Open source for learning costs less

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In my 2009 predictions for eLearn Magazine I said that “There will be an increased interest in open source software as well as tools and methods that enable online collaboration.” Ryan Cameron took me to task on open source in the comments:

Open source is not, actually, free. Someone has to build it, someone has to maintain it. Open source is simply transferring an up front and usually meagre licence fee for a long term highly specialized labour cost, which in many cases ends up creating situations where organizations are completely hamstrung by their IT department/gurus.

I agree, OS is not free, however it is free of licensing fees and free from many other licensing constraints of proprietary systems. If it is GPL it is free to hack, modify or build upon, with some restrictions.

My research and experience over the years shows open source, especially in training and education, to be significantly cheaper. One example is a Moodle installation that had a total cost of ownership at 3-10% of the compared proprietary system. Another example of open source versus a proprietary learning management system showed a savings of $345,000. Here’s a study from the Quebec Provincial Department of Education that showed savings of 59-75% over 5 years.

While OS is not free, and does incur some costs for implementation and support, I have yet to find examples where open source learning management systems cost more than proprietary ones. An OS learning management system may not meet all your needs, but it won’t be because it costs too much.

It’s not about the technology?

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INATT makes sense because most of us realise that people make things happen, not technology. It’s not about the technology is a rallying cry amongst many in education or in fields that are being disrupted by information technology. Perhaps INATT, but:

  • Imagine organising an international group of collaborators without access to Voice over IP (costs increase) or without presence monitoring (who’s available in what time zone) or without shared documents online (what’s the latest version?).
  • Try to understand a different geographic market with no travel budget. Using Twitter, you could follow people who live and work in that area and get to know what’s important to them (free competitive intelligence).
  • Create a presence in a field while living in a small town far from a major urban centre (that’s me, using my blog for the past five years).
  • Keep up to your professional field without access to paid journal subscriptions, lectures or conversations with experts (many experts now publish material online – TED.com, as well as universities publish lectures online, and you can engage other professionals on blogs or Twitter).

Just think about the advantages that these technologies provide us in connecting, collaborating, sharing and learning. Now imagine organisations that do not use them. Would you say they are at a disadvantage? It’s not about the technology but it’s definitely not about ignoring the technology.

Learning Industry Predictions 2009

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eLearn Magazine offers predictions for 2009 and Editor Lisa Neal Gualtieri says that the people polled “unanimously agree the global economic downturn is the overwhelming factor coloring their forecasts, [however] they do see a great array of opportunities and challenges in the coming 12 months.”

Here are the predictions from my Internet Time Alliance colleagues:

Jane Hart: As the recession bites and training budgets are slashed, organizations will no longer be able to afford the production of sophisticated courseware. Instead they will become more reliant on employee-generated content and increasingly appreciate the potential of Web 2.0 approaches for informal, social, and collaborative learning, and knowledge sharing throughout the enterprise. There will also be a growing trend toward adopting a top-down approach to using social media in organizations by building a social media/learning strategy and implementing a platform that integrates a number of social media tools for enterprise use.

Jay Cross: Wrenching changes in business and society accompanying the global transition from the industrial age to the network economy will kill off much of the training and education programs as we have known it. In its place will arise a more natural approach to learning through collaboration and sharing. There are great times ahead, an era of fulfilling, bounteous learning unprecedented in human history. However, the journey to this promised land will be brutal and unforgiving for people and organizations who resist change and lobby for “back to the basics.”

Clark Quinn: The extraordinary: Semantics will arise; we’ll start realizing the power of consistent tagging, and start being able to meta-process content to do smart things on our behalf. And we’ll start seeing cloud-hosting as a new vehicle for learning services.

You can find my predictions in with the rest as well.

PodCamp Halifax 2009

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PodCampHalifax2009 seems like a great mid-Winter activity. Time to get away from my computer screen and meet some folks. This year’s event is at the Aldernay Gate Public Library on 25 January, from 9 to 5.

This is an unconference, focused on social media (blogs, wikis, podcasts, video, etc). The goal is to have an open, participatory, user-generated series of workshops and the people who attend are the presenters.

There are several folks from New Brunswick listed to attend, so sign up and come on out. If you plan on staying overnight, you may want to put yourself up for adoption. I’m sure that we can organise some kind of car-pooling as well.

Make commenting easy

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Blogs have 3 primary characteristics that make them different from other media. 1) Blogs have a permanent resource identifier that does not change over time, 2) Blogs publish an RSS/Atom feed to notify services of updates, and (most importantly) 3) Blogs allow comments. What differentiates blogs from other published information is that there is a feedback loop.

