As broadband becomes ubiquitous, synchronous (real time) web applications for learning and business are getting easier to implement. However, many of these systems are still quite expensive. Luigi Canali de Rossi (Robin Good) has an excellent video presentation that covers low-cost web collaboration tools such as voice over IP, web conferencing, screen sharing, document sharing, etc. This is worth 37 minutes of your time, especially if you intend to spend money in this area.
Harold Jarche
Look Forward
I’ve been at a few conferences and meetings lately and some of the discussion has been around innovation and making Atlantic Canada more productive. Much of what I heard centered around yesterday’s problems. One theme was “how can we create more knowledge jobs”, especially in the e-learning sector. I find this backward-looking because I agree with Dan Pink’s premise that the major factors influencing North American work in the next few years can be put into the context of three questions:
- Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
- Can a computer do it faster?
- Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?
Pink says that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, and I see this very clearly. In the e-learning marketplace more and more is being outsourced to excellent companies in Asia. We cannot work cheaper than these companies and we should not try. However, most of the jobs that I see being created are in the area of e-learning content production. When it comes to services, such as e-learning development, the value is higher up the stack. High value services are based on unstructured problem solving, while lower valued services are rules based or even modular. When services are commoditized then competition is based on price and Asia will win over North America (so get used to it). Since services are constantly being commoditized, the aim should be to stay ahead of the pack and higher up the stack. We already see this happening with software development.
Therefore, I don’t believe that the e-learning courseware development model will last very long before companies shift production overseas. I doubt that the intructional designer hiring boomlet in New Brunswick will last for long, unless production moves up the stack. This will take Conceptual Age skills.
There are some companies that are focused more on creativity (right brain stuff) and I would bet that these business models will last longer. One of these companies is FatKat Animation in Miramichi. We need to foster more of these creative companies, the schools that help to educate them like NBCCD and more breeding grounds for future artists. This does not mean that we should abandon the digital economy, only that we have to become the creative and conceptual leaders in the world economy or we’ll wind up with a future generation of digital gas jockeys.
This is old stuff in terms of ideas, but I’m getting scared that our government and industry leaders are still too focused on the Information Age and don’t see the upheaval coming with the Conceptual Age. Once more Marshall McLuhan was correct when he said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Creative Commons Media
Do you believe that private property extends to digital media? Did you know that much copyrighted popular media was appropriated from past works that are now in the public domain. Isaac Newton said that , "If I have seen further [then other men] then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". We owe much to our common past and shouldn’t forget that we are currently creating the past from which our children will have to be creative.
I remember a conversation about copyright I had in Tunisia a couple of years ago. An IT manager was discussing software licenses and how he was not bothered by using non-licensed software from major North American vendors. He could not understand how these companies could claim software intellectual property rights when the concept of zero, necessary for computing, came from the Arab world and no North American company had ever paid for this IP. So why start charging now?
The open source movement is about making source code freely available, while the Creative Commons (CC) is an organisation that allows individual creators to share their work but still retain certain rights. CC makes it easy to understand copyright and to use licenses that have been vetted by legal counsel in many countries.
So if you don’t have time to read the book then check out these videos that explain the CC concepts much better that I can.
Small Scale Intelligence Collection, Collation and Dissemination
At yesterday’s breakfast meeting in Fredericton we received a firehose of information on competitive intelligence and then had about 10 minutes to digest and reflect before being asked to comment. Luckily, I had already done some work in the field of web-based competitive intelligence, thanks to Conor Vibert at Acadia University, so the concepts weren’t new. I had also spent a short period as a combat intelligence officer many years ago. With the limited time available, we did not discuss how you could integrate competitive intelligence gathering techniques into your daily work flow.
If this is one of the first times that you’ve come to this site, perhaps as a result of the CSTD conference, here are some of the tools that I use for competitive intelligence. If you look at the left Navigation Bar you will see a section marked "External Info Sites". The first one is my account at Bloglines. Bloglines is a web feed reader (also called an aggregator). It allows me to view any site via a "feed" seen within the bloglines window without having to go to the actual site. If you follow the link you will see what web sites I read. Advantages of feed readers are that you can see what has changed since the last time you looked at a site, and you can preview a post without having to go to the site. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly scan many sources. I usually have ~100 feeds that I monitor. There are other feed readers available, such as Newsgator, but Bloglines is perhaps the simplest. If you want to know if a site has a feed then install the Firefox browser and a small orange icon in the bottom right corner will alert you.
