Out of the chat room came an interesting discussion about Derek Sivers and this commentary on leadership in his blog post Leadership lessons for Dancing Guy and his ted talk which I have posted here below.

The conversation goes something like this;

It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

The 2nd follower is a turning point: it’s proof the first has done well. Now it’s not a lone nut, and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news.

The summary take away comment for me is this one: –

“It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.
There is no movement without the first follower”

There is a lot of conversation going on about making changes in education and if you were to embrace Siver’s comments you might be wondering how to be the first follower when there are so many barriers to limit your chances of changing status quo.

The beginner series at www.elearningcenter.ca offers you the opportunity to test drive some web 2.0 tools to help you get over the jitters of dancing center stage. We have purposely geared the beginner series to allow people the opportunity to ask questions and try out a tools with a trainer working with them during session. The next session is scheduled for Wednesday April 7. 2010 at 7:00 PM EDT Topic is Setting up a classroom blog. Link to Webinar http://tinyurl.com/lcparticipant Its free and it might just help you be a change agent.

Please join us by following this link to the session held in the Learn Central Elluminate room.

In this session you will get an overview of how to use Weebly to create a website and Blog for free. Weebly is a great out of the box solution with free hosting and no ads. The drop and drag solution gets you up and running in a a few min. The participants in our session had a web site and had started blogging by the end of the hour. With Weebly you can use images, video and audio, contact form, discussion forums along with polling and other great features.

This screenshot illustrates one of the out of the box professional looking themes. Click the image to enlarge.

If you can’t make it to the session, please feel free to watch the recorded session.

As part of the Beginner series at www.elearningcenter.ca, Kim Caise and Lorna Costantini will be hosting a free webinar for people new to blogging. Each participant will create their own blog and learn how to publish content and connect to other bloggers. The webinar is scheduled for Wednesday March 31, 2010 at 7:00 PM EST (GMT-4 – TIme Zone converter) at www.learncentral.org Here is the link to Register for the Elluminate session.

So often we try to teach ourselves how to learn a new technology by watching videos and reading tutorials and we do it but take a lot of time and energy to master a new task. The workshops and webinars at www.elearningcenter.ca are you opportunity to speed up the process and facilitate your learning a new technology task.

During the session, Kim and I will walk the participants through the basics of using Twitter. Participants will sign up for a Twitter account and the use of the Tweetdeck application will be featured to demonstrate different aspects of using Twitter. Participants may create a Twitter account and download Tweetdeck for use during and after the Elluminate session.

Tweetdeck is a fantastic application to manage Twitter feeds but it is not required to successfully use Twitter. Tweetdeck is an easy application for beginners and helps Twitter users become more adept at using Twitter on a larger scale and for this reason we will be using this application in our sessions.

If you are new to Elluminate, you may want to join the session a bit early to make sure that you do not have difficulty accessing the session. You can use your computer microphone to ask questions or use the chat window to participate in the discussion using text only. The ‘Twitter for Beginners’ session will be offered through the ‘Host Your Own Webinars‘ group at LearnCentral.You can register for the session at the LearnCentral event page or email us at info@elearncenter.ca. This session is free and open to the public. If you are unable to register or email us prior to the start of the session, please still join us.

The “Twitter for Beginners‘ webinar will be the first session of our new venture and offerings of our innovative ‘eLearning Center‘ training center. Each week, Kim and I get requests for us to create webinars on a variety of topics for beginners.Our sessions will be designed to offer support and resources to beginners just starting to use web 2.0 tools and technologies. All of our training sessions can be customized for groups of employees or faculty members.

Test your system
Link to Elluminate room: https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid n=2008350&password=M.438D554F4A450D77B901E14104C303

Short URL to Elluminate room: http://tinyurl.com/cr20live

This Saturday January 17th ( see here for times) the show will be about using Google forms to make things easier for teachers.

Tom Barrett’s blog post is the reading for the session.

If you have never participated in an Elluminate session, please watch this 5 min demonstration. Requires Java

Recipe:
1. Computer with audio and usb headsets; internet access and a free Skype account.
2. Create a Skype account register at Skype
The user id you create will be used to connect the other members of your group. WIth this setup you will be able to communicate from one computer to anothercomputer to any where in the world for free.

3. Setup a conference call.
Open your contacts list.

From the menu bar at the top of the screen, select call. From the drop down menu select conference call.

In the conference call widow, Select the contact from the list and move the contact to the second window. Continue to add contacts until you have all the contacts you wish to join the meeting.
When you have finished select start. The conference call will begin and you can start your meeting.

Send your meeting agenda to all the participants by email. You are all set. You can forget about the babysitter.