Archive for 'Work From Home'

Taking a Picture of Your Non-Virtual Workspace to Add Trust to Your Profile

Posted on 20. Dec, 2008 by Koichi.

Over at Onlinesapiens (a great blog about online learning and Learning 2.0), Emapey shared a really interesting idea about sharing an image of your workspace in order to build trust. If you are teaching online (and I’m guess you probably are, if you’re on eduFire), then this might be worth a shot! This is one of those things that makes a lot of sense, but I can’t figure out why. Maybe one of our members has a past full of psychology, and can fill us in?

Here’s how I see it. An image of your workspace helps make the “virtual” a little more “real,” which puts a lot of folks at ease. The stuff we’re doing with online video learning is pretty new to a lot of people, and by adding a picture of your workspace, you become a little more solid and trustworthy to those who aren’t used to a virtual environment. I could be making this all up, but that’s my two cents on the issue.

What do you think? Do you think adding a picture of your workspace (versus, say, a picture of yourself) to your profile page would make a difference? If you want to give it a shot, remember that eduFire lets you add HTML tags (which means you can embed an image in your “About Me” description) to your profile. Here’s a little cheatsheet for those of you who are rusty / new to HTML.

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Reason #4541 Why We Love eduFire: Snow!

Posted on 15. Dec, 2008 by Koichi.

The other morning I woke up to several inches of beautiful snow. Snow on it’s own isn’t too bad, but then it warmed up slightly and melted a bit, then dropped to a frigid 25 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s about -4 Celsius). Everything turned to ice, and I was trapped! I live on a pretty big hill, so I wasn’t going anywhere.

That made me realize, though, that it didn’t matter! When you’re teaching or learning online, all you need is a computer, some equipment, and an internet connection. I was able to open my window and enjoy the snow, while everyone else was skidding around trying to go to work.

How many of you get to enjoy/not enjoy the snow where you are?

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