A description of how feeds work, with a technology called RSS, is available here. I know this URL because it is saved in my Furl account. I have made this account public as well, so that I can share websites of interest that I don’t mention directly in this blog. Furl also saves a copy of the page for me so that I get to view it even if the site is taken down. Think of Furl as a replacement for "Favourites" or "Bookmarks" in your browser, with these additional advantages:
- you can use multiple categories for an individual post;
- it saves a copy for your private viewing;
- you can access your account from any computer;
- it can be publicly viewable for sharing; and
- your Furl archive is fully searchable.
If you are interested in blogging then you might want to start by Furling because it’s easier and simpler. A similar tool is Del.icio.us.
Blogging is another intelligence method, by which you can post a nascent idea and see what kind of response you get. I’ve recently posted about the benefits of blogging for small businesses. The advantage in this case is that the post to which I’ve referred is within the database of my own website. I own this data but share it under a Creative Commons license that covers everything on this site.
I hope that this is helpful for those new to blogging and the two-way web.
Blogs & Wikis for Learning
There was a fair amount of interest in our presentation at the CSTD Symposium on Mancomm’s use of wikis with healthcare professionals. The MASIE Center has recently published this commentary on the impact of blogs and wikis on learning;
- Instructor Blogs to offer a more dynamic and personal perspective on the teacher’s expertise and view of the context.
- Wiki Handouts that are launched by the instructor or instructional designer and then evolved by the various learners in the classroom or on-line programs.
- RSS Feeds from Blogs and Wikis that are linked to Compliance subjects. As the content changes, the learner receives a RSS feed linking them back to the Blog to receive an update and even take a Compliance Re-Check.
- Context Rich Wikis which are used as ways of making the role of SubjectMatter Experts easier and more time efficient.
These examples are for more traditional training models, where you have an instructor and students. In our case (mental health community of practice) the wiki was used for a diverse group of physically separated professionals to post and share common practices that were not available in any published manuals or procedures. So far this group, many of whom had no computer experience, has created +600 wiki pages.
As for blogs, there are many applications for informal learning, such as this post which is a follow-up to our face-to-face presentation in Fredericton on Monday. For instance, blogs can be used to post presentation material so that learners can determine if the material is suitable for their needs and can act as a medium for questions in advance so that the facilitator can customize the scheduled F2F meeting to meet learner needs. I encourage anyone to use this blog as a follow-up to what was presented and let’s see where the conversation and learning goes.
Linking to subject matter experts (SME) is made easier with blogs and wikis, as one Canadian military officer told me at the conference that they are trying to connect the best SME with their soldiers in training. This could mean a synchronous web session between soldiers in New Brunswick and the expert currently serving in Sudan or Afghanistan. Blogs and wikis can be the glue that holds the learning conversation together between time zones.
“Muse on Gutenberg”
I’m posting the comment to my last post here because it deserves to be highlighted and available to those who only read this blog through an aggregator. The author [you could include your name, even though I have an idea] explains the key issues in our electric/internet era in a much better fashion than I can. When we had our CSTD breakfast meeting today, explosive change of this type did not even register with most participants. We spend too much time looking into the rear view mirror.
If you can’t decrypt the following, then start with McLuhan for Managers.:
muse on gutenberg
Submitted by Visitor on Tue, 17/05/2005 – 02:36.
Agree, the “printed word is already being pushed aside by the likes of IM”. IM is called ‘chat’ essentially because it mimics ‘speech’ afforded by instant electric interaction, not printed text. The medium of IM is ‘electric speech’ as an effect, not text.
‘The Daily Telegraph’ newspaper, conversely, tried to reclaim text as its ‘medium as message’ by appropriating the instant effect of reportage enabled by the electric telegraph.
What’s happening therefore is an erosion of the alphabet into orality because electric communication in its effect is speech-based (audio-tactile), not print-based. Hypertext is non-linear and speech-based (acoustic) because linear space as a ‘print-based’ narrative can be circumvented with every hyper-link. We’re not required (forced) to follow narrative from word to sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, etc. anymore, as was the case for 500 years. Just bookmark it, if anything.
As a result, as McLuhan said, the ‘user is the content’ driven by the users purpose for learning–context dependent on their sophistication, intentions, needs, capabilities, desires, etc.
