A Call for help

Please HR Tech vendors, help!!!

I am preparing to teach my HR Technology Class at RIT this Winter, and I am hopeful that I can recruit some assistance and partnership from the HR Technology community.  I am in need of some 'hands-on' experiences and exercises for my students in HR Tech, and I really need some folks in the vendor community who would be willing to participate.

My ideal scenario would be to obtain access to a hosted demo or test instance of your software, set up and design some scenarios for my class, and let me really learn what cutting-edge, enterprise HR software is all about.

In the past the only important vendor that has shown willingness to participate in my class is SpectrumHR, and I can't say how fantastic and supportive they have been to work with.  They have been over and beyond my expectations.

But what I could use the most is for one of the major Talent Management vendors to step up. Anyone from SuccessFactors, Halogen, or Taleo? 

How about Workday? I would kill for the chance to get my class in any of these packages.

Look at it this way, if the economic crisis is here, you may have some time on your hands for some 'pro-bono' work.

So, I am asking, no basically begging, if anyone can help me on this, or knows someone who can, drop me a note at steveboese@gmail.com, or leave a comment.

Thanks!

Subscribe!

photo credit - FlickR - aspengull

Class - Please Introduce yourselves

Every class usually starts with a classic, 'Let's go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves and tell a little about yourself' kind of exercise.  These are pretty standard, sometimes a bit dull.  In a class that is offered completely online, these introductions take the form of forum discussion posts, that have to be read one after another and can be very flat and non-illuminating. 

But how about viewing the content of a series of student intoductions like this:

This is a 'word cloud', generated by a cool service called Wordle, that helps illuminate and give some life to a series of introductory posts.  What kind of class do we have, based on the word cloud?

I think tools like these can help give some perspective and help you look at raw text data in a new way.