Harold Jarche

Failure of Online Communities

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Jay Cross is at ASTD TechKnowledge 2006 in Denver and provides this observation on communities of practice:

Next up was Bill Bruck of Q2 Learning on Creating and Sustaining Online Communities of Practice. After the session, several people told me they really appreciated Bill telling it like it is. Early on, he said that while he thought he was pretty good at fostering online communities, 90% of the communities he sets up fail.

I have had similar experiences, with the failure of the R&D for elearning community in New Brunswick as well as our local Sackville SOHO Society, which has died a natural death. I believe that it’s natural for online communities of practice to fail and that we may be putting too much emphasis on their longevity. If they serve a temporary purpose then I would say that they are successful, even if they don’t last.

Blogs seem to work this way. First you start reading other blogs, then you may aggregate them in a feedreader and then you may start to make comments. Later you may create your own blog and continue the conversations of others by linking to their posts.

However, your focus and links will change over time, as will the flow of the conversation. The ‘communities’ in which you are actively engaged will change and some conversations will stop entirely. This is similar to the failure of an online community.

We don’t view a discontinued blog conversation as a failure, but an unused community of practice is seen as a failure. I believe this is because we create most communities within an enclosed web space to which the members must go. On the other hand, most blogs are built around the individual and the community is dynamic (it flows).

Centering on the individual, who then decides on which people to connect to, is more natural than creating a box to which you must subscribe to be a member. With Elgg Learning Landscape, communities have the same properties as people and individuals link to a community as they would link to a friend. It is not necessary to go ‘inside’ a community space. This seems to be more natural. If more communities are built around the way that people naturally work and socialize then that 90% failure rate might drop.

Edublogs.org Needs Support

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James Farmer has been offering one of the few educational blogging services that is free, non-commercial and just about perfect for those looking for an alternative to Blogger.

edublogs.org is a non-profit adventure into providing free blogs and hosting for teachers, students, researchers, librarians, writers and other education professionals.

I know that there is a demand for this service because many people pass through here while searching for "free educational blogs" or similar search terms. What James needs to keep edublogs going is some financial support.

But I’m fundamentally against putting any advertising on blogs. Down the line I’d like to leave that option up to you (i.e. advertise if you want to & for yourself) but I certainly don’t want to slap ads on any edublogs.

So, it’s going to have to be sponsorship & partnership. Here’s the deal…

  • Plain old simple advertising as a ’supporter’ on edublogs.org
  • Inclusion (and write up) in the edublogs.org newsletter
  • Inclusion in the ‘backend’ of each blog (this can be done in a number of ways)
  • Partnership in offering edublogs.org users tools and services

Life in Perpetual Beta

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One definition for a Beta release is, “A version of the vendor’s software that is given to selected installations prior to the product becoming generally available. This version is often not free of defects.”

I can relate to the second sentence when I think of my personal and professional life being in a state of continuous Beta releases. This perspective has been my norm for a few years, particularly since I’ve become a free-agent and have to do everything, including my own tech support.

Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning — I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

My wife has often told me that my current situation as a consultant is the best vocation for me because I bore easily and need constant challenges. Life in beta seems to suit me. This may be because I am male, as there is more research coming out that our ‘drill & fill’ education system doesn’t work for boys, as the Eide’s note in The Trouble with Boys. A solution could be what Christian at Think: Lab refers to in a recent article on schools in perpetual beta:

Beta schools.  Perpetual.  Environments that promote infinite discovery.  Student and teacher as co-researchers.  Form.  Intent.  Re-mapping the entire premise of ‘school’.

Given the abundance of information and connectivity, or what Mark Federman calls “ubiquitously connected & pervasively proximate”, we may find that in the near future hyperactivity is no longer diagnosed as a problem.