Their lived ‘context’ subverts mere text. Context as scope, depth, relation, pattern, process, tangent, association, bridge, etc. are spatial, non-linear, non-Euclidean metaphors. Effect and cause collapse together with instant time and space. Real-time communication therefore is speech-based and aural–timeless, always floating in the present tense, so ideas have to be bounced.
‘Bounced’ back and forth communication in IM requires repetition, resonance, the structure of lyrics and poetics, in order to get something across Learning from the rappers, IM becomes more and more acronym RAP (brb). Rhythm is repetition, repetition, repetition…’read my lips’. Rhythm is tribal. Yet IM itself is be replaced by video chat just as blogs are being replaced (subsumed) by video-blogs. The bell tolls for print.
The tragedy of Gutenberg resulted from the German Protestant bible competing against the Christian latin, the infamous Reformation. A time of nasty inquisition. The effect was that the Renaissance (Church) got replaced by the Enlightenment (State), pushing rationalism further known as Modernism, Objectivism, Formalism, Realism, Socialism, blah, blah, most of the ‘isms’.
Now, linear education has been reversing (imploding) since the telegraph, ushering in post-structural and postmodern (just used to be called, rhetoric)–in painting, Dadism, Surrealism, and in music, all that dissonance and jazz. And, non-linear narratives become (one liners) staged improv (Bush-isms).
Now, Cartesian sciences have little hope of probability against non-linear narratives unless they teach ‘method’ to save face during their ‘culture wars’. That is, method is first show as constructed for objectivity (sorry Plato)–a centimeter is a usefully contrived unit of space, not an intrinsic eternal form.
As non-linear modes of perception become more and more prevalent to subsume linear print ‘concept-based’ text, science is forced to become more and more multidisciplinary (i.e., accountable to its methods, not extoll its contrived objectivity). We don’t need to globalize. We can internationalize, instead… ecologies subsume boundaries.
Because the ground keeps moving… IM is speech-based or percept-based media so our speedy typed texts are basically concepts fast parsing into speech-based thinking. Speech is Q&A, interactive, dialogic, fluid and interpretive, not definitive like your everyday print-based dictionaries. Dynamic flux not static statements create persuasion–action. Verbal contracts replace written. Networked relationships superimpose individuals. In short, Clark might well quip in, say, less than 10 years, the ‘tragedy’ of non-linear video and speech”, pushing poor old linear Gutenburg out the pixel.
It’s a dangerous time. The orals versus the prints (arts vs. sciences)–we’ll need a graphical operating system about now… not just cute Penguins. Balancing linear and non-linear depends on the balance of competing mediums (i.e., multimedia/convergence).
So the real battlefield will be information or knowledge design–the competition between written print, image and sound/speech. The content providers trying to construct meaning interaction is coming to everyone’s multimedia desktop, as a basic skill set, not just the 3R’s
McLuhan saw the need to see this shift as a civil imperative–to ‘perceive the grammar of communication’. If we confused message as medium, we’ll drown in violence from media fallout (PAX American). The medium is unconscious (i.e., seeing the word at the expense of the alphabet). The printed alphabet created linearity. Gutenburg just pushed it upon us faster using his 15th century xerox. Now we need him back before we dump narrative (keyboard) overboard with Dragon Naturally Speaking. That’s a tough challenge, ahead, to master the matrix…
As we ponder how to tinker with the ADDIE instructional design model, developed to train soldiers for WWII, the real issue is what are we going to do in the post-print world that is fast approaching. I think it’s time to master more of the non-linear and non-literate media (e.g. Flickr & podcasting)
CSTD Fredericton
I’m at the CSTD Innovations in Learning Symposium in Fredericton. We gave two presentations today, so I missed most of the others. Stephen has posted some of what he saw and has given a quick overview of Clark Aldrich’s keynote. I agree with Stephen’s comment on the lightness of this talk, but then it was a pretty mixed audience. The statement that stuck with me was a sidebar where Clark described the "tragedy of Gutenberg"; the fact that the printed word has pushed us into a linear educational model. It’s an interesting concept, especially in light of the fact that the printed word is already being pushed aside by the likes of IM shorthand and hierarchy-subverting hyperlinks.
Since I missed most of today’s sessions, I’m looking forward to attending one of the longer presentations tomorrow.
