Harold Jarche

Skype Call on Informal Learning

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The CSTD Ottawa Informal Learning Workshop is tomorrow, Tuesday January 30th.

I’ll be discussing informal learning in general, personal knowledge management, various tools and analysis & implementation techniques.

If you would like share your views or say how you’ve implemented some type of workplace informal learning then Skype me between Noon and 4:00 PM EST (GMT-5) for a quick chat with the participants. We’re expecting about 25 people from various industries and government departments in the Ottawa area [for those on my skype contact list, I may be pinging you tomorrow].

USPTO to re-examine Blackboard patent filing

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Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (aka the SFLC) :-)

Slashdot reports today that:

“Groklaw is reporting that the US Patent and Trademark Office has just ordered a re-examination of the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc, thanks to a filing by the Software Freedom Law Center. SFLC’s press release states, ‘The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC’s request raises “a substantial new question of patentability” regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent…’ The SFLC explains that though such re-examinations may take a couple of years to complete, approximately ‘70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked.'”

The Blackboard patent, and subsequent suit against competitor Desire2Learn, has been widely reported. Here’s an overview of the patent application as well as a subsequent comparison with Elgg’s functions that I did last year.

Thanks, Chris.

Elgg – MySpace for the learning community?

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This past year I used Elgg as my blogging platform for the Informl Learning Unworkshops, as I wanted to keep my posts separate from my main website. As many readers already know, I am a real fan of Elgg, which is a social networking, blogging, aggregating and e-portfolio system all in one. It’s also available as a free service or as open source code to host yourself. However, the experts are always available for additional services.

I recently revisited my site on Elgg, where I have a number of informal learning-related articles. Since I last posted, Elgg has been updated and is even more usable, in my opinion. Today, as I was explaining how it works, the ability to tag each post with a level of privacy (Public, Logged in Users Only, Specific Community Members, Group Members, Private) was seen has a great feature, especially to those new to blogging and Web 2.0 applications.

I’ll be covering Elgg in some detail during the CSTD Ottawa workshop next week and thought I’d give a heads-up to anyone who may want to create an account, explore a bit and discuss their experience.

Blogs and Informal Learning

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This is a continuation of my posts on informal learning in advance of the CSTD Ottawa workshop on 30 January.

How Many Licks Does it Take?
You can learn a lot through blogging and reading blogs, but it’s usually not what you were expecting. Many times you can go through a series of posts looking for something specific and then wind up following a completely different thread. Life on the Web is like life off the Web. You don’t get what you expect. As Pooh said, “They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.” Learning, especially informal learning, is similar.

I’ve found that the discipline of writing has forced me to read with a more critical eye and to read in more depth so that I can make some sense out the various, and often conflicting, messages. In the process of the discipline of reading and writing online, I get a few insights, but not when I’m expecting them. I have to prepare my mind to receive, though not much gets through compared to how much I read. I think that even less would get through if I didn’t do this regularly.

Blogging, or writing an online journal that anyone can read and comment upon, seems to be the core of my informal learning on the Web. Wikis are good for projects and teams, while social bookmarks become great virtual bookshelves that anyone can browse. Skype (voice over the Internet) keeps me in touch with my extended network and is excellent for asking quick questions (as is any other IM system). I still haven’t mastered social networking software (SNS) , such as Linked-In, but Seb Paquet told me several years ago that bloggers don’t really need SNS. For the time being, blogs are the core of my social and learning Web.

Here’s a technical, but easy to understand, diagram of how blogs work.

Inukshuk Call for Proposals 2007

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Once again, Inukshuk Wireless is calling for proposals for its learning plan, part of its licensing agreement with Industry Canada. Project proposals, by province, can be submitted in two categories:

EITHER

An innovative and creative project to develop multimedia and feature rich learning content, applications or learning environments for Canada’s learning communities;

OR

A Connectivity Project which results in the provision of wireless broadband internet access to un-served or underserved communities in the region. The goal of the connectivity projects is to bring wireless broadband connectivity to both public and private sector customers, including learning organizations.

The deadline for submissions is 8 March 2007 and details are available on the Inukshuk website. Funding available is different for each province. For example, New Brunswick’s envelope this year is $59,883 while Nova Scotia’s is $75,685.

Recommended reads on informal learning

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There are about 15 people signed up for the Ottawa informal learning workshop. This post is for anyone who is keen and wants to get in some early reading. Of course it’s not required, but these could spark some ideas for interesting conversations.

Jay Cross has just posted Internet Culture & the Evolution of Learning. This is a great read if you’re interested in the big picture of why this stuff may be important. Jay’s article is more comprehensive than my previous post on the forces of change.

Here’s a short post, by Tom Haskins called, I found it inside my blog reader, that gives you an idea of how some people in the educational technology field are connecting and learning informally – without any direction ;-)

If you’re looking for something concrete, here’s a post on How a restaurant uses stories to keep staff motivated.

An aggregated listing of various Definitions of Informal learning by Mohamed Amine Chatti.

If you want to dig deeper into social networking, then Dave Pollard’s Whirlwind tour of social networking for business covers a lot of the available tools.

SoulSoup on Why companies try to avoid informal learning, knowledge sharing and even innovation in the workplace.

Finally, I would recommend watching an interview (33 minutes) with Robert Paterson, done by Iowa Public TV in 2006, in which Rob explains the power of blogging.

… or just have a laugh:

Managing Time Management

Forces of change

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I’m conducting a workshop on informal learning on Tuesday, January 30th. In preparation for the workshop and hopefully to foster some early conversations, I’ll be posting my thoughts on informal learning here for the next week.

My initial reaction, when asked to present a full day workshop on informal learning, was to ensure that what I was going to talk about was not just a bunch of hype on the latest Web 2.0 tools that are being tested by the early adopters in the educational technology field. I didn’t want to be selling a new brand of silicon snake oil, so I tried to look at what forces are actually changing the way we work and learn.