The issue is copyright reform

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This blog is not about politics so I didn’t discuss the past election, other than a post last week about the role of the Internet. I did follow Michael Geist and CopyrightWatch on the Toronto riding where copyright became an election issue, especially the question on the Liberal incumbant receiving monetary support from the media industry. For me, copyright is a critical issue in the economic and cultural development of our country, and it seems that more Canadians agree.
From Michael Geist:

But they are not the most important part of the story.  More important than the story about blogs, is the substantive lessons to be learned from the past three weeks.  Building on a copyrightwatch post that mines the same theme, I offer three:

First, the recent events send a clear message that Canadians want copyright policy (and indeed all policy making) to be both fair and to be seen to be fair.  That means accounting for all stakeholders and removing the lobbyist influence from the equation.  My article on the role of the lobby groups in the copyright process attracted considerable interest as many people expressed surprise at just how badly the system is broken.  It was this message that resonated with many people in the riding who may know little about copyright policy, but can identify a perceived conflict of interest when they see one.  Going forward, all parties must work to clean up copyright.

Second, among the most important voices in the debate came from artists such as Matthew Good, Steven Page, and Neil Leyton.  As groups such as CRIA were rightly identified as lobbyists who represent predominantly foreign interests, Canadian artists and Canadian interests began to speak up.  If (or more likely when) a new copyright bill comes to committee, it will be incumbent on Canada’s politicians to hear not only from the lobby groups, but also from the creators and users, many of whom are singing a much different tune from the lobbyists.

Third, this could have been about any issue, but it wasn’t.  It was about copyright.  Copyright is often described as a fringe issue, yet to millions of Canadians it has an enormous impact on their daily lives, affecting education, culture, creativity, the use of personal property, privacy, and security.  Labeling those concerned with these issues as pro-user zealots or claiming that this is merely about music downloading is to miss a much bigger story and to fail to connect with a segment of the population.

Curverider – open source learning company

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David Tosh, Ben Werdmuller & Misja Hoebe have launched Curverider today. This is a services company built around the Elgg Learning Landscape open source learning platform. I have been a proponent of this business model for a couple of years and it’s good to see that others view it as viable. What’s great about Curverider is that the developers are supporting their own code but have also involved a growing community so that it’s more than just three guys in a garage (not that they work in a garage). For instance, look at how Mancomm, a private company,  paid for the development of a calendar function that is now in the latest version of Elgg.
For the end-user, this business model is a dream. You can get the developers to support you, but if your needs change or you want to work with someone else you are free to leave with your source code.
Customers are not handcuffed to their technology providers. I believe that this industry model will encourage more innovation and that companies like Curverider will prosper based on the value of their services.
Dave and his team have also created a resource site for Elgg learning landscape that shows what’s happening in terms of development.

Learners as contributors – the end of the industrial model

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I’ve just read one of the best posts that shows how the Internet changes everything in education; many just don’t realise it yet. Christian Long at Think: Lab has a long post on the connection between blogging and formal education. Christian starts by describing a new billboard from AT&T that has only one word on it – Blogging – and then talks about a major difference in life for a 15 year old today and ten years ago. This is the ability to connect with anybody in the world on any subject, no matter how narrowly defined:

We’ve discussed a basic definition of blogging (web-based journaling).  We’ve accepted that anyone can immediately create a website now called a blog.  And if you think about being a 15 year old and wanting to share your ideas about music or sports or whatever comes to mind in a creative and individual way, a social and collaborative way, you can see why someone would create one.  Even see the potential for a teacher and a class full of students to create ‘class blogs’ for a project or portfolio.  But is there more?


Yes, and it all comes down to something so fundamental to the very existence of schools and even education itself that it’s actually pretty easy to overlook:  information and who owns/creates it. 

This final point, the question about information and who owns/creates it – is shaking our concept of education to the core. The ability to be the co-creators of worldwide knowledge now lies within the means of a large percentage of the world. For example, anyone can contribute their individual area of expertise to the wikipedia knowledge repository.

The discussion at Education Bridges echoes a similar vein. In the creation of wikibooks as online textbooks for the world, should only the experts build and distribute the accepted official curriculum or should learners be involved in the co-creation of knowledge? Personally, I feel that this is no longer a valid question because of the nature of digital networks. If you don’t allow for the co-creation of information (construct, deconstruct, reconstruct) then your information will gather electronic dust in its uselessness.
Albert Ip states it another way with this picture, which asks how anyone could limit peer interaction to "just" the classroom.
Teachers and educational organisations can longer hide behind the classroom firewall. As Christian says, just imagine:

Now, go back to that original 15 year old. Imagine you as a 15 year old with a blog of your own.

