Photo credit: PublicDomainPictures, published under CC Unless you happen to be a corporate trainer working for a huge multinational business, you probably don’t get the chance to travel the globe that much. But why not create your own glamorous training opportunities abroad? The internet and budget airlines have made it far easier to travel and work in other countries. Just call your LinkedIn or Facebook connections through Skype (so you don’t have to pay the international phone call fees) and ask them for a reference. Here are 5 guidelines to help you expand your horizons. Don’t sell ice to Eskimos - don’t try to compete in a saturated market that already has all the training it needs. Just because your skills are in high demand in your home market does not mean they are overseas. Do your research. Get the numbers for the local market. Avoid direct competition with the locals - you don’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, so you’ll always lose. You have to bring something unique to the table. Play to your strengths. For instance, maybe you have in-depth knowledge about a specific market in your home country that overseas manufacturers are interested in. So, train the sales people of the overseas manufacturers on the local customs and business regulations in your country. In marketing speak: you’re looking for a unique selling proposition in your target market. Photo credit: Oliver Berghold, published under CC Focus your efforts on the most promising market. Be specific: training Chinese tour operators who travel to the UK is better than "training workers in the Chinese tourist industry". The reason is that you can get your idea validated sooner, build more relevant references (who also inform each other about the opportunity you represent for them), and re-use your experience with similar customers. Start selling your training services from your home. There’s no need to wait till you reach foreign soil. Pick up the phone, reach out through LinkedIn or Facebook and try to get into contact with key decision makers in your target market. Photo credit: Wikipedia, published under CC If you like traveling for the sake of it, consider doing all of your training online, through webinars, Skype conferences and online training platforms (learning management systems). Follow the lead of the digital nomads (check out the guys over at tropicalMBA)  and create a location independent training business. This means, in essence, that you’re doing all the work online, from the comfort of your hotel room - or with your laptop on a beautiful tropical beach. Share this post: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.     The post Create Your Own Glamorous Training Opportunities Abroad appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

The debut season of the BBC smash "Poldark" wrapped up its U.S. run tonight with Ross arrested and a grieving Demelza left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

Everything falls apart in the penultimate episode of 'True Detective' season two.

It's Tom Cruise's biggest opening weekend since 'War of the Worlds' in 2005.

But here’s the thing: the history of social media actually goes back a lot further, and its roots can be found in blogging, Google, AOL, ICQ, the beginnings of the world wide web and, perhaps surprisingly, CompuServe.  Source: www.mediabistro.com Can anyone predict the next 33 years of Social Media? We don’t know it but the History of Social Media belongs to our digital culture. Let’s meet  the pioneers of digital life. 

My name is Rebecca Woodland and I have had the pleasure of working to evaluate and cultivate organizational collaboration in a range of contexts and for many different purposes. In this post I’ll share tips that evaluators can use in the developmental, formative, and summative evaluation of inter-organizational and inter-personal collaboration. I’m excited to be delivering an AEA 2015 pre-conference workshop that goes into detail about these hot tips - maybe I’ll see you there! Hot Tip #1 - Make collaboration less messy. Though ubiquitous, "collaboration" persists as an under-empiricized concept. One of the first things that evaluators looking to assess collaboration will need to do is to operationlize the construct. Familiarize yourself with collaboration theory and find specific suggestions for facilitating a shared understanding of collaboration in…Utilizing Collaboration Theory to Evaluate Strategic Alliances, and the Collaboration Evaluation and Improvement Framework.  Hot Tip #2 - More collaboration is not always better. Levels of integration between organizations matter, but the scope and scale of integration should match the purpose and goals of the alliance. The Levels of Organizational Integration Rubric (LOIR) describes five possible levels of inter-organizational integration and the purposes, strategies/tasks, leadership/decision-making, and communication characteristics that tend to be present in each. Use the LOIR to measure and cultivate ideal levels of inter-organizational collaboration. Hot Tip #3 - Avoid "co-blaboration." The evaluation of inter-personal collaboration can help organizational stakeholders avoid "collaboration lite," whereby mere congeniality and imprecise conversation are confused with the type of disciplined inquiry vital to the diffusion of innovation and attainment of essential outcomes. The Team Collaboration Assessment Rubric (TCAR) describes four fundamental elements of high-quality inter-personal collaboration: dialogue, decision-making, action, and evaluation. Evaluators are encouraged to adapt and administer the TCAR in ways that are most feasible, useful, and appropriate for the context of their program evaluation. Hot Tip #4 - Use Social Network Analysis (SNA) methods (if you don’t already). SNA is a sophisticated, yet accessible, means for assessing organizational collaboration. Evaluators can use SNA to mathematically describe and visually see how "ties" between organizations or people form, and how these "links" may influence program implementation and the attainment of desired outcomes. You’ll find lots of information provided during SNA TIG week at AEA365.org, including these tips for getting started. Rad Resource: Coalitions that Work® offers excellent tools for evaluating coalitions and partnerships that are available in .pdf format. Want to learn more? Register for Evaluating and Improving Organizational Collaboration at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL! This week, we’re featuring posts by people who will be presenting Professional Development workshops at Evaluation 2015 in Chicago, IL. Click here for a complete listing of Professional Development workshops offered at Evaluation 2015. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Sixteen years after his last album, Dr. Dre is finally throwing his suffering fans a bone. The rapper and record producer announced on his Beats 1 radio show this Saturday that his soundtrack to "Straight Outta Compton," an upcoming biopic about seminal 1980s gangsta rap group N.W.A.—which included Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E—will be released Friday as an Apple exclusive.

