Harold Jarche

“This Internet Thing”

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Seth Godin marketing and branding guru, and author of Purple Cow, latest post is on how the importance of the Internet is only beginning to be felt. For instance:

Penetration. There are 50 times as many people using the Net as there were then [ten years ago]. 50x is a multiple you don’t see every day.

For those in the elearning or social networking business, this is a very important fact. It may mean that business models that failed 5-10 years ago, could work now. Time to clean out that closet of ideas.

Tools. You can launch most any online service with almost no custom programming. Changethis.com demonstrated to me how straightforward this has become. It also means that finding the world’s greatest programmer is no longer a critical component for most services.

I would infer that as cheap and easy Internet tools proliferate, those with specialised skills in coding, etc, may begin to lose their market worth – unless they also have the skills of inventiveness, empathy and meaning that Daniel Pink believes will be necessary for future employability.

 

Market Diversification

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Godfrey Parkin has an excellent post on what is really happening in the global economy; namely that multinationals will follow the money. The next century is looking like it will be the Chinese century.

Corporate America apparently no longer values having brain-power or talent on the domestic payroll – the notion of human capital as an investment is being replaced with the notion of human ingenuity as an expense. If our money, our designers, our R&D, our manufacturing, our management, our business partners, our suppliers, and our major markets are all in Asia, where does that leave the USA?

In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?

ATutor 1.4.3

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ATutor, a Canadian Open Source Web-based Learning Content Management System (LCMS), has just released its latest version 1.4.3. ATutor’s trademark function is that it is designed with accessibility and adaptability in mind.

New in this release:

Forum Upgrades: System wide and shared forums for communication across courses. Create communities around groups of course forums, or around an entire ATutor course server. Alumni participation in course forums.
Subscribe to general forums or course forums, or subscribe to specific topic threads to receive messages by email. Quickly access current forum messages through the Forum Posts menu module.



Enrollment Manager Overhaul: Create, import, and export course enrollment lists, and manage enrolled students and alumni. New tabbed display for managing student information, managing course lists, managing roles and privileges, as well as creating and managing groups.



Language Overhaul: Language management has been completely re-designed. Translate, import, and export language from within your own ATutor installation. Support for the UTF-8 character set. ATutor is available in more than 30 languages.



Question Database: Create tests by adding questions to, and retrieving questions from, a test item repository.



Test/Survey Manager Upgrade: Create image based test items, arrange multiple choice questions vertically or horizontally, assign tests to a class, to groups, or to individual students, analyse test data and generate statistics.



Theme Manager: Easily copy, import, and export ATutor themes.



RSS Feeds: Syndicate ATutor course announcements to display them on remote Web sites.



Embed ACollab: Embed ACollab [collaborative workspace] into ATutor, or open it in a new window to participate in course group activities.

Easy Enrollment: Students can now enroll in courses through the Browse Courses screen.

Open source learning systems, like this SCORM compliant LCMS, are steadily improving and becoming viable options for any organization, public or private.

New eLearning Company in New Brunswick

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Well, this is news to me, but I’m probably way behind on the local gossip.

It appears that the Irish elearning company, PulseLearning has opened an office in Fredericton, NB. The company focuses on compliance training, which seems like a sustainable business model, as the creation of new rules and regulations is not likely to end soon. PulseLearning is currently hiring project managers and instructional designers, and they join a number of established elearning companies in Fredericton, making for good job prospects in the capital city.

Some Free Advice for Higher Education

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Here is some free advice for any university or college, public or private. If you are wondering how you can stay in touch with your graduates and foster a sense of community, especially when it comes to future fund raising, then offer free blogs. This beats collecting addresses, making phone calls and all the other ways that development officers try to raise interest and money. Let your graduates be part of your university when you’re not asking for money, and they will be there when you need them.

Wellesley College is already doing it, so get on the wave now. If you need any advice, give me a call [shameless self-promotion].

From Cluetrain to Wirearchy

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In 1999 we had the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its 95 theses à la Gutenberg; the first ten being:

  1. Markets are conversations.
  2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
  3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
  4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
  5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
  6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
  7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
  8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
  9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
  10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

Many business executives do not realise the underlying reason of the Cluetrain Manifesto, and continue to build defensive walls between the company and their customers. They even use military terminology when referring to their markets. Get real folks, the customer is your lifeblood, and now has the tools to figure things out with or without you. Take thesis 7 – today we have more than just hyperlinks; we have peer-to-peer and Voice over IP to connect with anyone, anytime. Jon Husband, with his Wirearchy perspective, has developed his own 2005 manifesto on a similar theme [updated link]:

#1 Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has.
#2 The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight.
#3 People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long.
#4 Champion-and-Channel replaces Command-and-Control.
#5 Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done.
#6 Trust, Transparency and Authenticity are the glue that holds it all together.
#7 The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language.
#8 New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever.
#9 We’re All In This Together
#10 There’s No Going Back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal.