Imagine that student able to create a blog in seconds and within days or weeks or months have an audience spread out around the world that is genuinely interested in the ideas and stories and links and images that are on the blog, beginning to be taken seriously as a writer or an expert or a legitimate voice, and beginning to use the blog as a way to further explore ideas and develop a far-reaching network of thinkers and beginning to be seen on a level playing field as any adult.  And now imagine that student going back to school the next day and being asked to sit still, read books or notes that expect no interaction, being forever being seen as inexperienced and incapable, and not being able to contribute any ideas or questions to the larger body of research or ideas.

Both of my boys are in middle school and have their own blogs. One of them writes a lot, including the creation of a fantasy religion, while the other builds animations and shares them online. The eldest is learning Java on his own, via tutorials he finds online. At school they can use Google as an online library (find, access, use) during their limited time available during "computer lab". The physical library does not have any information for a report on the Avian Flu, and there is only one computer available. Access to Blogger is forbidden.
Teachers cannot teach the students how to get involved in the co-creation of knowledge because they don’t have a clue. The kids live in a completely different world than school. School is fast becoming irrelevant.
Next year, our eldest son will be 15. What will he think of school then? [I think I know the answer]

Three Conflicting Pillars – Revisited

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This post was prompted by Jay Cross’s discussion on how comments to blog posts get lost by not being tracked by most RSS readers.

A while back I made some comments on Education’s Three Conflciting Pillars, and a discussion ensued with excellent comments from Brian Alger, Rory McGreal of Athabasca University, and Terry Wassall.

It went sort of like this this [this is abridged and you can read the full conversation on the main post]:

Three premises compete for attention in our public education systems:

  • education as socialization
  • education as a quest for truth (Plato)
  • education as the realization of individual potential (Rousseau)

Brian: Given the fact that we have frozen knowledge and skills in something called curriculum, I would characterize today’s education system as something that is completely static and far removed from the practical realities of everyday life. So in that sense I would say that the very idea of a primary premise is plural and inseparable from the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in. I have not read Egan’s book, but I see no reason why the three premises mentioned above, and others, cannot co-exist simultaneously. Nor can I think of a reason that we would want to identify one and follow it exclusively.

Harold: The point that I remember was how the three premises have historically competed for primacy in the education system. When one dominates, then the others get less attention. We see this in initiatives like ‘no child left behind’ or the demise of music and physical education in the Canadian public school systems. My main concern is that there is no clear idea of what our education systems are trying to achieve, and we constantly go through ‘flavour of the year’ initiatives.

Brian: If I was to express a first principle it would focus on the desired quality of communication in education (in contrast to the current one). It seems to me that it is the nature of communication that needs to be changed in education more than anything else.

Rory: Western education has NEVER been based on those three pillars. Perhaps some lip service has been paid to them in the universities, but the schools K12 were formed for the benefit of employers in the manufacturing economy. They taught students how to sit still, do as they are told, and shutup and do monotonous tasks without complaining AND most importantly to arrive on time and respond to the bell and leave only after the day was over with the final bell — and by the way if they could become literate while these skills were being taught, that would be considered a good thing.

Harold: I think that curriculum development is a black art because we as a society and educators have not confronted what we really want from education. The disagreements that I hear over our education system are focused on symptoms and we”ll continue to tinker with the system unless we can find a way to address the foundations, such as “what the hell are we really trying to do and how are we going do it?” ; and even more importantly “how are we going to measure ourselves?”.

Terry: The extension of education to the masses was viewed with deep suspicion by the ‘natural’ and traditional ruling class. Education has always had the dual role of both enabling and controlling and has always been a double-edged sword. Teaching individuals how to read in order that they can read the Bible and employers” instructions always risked the possibility that they would also read subversive pamphlets if available. The controlling aspect was seem as crucial to those that begrudgingly conceded that they were having to ‘educate our masters’ — the Duke of Wellington I think. Whatever the other contradictions and tensions in education today I think this fundamental one between the enabling agenda and the controlling agenda is still very much in evidence.

Effective communication for learning

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Dave Pollard has a post on what communication methods are most effective. He has created a table that compares several media as to their cost, impact, value and cost/benefit. This is a good table for instructional designers to consider before creating educational media, and as Dave says, it’s open to revision.