It’s no secret that formative assessment is vitally important to any classroom. How can we know what to teach or review with our students if we don’t know what our students know? Do you know what I mean? As a flipped teacher, I am always looking for tools that can quickly, easily, and effectively help […] The post How to Use Formative to Assess Student Learning appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

The Irish band's tour mixed up new songs, rarities, and a bevy of special guests.

One interesting tech trend that didn’t seem to draw any attention at a first-rate "Top Tech Trends" presentation at the American Library Association (ALA) 2015 Annual Conference here in San Francisco last month is inspiring me to write about the panel discussion nearly a month after it took place: the trend toward (and digital-literacy skill of) using online resources to extend a moment of conversation over a potentially very long period of time. The extended moment we’re going to have as a case study here is the one that began with that session on June 28, 2015, continues as I write this on July 31, 2015, and extends further into whatever day you’re reading and, with any luck, joining the conversational moment by responding to it. There were plenty of notable tech trends covered during that session (viewable in an archived recording) sponsored and facilitated by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), and I’ll return to those by drawing from what we might call a Tweeter’s Digest version created in the form of an edited Storify transcript of the tweets coming out of the session. But let’s focus, for a moment, on the larger, paradoxical situation/long-term trend in which we are, at the same time, driven to respond as quickly as possible online to what we encounter and yet, at the same time, are equally at ease finding something that has been online for an extended period of time before we discover and—more importantly—respond to it as if it were newly created rather than disdainfully treating it as something waiting for someone to breathe new life into it. That’s what we might call "conversing, fast and slow" if we were to puckishly name it by modifying the title of Daniel Kahneman’s thoughtful treatise Thinking, Fast and Slow. At a time when we are sometimes (mistakenly) encouraged to believe that responses to online posts (e.g., in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a variety of other social media tools) must receive immediate responses if they are to receive any response at all, I’m encouraged to find that responding to older posts, articles, or other resources leads to some amazingly reflective and rewarding exchanges creating those very long moments I’m attempting to describe here. And that’s what is inspiring me to return to what some might consider to be "old news"—a brief summary and reaction to an event that happened last month—with the understanding that the delay in calling attention to the panel discussion is far less important than the act of extending the reach of that conversation via this article, the link to the archived recording, and the link to the Storify transcript which includes attendees’ initial in-the-moment reaction to the descriptions of the tech trends under review. An interesting and important theme connecting the various panelists’ tech trends descriptions was something library staff members often try to foster: collaborative efforts combined with a commitment to providing access to useful resources. As we heard about continuing efforts to provide "free, ubiquitous internet access in cities," we had the visceral example of the LinkNYC project, a collaborative effort between City Bridge, New York City officials, and others; it’s designed to provide around-the-clock free Internet access and touchscreen-tablet interface with City services and other resources. As we heard about cross-sector collaboration as a tech trend, we had the possibility of previously-unimagined sharing of data between a variety of organizations in ways that served those using services provided by those organizations. And when we heard about an apparent renaissance in podcasting, we had colleagues jumping into the onsite-online conversation via Twitter to suggest partnerships between library staff and podcast producers, and other colleagues tweeting podcasts that might be of interest to those engaged in the session. There is plenty more to explore in the Storify transcript and the archived recording, but what brings us full circle here is the realization that by reading this article, following the links to resources of interest to us, and responding, we immediately become part of the extended moment that transforms a one-time panel discussion into part of a continuing conversation that enriches all of us, fast and slow. And adds to what we as trainer-teacher-learners can foster. N.B. - This is the third in a series of reflections inspired by the American Library Association 2015 Annual Conference in San Francisco and the fourth in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course.