CEOS Halifax
I just came back from the Conference on Engaging Open Source in Halifax. Good to see some fellow bloggers, like Steve and Iain, but probably the most informative session was from Robert Charpentier of Defence R&D in Valcartier QC. Robert and his colleagues have recently released a report entitled Free and Open Source Software Overview and Preliminary Guidelines for the Government of Canada. This is a must-read report if you work in or with the federal government. Robert told me that Ontario and Quebec are moving in the same direction as the federal government; to include FOSS in all procurement considerations. This is a big deal and I encourage the open source communities to examine the report and ensure a seat at the procurement tables. There will be many opportunities for the training & education sector here as well, if you understand the requirements and know the subject area (hint).
The best piece of information during this conference came from Robert. He said that the OS collaborative development process is very effective, and their analysis of 287 technical reports showed that bug fixes for proprietary software take an average of 10 days while bug fixes for open source software take an average of only one day. The OS community is much more effective and efficient than any proprietary counterpart.
There were a lot more data in all of the presentations but my clear understanding after the day is that open source is not a fringe movement when it is accepted by Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, the Government of Canada and the EU. If these behemoths get it, then I really don’t see any more of a need to make the case for open source. The OS cluetrain has left the station.
Learning the Laws of Media
There has been much discussion of Thomas Friedman’s recent book The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century. Will Richardson connects this flatness to education:
Like him or not, I have to say that I’ve been getting a bit of an education from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, and I’m finding more and more connections between the global leveling he describes and the classroom.
…We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don’t own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance…soon.
A common adage amongst learning professionals is that, “it’s not about the technology, it’s about learning”. While we may hope that this is true, we live in societies based on technologies, and Marshall McLuhan is consistently proven correct with his Laws of Media:
every new medium:
1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)
Every new technology has these four effects on all of us, including learning technologies. This means that much of our work is about technology. If you don’t understand the effects of the technologies that we use, how can you understand their pedagogical implications? Take the learning management system, which has been with us for about a decade. The LMS:
- extends the instructor’s voice beyond the walls of the institution;
- obsolesces the classroom (but small, face-to-face executive classes are on the rise);
- the LMS retrieves the correspondence model;
- it has flipped into a costly administrative tool that does not meet the needs of inter-connected learners using other more effective technologies to communicate.
In looking at the newer social networking technologies (blogs, wikis, eportfolios) we could say that they:
- extend the learner’s voice;
- obsolesce the course as the unit of education;
- retrieve the Oxford-Cambridge collegial education model ;
- could reverse into a meaningless “echo-chamber” (Wikepedia definition of “echo chamber: Metaphorically, the term echo chamber can refer to any situation in which information or ideas are amplified by transmission inside an enclosed space.)
We live in a time when new information and communication technologies are constantly being developed. My advice is to get used to it, and remember that “The medium is the message”.
UK Tries to Keep Learning Open
From Silicon.com we get news of this pending report from the British education sector:
The UK government’s ICT agency, the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA), is poised to publish a study that found primary schools could halve computer costs if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from companies such as Microsoft, according to the Times Educational Supplement.
I noted this report a few days ago and bookmarked BECTA, anxiously awaiting its release. If you read the Silicon.com article a bit more you see that the counterattack has begun:
Stephen Uden, group manager of education relations for Microsoft, wrote: "Competition in the software market is good for customers because it ensures that they get a good deal as it drives choice and innovation.
"There are some 5,000 third party applications available to run on Microsoft Windows operating system but only a handful of applications supported by the open source community. We offer free support and training materials to help teachers and students make the most of their technology."
"There are some 5,000 third party applications available to run on Microsoft Windows operating system but only a handful of applications supported by the open source community. We offer free support and training materials to help teachers and students make the most of their technology."
Of course MS does not discuss the cost of upgrading your applications, the operating system or the database – all at the whim of the proprietary software vendor. The fact is that open source software for all learning applications is cheaper. I say all, because these applications are not mission critical, so even if the open source application only does 80% of what the costly software does, then it’s still good enough. However, in many cases the open source version is even better than its proprietary counterpart. Take for instance OpenOffice, which can save a slide presentation as a PDF or even a Flash file (with no extra software), making it a great tool for school projects. You can install as many versions of OOo as you want on all of your school computers and students’ home computers for free. Beat that.
Update: The report, "Open Source Software in Schools: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs" is now available as a PDF. The conclusions are favourable towards open source, but not overly enthusiastic.