Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Trdev: a group worth joining

I have recently become a coordinator of the trdev listserv. Trdev is the oldest and largest online discussion forum dedicated to training and development issues. It has more than 3,000 members from around the world, and it is moderated by a small group of coordinators to ensure it stays on topic, free of commercial hype and spam, and relatively congenial. If you are not a member I urge you to check it out. Registration is required (but it's free), you can remain as anonymous and passive as you wish, and unregistering from the list is easy.

You can elect to receive every comment posted as an e-mail, get a single e-mailed daily digest of posts, or block mail altogether and interact directly on the web forum. Content is wide-ranging: from academic discussions of esoteric aspects of pedagogy to practical help with PowerPoint; from debates about e-learning to discussions about surviving management conflicts. There is always a willing group of fellow learning professionals around to engage on any issue. It's a great resource for sharing knowledge and experience, which is what the web is all about.

2 comments:

Harold Jarche said...

Is it available as an RSS feed yet?

Godfrey Parkin said...

No, it's not directly providing RSS. This is because it is a moderated members-only forum, and we try to protect those contributing from spam, e-mail harvesters, and copyright infringers -- there's a mixed bag of contributors, some of whom do not want their comments available outside the group.

But I have just set up a blog (sort of) to post the subject lines of any new threads that appear, and that has an RSS feed. It doesn't give you the content of the thread, but it links you back to the forum itself. We are using the blog as a sort of billboard for non-members so they know what's under discussion.

You can find it at here at http://trdev.blogspot.com.

Godfrey