Happy New Year

It’s time for that annual ritual of looking back at the year. Unlike last year, this year I’m actually reviewing before the new year starts.

What did I do this year? A few things come to mind.

  • In January, we officially launched Sakai as our LMS, marking the end of a long process of choosing the right system and converting all our courses.
  • In April, I presented with my colleagues at the TCC conference on our LMS selection and implementation process.
  • In June, I found out that my job situation was not especially secure. Not coincidentally, June was the month I finally put together a portfolio of my work.
  • In July, my column on using wikis for ID process documentation was published in the eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions magazine–my first official published article.
  • In August, my husband and I closed on our first house. No more renting!
  • In December, I started a new job. It’s been a somewhat slow start, as I had no computer for the first two weeks, but hopefully I’ll have some more to write about soon.

These are my top posts according to the social signals measured by eLearning Learning:

  1. Blogging in a Walled Garden
  2. Why a Wiki?
  3. Google Wave in 10 Minutes
  4. Sakai 3 Development Process
  5. Google Wonder Wheel & Other Search Options
  6. TCC09: Podcasting with Section 508
  7. TCC09: Digital Storytelling in a Web 2.0 World
  8. LearnTrends: Microlearning
  9. LearnTrends: Personal Knowledge Management
  10. CCK09: Connectivism and Constructivism

If I was looking for evidence that live blogging during conferences and webinars provides value, I think this sums it up quite nicely. Half of my top posts by this measure are notes from presentations I attended.

By the number of views, my top posts are mostly related to instructional design careers. The posts from my original series on instructional design skills and how to get started in the field are still some of the most popular here, even though they are now over two years old. What Does an Instructional Designer Do? ranks pretty highly in the Google search results for “instructional designer,” currently #3 (behind Wikipedia & Indeed).

My top search terms are clearly focused on instructional design (with a bit of traffic to my March 2007 cyberbullying post):

instructional designer 2,148
instructional design jobs 836
instructional design certification 564
cyber bullying quotes 553
cyberbullying quotes 378
what is instructional design 355
what is an instructional designer 341
instructional designers 268
instructional design certificate 253
instructional designer skills 252
instructional design skills 217
what does an instructional designer do 207

Looking at just the numbers, my number of views didn’t increase dramatically in 2009. In 2008, I had about 61,000 total views; this year I had about 79,000. I went from about 160 daily views to 215. Those are respectable numbers; not outstanding, and certainly not enough to make me a big-name blogger or give me delusions of making a full-time living from my blog. But not bad.

I’m happy to see that my number of subscribers has more than doubled though. Figuring out how many RSS subscribers you have on a WordPress blog can be challenging, but adding everything up from my multiple feeds looks like I have over 1000 subscribers. That feels like a more relevant number to me than the number of views on the site. Subscribers are long-term readers, where many of my views are just search engine traffic from people who will never be back. Subscribers are people who have decided my blog provides (at least some) long-term value to them.

I don’t know what the new year will bring, but I’m looking forward to the challenges of 2010. Happy New Year everyone!

Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by uhhhlaine

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