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Training managers of volunteers
Today I was at Volunteer Victoria meeting with my co-facilitators for the upcoming Leading Volunteers: Foundations in Volunteer Management course. This is the blended model course that I was lucky to be able to develop in 2012 that has become even better over time....
What would I tell my 24-year-old self?
I got inspired the other day while reading a friend's blog post about what advice she would give to her 24-year-old self. It got me thinking about questions I answered to be featured on the UBC Alumni website recently about what I would tell my graduating self and...
Some ed tech tools to share
I've had some fun incorporating different ed tech tools recently into my work so I thought I'd share a few of them here with you. None of these are particularly new but still can be interesting to use in your courses or otherwise, so here goes: Storify Last week I...
She, with the beautiful voice – and life
This post has nothing to do with education or technology or facilitation or instructional design. It has nothing to do with work. It has everything to do with life. Earlier this month my family lost my aunt Linda from the world; she will be heartachingly missed. One...
Keeping calm and carrying on
I've always loved the motivational phrase "Keep Calm and Carry On" that the Brits used in posters to prepare the public for World War II. But truthfully, over the past few years of owning my own business and balancing it with working for an employer I haven't always...
Navigating “three Ts” of online facilitation
I've taught nine asynchronous online courses over the past two years, all of which were longer than four weeks each, and I learned something useful about online facilitation going through every one of them. As a result, here are "three Ts" - technology, time and team...
A lesson in balance…from a crow
The other day my daughter came home with six or seven black crow feathers that she had found on an "out trip" at day camp. My first internal reaction was one of the Yuck! variety but she was so excited about the feathers that we talked about how she could keep them....
Thinking about the empty chair
A couple of weeks ago I read Daniel Pink's new book, To Sell is Human. Pink argues that all of us are in sales jobs these days, no matter whether we think we're in sales or not. That is, our title might not be "salesperson" but most of us spend large portions of our...
The strong appeal of a portfolio career
A few weeks ago at a dinner I convened for my facilitators group we got talking - as we always do - about the various things that we each do for work. Not surprisingly, many of us have several areas of expertise and it made for interesting introductions as each...
The upside of meetings
It's funny how sometimes in our culture people can get really down on meetings, saying they're "not productive", "don't allow people to get real work done" or even are "a waste of time." While there likely are meetings going on in the world that do fit these negative...