Dave goes on at the end of this post to list his principles of human learning preferences:

  1. People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
  2. People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
  3. People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
  4. People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
  5. People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context-specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches.

Continuing from my last post on Controlling Chaos?, I would suggest that these preferences show that learner behaviour indicates that better tools, like tag clouds, are needed to enable serendipitous learning (Point #3) and that better built-in search is critical for finding good learning resources (Points #4 & 5).

Dave’s principles also support the idea that we should put more effort into contextualising online learning and less on cataloguing information/learning objects (Point #1). This is similar to the  concept of Stock & Flow, because having meticulously catalogued & tagged Stock (learning objects) is of little value without the contextual Flow (conversations & stories).

Controlling Chaos?

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Scott Leslie comments on the recent release of the CETIS Vocabulary Project, which includes two reports and a series of recommendations [my emphasis added]:

But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it.

I’m not an expert on ontologies, the semantic web, metadata or controlled vocabularies, but I’ve had enough conversations with enough experts to know that more control will not address our information management needs. Recent conversations with people smarter than me have me concluding that Smart Search is (will be) an excellent tool and that the RDF standard seems to be quite useful with its minimalist approach. From the CETIS Report (MS Word Doc, page 23):

What really sets RDF apart from XML and other things is that RDF is designed to represent knowledge in a distributed world. This means RDF is particularly concerned with meaning. Everything at all mentioned in RDF means something, whether a reference to something concrete in the world, an abstract concept, or a fact. Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge.”

I recently asked if metadata was dead and received some good advice:

  • From Anol: "Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode."
  • and from Keith, "Maybe metadata structures are dying, but there’s a distinct difference between metadata and metadata structures. If you’re going to ask, "Is metadata dead?" why not also ask, "Is tagging [with METADATA!] dead?"

After perusing the 121 pages of the two CETIS reports [I didn’t read every item], I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. Instead of asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s time for the learning industry as a whole to shift its effort to more pragmatic solutions, because the answers from CETIS et al are not very clear. Having watched the enormous efforts ($$$) that the military, academia and corporations have put into metadata and controlled learning structures, without any measurable improvements in learning or performance outcomes, I have to ask if this is worth the time and money. My suggestions:

  • like Lego, use the simplest of basic structures (RDF?)
  • build better search into online learning applications
  • only build taxonomies, ontologies & controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not "just-in-case"
  • give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc)
  • focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it

Individual and Company Blogs

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I recently received an invite from Ankush Gupta, who has the Learned Man! blog, to look at the company blog of Tata Interactive Systems. I’ve read Ankush’s blog on and off for a while and found that he provides some solid commentary on elearning, so I checked out the Tata Blog. It’s a multi-user effort with posts so far from the CEO and various instructional design consultants. The review of Allison Rossett’s First Things Fast is worth a read, as this is an excellent handbook for performance improvement.
It will be interesting to see how this corporate, multi-user blog evolves over time. One successful multi-user blog, though not from a single company, is the Learning Circuits Blog. Whether a company blog can have the same depth of conversation remains to be seen. So far, I like the initial posts on the Tata Systems blog, especially on their work for learning disabilities and participation in the Mumbai marathon.
A different approach to company blogging is SilverOrange, a web-systems company on Prince Edward Island. There are no direct links from the company website, but the individual bloggers proudly link back to their company. SilverOrange bloggers include Dan James, Daniel Burka and Steven Garrity.
Here are two approaches to blogging and work. In one the blogger is part of a corporate blog while in another the blogger is an individual who happens to work (or own) a company. The use of blogs is evolving over time and there may be a day when a company blog is identified (by the majority) as a separate entity from an individual blog. Does it matter? I think that the level of comments and interaction, especially when controversial subjects arise, will show if there is a difference. Dan James has even stated that "Companies don’t blog, people do".
My interest in all of this is how this medium is being used and what its effects will be. Will blogs become the equivalent of the e-mail scourge of the next decade? Will employees be forced to blog on the company site? These are the early days of blogging for the mainstream and it’s still fun to watch the field change and read new blogs.