We went to the Ministry of Industry and Trade and registered a trade name for Questler, since it had to be Arabic and we couldn’t use the exact Arabic alphabet to translate questler. So we had to come up with a unique name and we didn’t want it to take ages to check against their database. Our first option was “Blue Star” , and oups, it was taken.  The next option was “Blue Lemon”  and the registrant lady wents into a big laugh, sayine “come on guys, Blue Lemon!!! what kind of software company gets called Blue Lemon. Then she made sure we sign that “we will not translate that name when we write it in English” Here is to you lady, a blog post called Blue Lemon!

So the company behind questler is -so far- called “Sharekat Al-laymoun Al-azraq lilbarmajeyat”

And much to our surprise later, is our icon!

We got very excited today with the number of blog posts that sprung out of Jane’s post yesterday, the more exciting thing was the great number of users that joined and are growing!

Here is the chronological order of things:

1. Jane’s post on July 28th UK morning time. http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2008/07/questler.html

2. Someone submits Questler to SimpleSpark.com,  gets on review queue.

3. Glen Gaten writes about us on his blog. http://ggatincritped.blogspot.com/2008/07/informal-aspects-of-everyday-learning.html

4. Questler gets listed officially in  SimpleSpark.com. http://simplespark.com/catalog/questler/

5. Questler gets selected as one of the 15+ web reviews at KillerStartup.com, a great review! http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/questler-com-find-answers-and-share-knowledge

6. Ajay Tripathi writes about in his Visionwiz blog http://visionwiz.blogspot.com/2008/07/questler-is-informal-learning-network.html

7. ROTOR blog writes a great review of Questler, http://www.rotorblog.com/2008/07/29/questler-tries-to-make-the-world-an-active-learning-space/

Hope I didn’t jinx it by a pre-mature post but I had to mark this day, will post this at WEBsessed as well.

——

Update, July 30th

8.  Questler review on KillerStartups.com is published @ The Online Life Knowledge http://www.jaimeviniciusbarros.com/2008/07/questlercomfindanswersandshareknowledge/

9.  The briefest mention ever (yet powerful!) @ the English Education Professor http://www.eeprof.com/blog/?p=3209

10. Questler briefly reviewed at a mini blog post by Sigalon http://sigalon.posterous.com/an-informal-learning-network

11. Questler @ ZEPY http://www.zepy.net/archives/find-answers-and-share-knowledge-with-questlercom.html

——

Update, Aug 3rd

12. Questler gets listed as a tool to be used to network with other teachers and students in Active Learning Blog Carnival http://activelearningcarnival.blogspot.com/2008/08/preparing-harvest.html

Questler was picked as the E-Learning pick of the day at Jane’s blog. Jane Hart is a Social Media & Learning Consultant at the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies.

http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/2008/07/questler.html

Jane picks a daily item of e-learning interest and gives a briefing about it in her blog.

Thank you Jane

Questler has been listed as a personal learning environment (PLE) to investigate by the Innovative educator blog, in a post that talks about 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning Network.

We think Questler has two qualities of a personal learning environment based on the Wikipedia page on  the History of personal learning environments:

1. Questler enables its users to define their own learning goals which is what we call Learning Topics in Questler.

2. Questler enables its users to communicate with their learning buddies or other users through their learning process. Wether its a Query, Discovery, Observation, Research, Story or Media by enabling comments on every quest as well as enabling the user to select who do they want to discuss their quest with.

However, the third aspect mentioned  in the wikipedia article is the ability to manage the content and process of the learning done by the individual.

Questler does enable it’s users to manage the content of thier everyday learning however , it does not deal with the process, we believe the process is the individual’s everyday life at home or at work, the core of why Questler is an informal learning network.

We are happy to announce that Hassan Shahin has recently joined us as a co-founder. Hassan Shahin has been an adviser for the company for the past 6 months and has helped us to better position questler.com.
Hassan, an IT veteran, with over 20 years experience in IT, content management, and localization. Worked as editor-in-chief of high-tech magazines as well as an Instructional designer, and adviser to many software companies. Currently the Chief Knowledge Officer at SYNTAX.
Hassan will be working on product development and information architecture of a very exciting new product we are working on!

We have successfully uploaded a new release, here is what’s new:

· Channels: We created a new channel page for each user, where you can browse all their contributions whether quests or comments, per their learning interests or all tags of their posts. You can also search for any keyword within that channel. Go to Me>Settings>Channel to upload your own logo and change background color of your channel! Soon we will launch specialized channels from companies and organizations that have quests to share!

· RSS Feeds: Now you can subscribe to Questler’s everyone feed from your home page as well as subscribe to RSS feeds for any user channel you like to get updated with their latest posts right from your RSS reader. Also, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for any tag you explore or any keyword you search for within Questler so whenever a user posts a quest with that tag or keyword you get notified via RSS.

· Extra Tagging: Now you are able to add more tags to a quest when you post a comment, this way other users will be able to filter through the Quest View page to see your comments per any new tag you have added from the left bar.

· Create a Quest from a comment: You will be able now to post a comment you had on a quest as a new Quest, the two will be linked and you can see them in Related quest tab.

· Related Quests: When you are viewing a quest you will be able to view all related quests from the same page. Also you can view Recent quests as well as latest quests by the same user.

· Home/Dashboard: Now you can post directly from the home page instead of going to the quest page. Also we have introduced the dashboard where you can browse through latest conversations as you used to do on the Quest page.

· Cosmetics: We just introduced a sleeker looking logo and new navigation design!

We will be launching a new release tomorrow and site will be down for 1-3 hours from 13:00 GMT till 16:00 GMT.

We will post the list of all new features on the blog tomorrow as well!

We would like to apologize for our users because of today’s incident where the site was down for approximately 9 hours today, we are working to know the root cause and to do our best for this not to happen again.

Regards,

The Questler Team

Here is a link for the interview with Razan Khatib at startuparabia.com

http://www.startuparabia.com/2008/06/interview-with-questler-founder-razan-khatib/

Well after taking two days to recover from the three day conference, I would like to talk about my experience there.

The conference was really small in size not the bigger one I anticipated it to be, though i was part disappointed at first then became to appreciate the intimacy of smaller conferences, the chance to meet and talk to many people as well as to attend more sessions!

Our presentation attracted several good discussions with other attendees/presenters (some good ego boost ;-)) several people were very excited about the site and appreciative of what we are trying to do in an attempt to encourage and capture informal learning while few were suspicious of the real value community websites could bring to “deep” learning.
The general talk at the conference was concentrated into 2 main topics, the need for platforms that could connect informal learning to the formal learning, the second was the non-existence real change eLearning has made to traditional learning environments. Some experts were talking about eLearning serving to be yet another content delivery channel with content being the same traditional content that was delivered in class.
Some participants shared experiences they had at the class room, like ability for students to send questions by sms to the instructor while in class, another one ability for students to send geology field trip photos by MMS to the class’s blackboard eLearning system.

In general, I believe many educational systems are confusing new technologies as a goal instead of a mean for better teaching and largely ignoring the power of informal learning. And eLearning vendors are supplying tools to enable accessibility of content instead of new ways to teach and learn. Focus is always on the teacher and what he/she needs with little attention being given to the learners and what they need.

All in all it was a great learning experience for me, to see what different people in the Learning “industry” are talking about!

To read the paper Questler submited, please download this PDF file: Questler: A learning 2.0 experience from Jordan