Harold Jarche

Mahara open source e-portfolio

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My friend Benoit Brosseau told me about Mahara, which seems to fill a growing demand for e-portfolios in education. I like their approach:

What makes Mahara different from other ePortfolio systems is that you control which items and what information (Artefacts) within your portfolio other users see.

In order to facilitate this access control, all Artefacts you wish to show to other users need to be bundled up and placed into one area. Within Mahara this compilation of selected Artefacts is called a View.

You can have as many Views as you like, each with a different collection of Artefacts, and intended purpose and audience. Your audience, or the people you wish to give access to your View, can be added as individuals or as a member of a Group or Community.

Learner control over content access would be one of my essential criteria in selecting an e-portfolio system. More innovation from New Zealand!

Collaboration versus Teamwork

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In his Valence Theory of Organizations, Mark Federman identified “several specific forms of valence relationships that are enacted by two or more people when they come together to do almost anything; these are economic, social-psychological, identity, knowledge, and ecological.”

Recently Mark has posted on why bureaucracy and collaboration are mutually exclusive, showing the limited nature of Teamwork …

… in comparison to the more balanced aspect of Collaboration which brings all valence relationships into play.

As much as organisations advertise for “team players”, what would be best are workers who can truly collaborate by connecting to each other in a more balanced manner with all the facets of their lives. Of course that would mean that the blunt stick of economic consequences would have less overall significance.

Learning professionals as first responders

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When I was in the Canadian Forces Medical Services much of my work was in preparation for mass casualty situations, such as would happen in a conflict. Hospitals and medical personnel train for mass casualty situations because the rules are a bit different from the standard admission process. You are overwhelmed with casualties and the system cannot treat everyone as they would like or need. Priorities are set. An important role is that of triage [from the French verb “to sort” – Processus de prise de décision utilisé sur les lieux d’une urgence et servant à classer les victimes selon les priorités de soins – Grand dictionnatre terminologique].

I was thinking that triage is good metaphor for learning today. We are inundated with information and sources of knowledge. Learning professionals can help sort the signal from the noise by understanding the current circumstances of the organisation and do an initial triage. Of course the situation will be changing so what was important yesterday may not be important tomorrow. Only by constantly looking outside and inside will the learning professional provide a valuable service.

So if anyone asks why you’re reading 100 Web feeds and checking out the chat on Twitter and Facebook, tell them you’re doing triage.

I am a Canadian

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John Diefenbaker, Prime Minister of Canada, in 1960, while referring to the Canadian Bill of Rights:

“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

I was only one year old at the time. Of course, each generation has to keep fighting for its rights and freedoms and ensure the rights of those who cannot.

It’s a great country — Happy Canada Day!

The business of social media

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I had the opportunity/chance/pain of being on a social media panel for our Third Tuesday Meetup, so I couldn’t resist a post called Ten Questions Not To Ask A Social Media Panel. It’s a humourous post with much truth between the lines. I’ve found that just about everybody today is a social media consultant and I’m glad that I never used that descriptor for my professional services.

As much as I enjoyed Berkowitz’s main topic, there is one comment that answers several of the questions that I get asked about this “Web thing”. It’s by Janet Johnson who provides the specifics that most people want from panels but don’t often get:

I’ve personally observed ROI (expenditure = time) mostly in the following areas:

1) Improving collaboration for virtual teams scattered around cities, countries and such – Twitter is especially great for that.

2) Lead generation for consultants – especially in the areas of RSS, infrastructure and social media (big duh, but it’s true).

3) Awareness and thought leadership – especially for those whose markets serve early adopters/18-35 year olds today, although the baby boomers are adopting to, and using the social web quite quickly.

Negotiating the mesh of social meaning

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I finally got around to reading Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. I thought that I understood the premise and contents fairly well from my readings on the Web but I was pleasantly surprised by this book, which is now available in paperback. There is lots here that I will refer back to and the book will definitely stay on my reference library shelf.

For instance, I already knew this concept ;-)

In the miscellaneous order, the only distinction between metadata and data is that metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying find.