Here are some ways that I can think of to develop a new company, based on Jon’s principles. You see, I always have to make things concrete – it’s in my nature ;-)

  • Build the company with an open connection to your customers, whether with the two-way web (e.g. blogs) or with a physical presence.
  • Develop your organisation chart based upon your customers needs, not your own. When I lived in Germany, what I found unique was that the bank tellers were the most senior people in the bank. Bank employees were not allowed to interact with customers until they knew how the entire system functioned. This meant excellent customer service.
  • Have all of your marketing material written by someone who can write in plain language. Maybe even pay your best customers to write it for you. In this way, it will reflect the customer, not you.

Please feel free to add your own …

Drupal for Learning

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Do you want to be in on the ground floor of the development of a new web-based learning system? Boris Mann sums up the activities of a lot of people who want to create a learning-oriented Drupal CMS. The time has come to get things going, and I know that Will already has a lot of ideas.

Having been on the inside of one proprietary LCMS, and having evaluated dozens of LMS/LCMS, I would like to see the creation of a much looser, but still learning-oriented, structure. I think that Scott Wilson’s graphic of a next generation virtual learning environment has some promise. I also believe that we should try to push the envelope and allow for different instructional strategies; something beyond testing through quizzes and questionaires. For example, Dave Jonassen has developed an instructional design methodology for problem-based learning and I know that he has been looking for someone to implement it on the web:

For the past few years, I have devoted most of my professional research and development to better understanding problem solving. Why? Primarily because the field of instructional design has largely ignored problem solving, so there is very little understanding of how humans solve problems or how to support learning, how to solve problems.

Does this sound like an interesting project for the Drupal community or anyone else?

Innovation in e-Health

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Yesterday afternoon, during the ITANS CEO Boot Camp in Halifax, we were treated to an excellent overview of e-Health in Canada. Dr. Mamoru Watanabe, of the University of Calgary, gave a quick survey of e-Health innovations from the clinical perspective. Currently, the federal government is funding initiatives to improve the IT infrastructure of the health care system. However, many primary care phyicians lack the resources and/or the know-how to take advantage of new IT systems.

Dr. Watanabe spoke of some marvels being developed in the health sector, such as inter-networked operating suites in Alberta, voice activated tools for surgery, robotics and – haptics [Defn: Of or relating to the sense of touch; tactile.]. For instance, haptics in surgical tools give specific tactile responses when cutting through different kinds of tissues, even at a distance. Thus, a surgeon can "feel" a procedure that is being done remotely.

Of more interest to those in IT is the new field of bibliomics, which is the linking of biological data with medical data. This field is driving innovation in customized medicine, where one size no longer fits all. The overall theme from Dr. Watanabe, and the panelists who followed him, is that there are many IT-related opportunities in the Canadian health care sector, including e-learning.

Innovation in IT

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I attended the ITANS CEO Boot Camp in Halifax yesterday. It was geared to small & medium sized businesses in the IT sector. There were a few of us from New Brunswick as well as at least one person from Newfoundland in attendance. I decided to attend because of the great price – $75 and the presentation on e-Health in afternoon.

The morning started with a presentation from Michael O’Neil, Managing Director of IDC Canada. He talked about the various definitions of innovation and commercialisation, stating that commmercialisation should be the focus of any IT firm. I think that this is just quibbling over definitions. Many definitions of innovation include wealth creation. For an excellent, and non-mainstream, read on innovation and its underlying principles, read Dave Pollard’s 30 page – A Prescription for Business Innovation (2004) instead.

What I found the most useful part Michael’s presentation was his description of the typical growth curve of a company and how a company needs different kinds of partners, depending on where it is in its growth. For instance in the initial stage, IT product companies need sales partners, usually hired at great expense, to get those first product sales. In Stage 2, companies need services partners, with existing relationships in vertical markets, who can refer their products. Later, in Stage 3, companies need logistics partners, to smoothly handle customer service. Finally, in Stage 4, companies need to find hyper-efficient channel partners, such as Dell is for the computer hardware industry.

Michael also likened the typical IT company’s perspective toward its customers as wearing your suit jacket inside-out. Only the company can see the nice, finished fabric. He said that vendors have to stop considering themselves as the centre of their solar system, and put their customers at the centre. His presentation was then followed by two IT company representatives who rarely mentioned their customers, and one talked about the need to get the "message to the market" correct. An inside-out approach, I would say.

For small companies, there were a few more nuggets of wisdom during the morning, but you had to dig hard to find them. Many of the models shown would have worked well during the dot com bubble, but I’m not sure how well they will work today for a start-up tech company. For now, I’m sticking with Dave Pollard and his work on Natural Enterprises and Clayton Christensen’s theories on innovation.

The Google Browser?

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Seth Godin comments on the fact that the key developer of the open source Mozilla Firefox browser is now going to work part-time with Google:

Lessons?


1. Running a successful open source effort is a great idea. I can’t think of an individual who has invested the time and not had a great personal outcome as well.


2. Google understands what I failed to persuade Yahoo! of a long time ago–owning the browser is a home run. Microsoft has botched their ownership of IE, because they think like bullies, and you can’t bully consumers into doing what they don’t want to do. The idea of a Google browser is powerful from both a user and a commercial perspective, mainly because Google’s culture will make it work.

This goes to show that open source is a viable business model for the individual as well as the company, and that with the Web, corporate dominance can easily be usurped. I bet that Firefox will overtake IE in 12 months.

Don’t miss Seth’s ultimate lesson.