Harold Jarche

Open Source 2005

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Please don’t take it from me; just read this article if you still think that open source software is a fringe movement and will have no impact on the software development business. By Steven Vaughan-Nichols at eWeek:

Sometimes people don’t know when a revolution has happened until afterwards. Then, the historians tell us that 2004 was the year that open source started to become computing’s mainstream.

From e-Learning to s-Learning

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James Farmer has started an excellent conversation on learning management systems and how new systems can be developed on a looser configuration of individual controlled nodes by using blogging software. The general theme is that less management is better, and that individual learners could write all of their posts, assignments and papers from their own site, and these could be directed to each class as web feeds. The classes would aggregate the feeds from all the students and instructors. The beauty of this kind of system is that each student keeps all of his/her content, and it does not get locked away in an inaccessible archive of a centrally controlled LMS.

Boris Mann and Will Pate add their comments, especially from the Drupal perspective, with Will pushing for a move away from electronic learning to social learning. I think that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner.

We have the technology to do this, and Drupal only needs a few more functions in order to be a “learning community in a box”. It’s exciting to know that we are getting to the point of having a real alternative to the LMS. I have tried in the past year to convince some organisations to move away from the LMS model, but the alternatives have been a bit messy, especially for the IT department. Rob Paterson’s course at UPEI showed that an online course could work without an LMS. The development of an “off-the-shelf” social software tool, designed for formal learning interventions, could really kick-start a new direction for learning technologies.

Update — and the Drupal development community has begun to discuss the creation of a module for educational sites, starting with quizzes, but ending who knows where.

Pedagogical Praxis – Shaffer

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David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with case studies, on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace. These three studies show how relatively easy it is to ground a learning program in a post-industrial workplace context, by using what are today quite cheap and accesible technologies.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as
those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately
constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a
way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of
mathematics, science, history, and language arts.

These case studies include students working as biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics. These three stories make this academic paper a delight to read.

For a more academic review, see this eLearning Review.

Update: Link fixed :-)

The New Skills – Inventiveness, Empathy, Meaning

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Just before I stepped out on my own, I read Daniel Pink’s Free Agent Nation, which I would recommend to every freelancer. The CS Monitor has recently featured Pink in an article on the end of jobs. Pink sees another shift in the employment market, speculating that off-shoring is going to continue, and that “There are going to be plenty of opportunities…. But it’s not going to be ‘knowledge workers,’ it’s going to be creators and empathizers.” His new book, A Whole New Mind, is based on this idea:


The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind. The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities – inventiveness, empathy, meaning – predominate.

I take this to mean that synthesis and conceptual thinking will be in high demand, as businesses and organisations keep up with technology, market and cultural changes. Seeing patterns will be necessary. If this is the case, then Dave Pollard’s critical life skills will be essential for more and more people [take the hint, educators].

Pink’s first book was based on many interviews with free agents across the US, and I hope that this next one will have good data to back it up. The book is due out in March 2005.

Wink

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Via the Educational Bloggers Network, is this pointer to a freeware capture and presentation application, which looks like a simple version of Robo-Demo, called Wink:

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots of your software, use images that you already have, type-in explanations for each step, create a navigation sequence complete with buttons, delays, titles etc and create a highly effective tutorial for your users.

Theory & Practice for Innovation

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In reading Christensen, Anthony & Roth (2004) Seeing What’s Next, I found patterns linking three strategic innovation approaches.

First, in McLuhan for Managers, the authors synthesize much of Marshall McLuhan’s work, and provide a lens for managers and owners to make business decisions. The important piece of this book is how to use McLuhan’s laws of media to understand the changes that are possible with a medium. The authors suggest that it is in the retrieves quadrant of the
probes ” … we may be able to glean valuable clues as to the effects of the new medium from more easily observed effects of the old.” Understanding retrieval can give a clearer vision of signal versus noise.

Johansson, in The Medici Effect says that new businesses should look for reversals in order to find possibilities, especially at the intersection of fields or disciplines. These can result in order of magnitude business opportunities.

Christensen, also the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, gives new business entrants and incumbents a theory-based set of tools to understand and use disruptive innovations. One of the strategies for new businesses is to target non-core customers of the incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise (swords) in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents.

This is an over-simplification of these three excellent books, but my intent is to grab your interest, as I see patterns in each book that reinforce each other, and I believe can be beneficial to your business, existing or new. Finally, Seeing What’s Next includes chapters on the healthcare and education industries, two fields of my own practice. The chapter on education was worth the price of the book for me.

Here is my first attempt at summarizing some of these concepts in a graphical form.

International Partnering

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My town, Sackville, is looking to create a long-term partnership with a a tsunami-stricken Indian town of the same size. This seems to be a better strategy than just raising money (though that is important), and I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even get involved if it makes sense.

Here is the full CBC post, as they tend to take them down after a while:

NB town to adopt tsunami-stricken community

WebPosted Jan 13 2005 01:16 PM AST
CBC NewsSACKVILLE



The town of Sackville, New Brunswick wants to adopt a town in India that’s been affected by the tsunami disaster.

Sackville town counsellor Virgil Hammock suggested the idea of partnering up with an Asian community. He says other aid efforts are helpful, but he’s worried that the campaigns won’t last .

“You know, six months to a year from now, people will have forgotten about this. They’ll have some other catastrophe to deal with,” said Hammock.

Hammock says the town hasn’t decided which Indian community they’ll support, but he says it’s likely that it will be a town in one the Indian islands that were hit worst by tsunamis.

“I looked at a town called Malacca, and that’s a town about the size of Sackville. But I haven’t been able to contact anyone there yet because this town was utterly destroyed.”

Hammock says the town will work with the local Rotary Club over the next few months to make a connection with an Indian community that needs aid.

Once the groundwork is laid out, Hammock says the people of Sackville will decide what kinds of projects they want to work on in the adopted Indian community. Hammock says the idea behind the partnership is to provide long-term support for people in Asia.

“We want to give them something they actually need, that we can buy or install, instead of just sending money. Then we can have sort of a longterm relationship with them.”

I’ll suggest to our town council that we all take a look at the SEA-EAT Blog, which includes a “Help Needed” section for the region hit by the tsunami.