First of all, the ubiquitous connectivity that over a billion people now have has had a significant impact. Search (or Google as a verb) is an integral part of most of our lives. Today, we can publish something online as soon as we feel like it – whether in the form of blogs, wikis, social spaces like MySpace or FaceBook, as well as pictures or videos. We can find almost anything online and we can share our digital creations with the world. We can also connect with individuals.

The main force of the Web is that you don’t need anyone else (postman, broadcaster, photo developer, social convener) to help you reach out to the world and find others who may be interested in the same thing you are. Until recently, we needed an organisation (company, union, association, school) to help us connect with others. Now we can pretty well do it on our own.

One of the main forces of change that will affect how we learn is the weakening of the industrial command & control organisation. We don’t need a third party to mediate our learning because we can find interesting stuff and interesting people (interesting to us, at least) on the Web. I see those workers, who one could call the “Cluetrained’, as already dropping out of the bottom of the industrial organisation’s pyramid and doing it on their own. “It” meaning working, learning, creating and collaborating.

We’re seeing signs of this weakening of the industrial hierarchical model (see Wirearchy for more details), with workers dropping out of the “Corporation” and becoming free agents. Will this trend continue? I don’t know; but it sure appears that a job for life is a thing of the past and learning how learn for yourself, or at least with your own online network, might not be a bad skill-set. Unfortunately, many of us have come through school and training programs where we’ve been told what the learning objectives are and that we will be tested at the end of the course. On completion, we get a certificate to hang on the wall to simulate some kind of actual competence.

The figure below is my first attempt to synthesize these thoughts into a graphic. I’m not an artist, but I’m learning informally ;-)

informal-forces.jpg

In a less structured and networked world, we all will need to learn in unstructured and networked ways. More to follow …

Where would we be without school drop outs?

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Nine Shift (required reading in my opinion) explains in “Schools depend on drop outs”, that the education monopoly is not primarily responsible for innovation in our society. Bill and Julie show how young men (yes, it’s usually boys who quit) who drop out of school are often the ones who go on to achieve great things. Notable drop outs:

Bill Gates – Microsoft
Steve Jobs – Apple
Michael Dell – Dell
Larry Ellison – Oracle
Mike Lazaridis – Blackberry
Shawn Fanning – Napster

What technologies would schools use without these guys?

How Computer Games Help Children Learn – Review

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Will Richardson commented on my recent post where I referred to the book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

The thing I find so much more effective about the network learning I do is that it’s asynchronous and done on my time. And yet IM and Skype and others make synchronous discussion imminently possible when needed or necessary. And all of that is what to me at least poses such a challenge to the traditional work of classrooms where we are all expected to learn the same things at the same time.

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning and education, but the title is a bit misleading. It’s more about the theory and practice of authentic learning experiences than specific computer games. Many of games mentioned in the book, like the debating game, are not computer-based, but could be computer enhanced. David Williamson Shaffer’s book is really about epistemic games, or “games that are fundamentally about learning to think in innovative ways”.

He begins by showing the fundamental weaknesses of our Industrial School System, itself a game:

Not surprisingly, the epistemology of School is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution – of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not. Truth is whatever the teacher says is the right answer, and actions are justified based on appeal to authority. School is a game in which what it means to know something is to be able to answer specific kinds of questions on specific kinds of tests.

Shaffer shows the need for teaching how to think and how to be creative, instead of how to memorize, and lays the argument for the use of games in learning. Most of his examples are outside of the classroom because it is obvious that these kinds of epistemic games would disrupt classes and the curriculum. The games that are discussed are called monument games, or exemplars of good practice. None of the games is available “out of the box” but the ideas and concepts are critical for anyone who wants to use games in learning, not just playing bingo and using words or figures out of context. The latter does not help learning.

The use of epistemic games is an approach that resembles cognitive apprenticeship. As our society moves from a linear print-based medium of knowledge creation to a networked and computer-assisted medium, we need new, post-industrial learning models:

As the late Jim Kaput and I have argued, if written symbols led to a theoretic culture based on external symbolic of storage, then computers are in the process of creating a digital or virtual culture based on the externalization of symbolic processing. This is the kind of change that has happened three of four times in the course of human evolution – a change of similar magnitude to the development of the printing press and the development of writing and language itself. What it means is that being “literate” in the digital age is not about reading and writing but about solving problems using simulations. What matters in the digital age is not learning to do things a computer can do for you but learning to use the computer to do things that neither you nor it could do alone.

I have emphasized what I see as the core argument of the book. We need to do things differently because the world has changed.

I highly recommend “How Computer Games Help Children Learn”.

Other books I recommend.

The Woz Wows Sackville

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Steve Wozniak, author of iWoz, gave a superb performance at Mount Allison University this evening. The Woz is a very open and friendly person who freely gives of his time in the spirit of learning and collaboration. His presentation this evening covered much that it in his book, but in person you get to feel the passion. People came from all over the region to listen to his inspirational speech, as witnessed by the capacity audience.

conhall.JPG

Our son, Nicholas, is reading the book and he found the presentation very interesting. Being able to hold the attention of a 14-year old, using almost no computer-generated effects is no small feat. Steve Wozniak spoke as if he was on fire, and some people felt that they could barely keep up listening to his fast-paced speech. At the end of the presentation, my friend next to me said, “now that is a very nice man”.

I really liked the part when Woz talked about his time working at Texas Instruments and how he got a job designing calculators because he had the skills and therefore didn’t need the formal certifications. He definitely believes in informal learning and taking charge of your life and your learning.

Afterwards, Nick got his book signed and Dad got the picture.

woz-and-nick.JPG