But then we go one step beyond the Cluetrain:

The markets that conversations make are real markets, not mere statistical clusterings.

I highlighted this passge near the end:

In the world after the Enlightenment, the cultural task was to build knowledge. In the miscellaneous world, the task is to build meaning, even though we can’t yet know what we’ll do with this new domain. Certainly some will mine it for knowledge that will change our lives through science and business. But knowledge will only be one product. Knowledge’s new place will be in an ever-present mesh of social meaning. Knowledge is thus not being dethroned. We are way too good at knowing, and our continued progress – and survival – depends on it. But knowledge is now not our only project or our single highest meaning. Making sense of what we know is the broader task, a task for understanding within the infrastructure of meaning.

This made me pause and think about what we mean when we discuss knowledge work, and if it may be the wrong label.

Your market is laughing; at you

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has hit some success with a program that gets viewers to create mash-up advertisements that spoof traditional advertising.

The number of ads made for a range of fictional products – a beer, an anti-ageing cream and a bank – and the number of times they have been watched, 280,000, has surprised ABC programming chiefs.

However, this is not going over well with the industry:

But yesterday the chairman of one of the biggest industry groups, Robert Morgan of Clemenger Communications, panned the series, saying it “demeaned and trivialised” the business.

Here is an important note to corporations; Cluetrain Thesis #20:

Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.

Gee, what’s next, people making fun of education?

Meetings

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Two meetings in one day. One was traditional. Use the telephone; get everyone on the same page through lengthy discussions; follow up with e-mail; work several iterations; many phone calls and lots more e-mail. No one uses social media in their work flow. Getting paid for this work. Conference call – almost three hours.

The other meeting was between three bloggers, all who read each other’s writing and understand their perspectives. The idea is to try a new initiative and see what happens. Invest some time but no money. Initiate first discussion on a collaborative web document. Get going now. Conference call – one hour.

Which will be more successful? Which do you think gets me more excited? Which one pays the bills :-(

OLDaily Summer Edition

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For the next month I’ll be a co-editor of Stephen Downes’ OLDaily newsletter, with Barry Dahl and Gary Woodill. This will probably mean fewer posts on this blog.

I’m looking forward to the challenge of an enforced daily posting. My own blog averages about a post per day but if I don’t feel like writing anything I don’t feel any pressure to do so. Now I actually have a deadline. Luckily I’ll have two great partners in this endeavour.

See you on the Summer Edition!

Moncton’s open source community is growing

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This week I attended the Social Media Meetup in Moncton and had the opportunity to spend some time with guest speaker Jevon Macdonald and several other folks, hosted by Steve in his new business digs. I met Steve Mallett over five years ago when I gave a presentation on open source at the local Cybersocial. Steve has been running the Open Source Directory for many years and at that time I’m sure he was trying to figure out who this local guy was talking about OS. Our meeting was my first glimpse that there may be people “below the radar” who work globally on open source projects but don’t advertise their local presence.

On my flight back from Ottawa on Friday evening I was lucky to meet another open source evangelist. Deb Richardson, the intrepid girl reporter, was on her way back from Silicon Valley after this week’s successful mega launch of Firefox 3.0. Her post on the Field Guide to Firefox 3 is worth a read for those +14 million who have downloaded it so far:

We’re done. Firefox 3 is going to be launched very soon. In anticipation of this long-awaited event, the folks in the Mozilla community have been writing extensively about the new and improved features you’ll see in the browser. The new features cover the full range from huge and game-changing to ones so subtle you may not notice them until you realize that using Firefox is just somehow easier and better. The range of improved features is similar — whole back-end systems have been rebuilt from scratch, while other features have been tweaked slightly or redesigned in small ways. Overall the result is the fastest, safest, slimmest, and easiest to use version of Firefox yet. We hope you like it.

Firefox 3 Deb Richardson

BTW, Deb, since you like the Peterson Field Guides so much, you’ll have to try your eyes on all the species in Sackville, or at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute [I work there from time to time].