I should note that there are now third-party services that let you comment on articles and blog posts without using the blog’s comment function. For example, Facebook allows comments via their platform.

For bloggers, comments add depth and insight to what would otherwise be a monologue. I think that it’s very important to make it as easy as possible for people to comment on your blog. However, too many services do just the opposite and I have passed on writing a comment many times when confronted by multiple-step comment forms. Captchas are one example.

I’ve made it as easy as possible to make a comment on this site and I get very little comment spam. First of all I use WordPress, designed specifically for blogging. The first line of defence is Bad Behavior, an easy plug-in for WP.

If this does not catch the bad guys, Akismet is the next line of defence. Akismet is another simple plug-in that will hold identified spam for 30 days or until you check it. It learns from the entire community of users, so it’s pretty darn good.

I also have my comment controls set so that first time visitors must be approved by me. I even allow pseudonyms and fake e-mails if the comment is relevant. Once approved, you are free to post at will, or until I revoke your privileges, which I have never done. This works very well and lets the conversation flow, even when I’m not online.

So if you’re wondering why you don’t get many comments, perhaps you’re just making it too difficult.

Volume, Velocity, Virtualization & Variability

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There are four V’s that should be kept in focus as Enterprise 2.0 becomes more of a reality in 2009, according to Mike Gotta:

  1. the volume of information is growing exponentially,
  2. the velocity of business is increasing,
  3. the virtualization of the workplace continues
  4. the variability of roles an employee may be expected to take on will become more diverse

What I like about Gotta’s post is that many of his comments are based on observations of real clients and workplaces. There is a lot to consider and I’m glad that Jon Husband pointed out this blog to me.

To address the increasing volume of information, processes such as Personal Knowledge Management become more necessary (note to self: time to update PKM diagrams).

The increasing velocity means accepting life in Beta, without becoming shallow thinkers and doers.

Virtualization of the workplace means that we had better figure out how best to work and learn collaboratively online. This of course, has been the focus of my work for the past decade. The key is making it work within individual and organisational contexts and accepting that there is more than one way to do anything.

Finally, variability of jobs may spell the end of job descriptions and a move toward multiple workplace roles, depending on context; a much less machinistic model, but one that still needs a lot of work in creating tools to help manage looser networks.

People, Events and Ideas

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“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

I don’t completely agree with this statement but it puts into perspective where our greatest effort should be. The discussion of ideas and finding ways to take action on those ideas is the great work that has fallen on the laps (laptops?) of the billions of people who now make up the “middle class”, a term with its own baggage, according to John Robb:

It’s hard to imagine a more derogatory and less descriptive label than “middle class consumers” for the group of people that created most of the world’s massive wealth, rich technologies, and societal complexity.

The comments to John’s post have some name suggestions for the group of people who have the education and the communications tools to change society. Social media provide a way for this new “Yeoman” class to act individually and collectively for change and self-determination. An example in my network is Rob Paterson with his work in mobilizing communities on PEI and in public broadcasting. There are many other free thinkers working at the local level with a mind to the global situation. Using Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote, I think that events and people are important in helping us come up with new ideas but they are merely grist for our cognitive mills.

The ideas of others, events that we watch or are involved with, and the people we meet and interact with; all provide the context for our own ideas. I believe that Ms. Roosevelt’s point was that we cannot narrow our focus to only people and events and that the true work for our minds is to develop our own ideas. Social media give us the opportunity to put forth ideas in progress and to evaluate and challenge ideas. Now that we finally have these tools, it is our duty as global citizens to use them wisely.

The feeds at the top of this diagram are mostly inputs, with varying levels of interactivity. At the bottom are outputs of knowledge work. This diagram is an evolution of my web tools for critical thinking post.

New year, new challenges

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I’m not sure what the next year will bring but I’m certain that it will be as full of changes as 2008. Change is accelerating. Blogging, which wasn’t even in the dictionary when I started this one, is getting competitive:

With all of this new competition, the future could be very interesting:

Happy New Year!

Innovation and Learning

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In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthony’s third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

New organisational DNA

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I’m going to take some time off work and writing over the holidays, with perhaps a post if the mood strikes me. What really interests me at this time is how The Great Disruption may be opening up possibilities for change that did not exist even six months ago. I have come to the realisation that for training, education, learning and development initiatives to work we need real organisational change, meaning a change in the way we create and run our organisations. I have some opportunities to write on the subject as well as ideas that may develop into projects. These may be difficult times but they can also be exciting times.

Jon Husband sums up the real work to be done in developing the post-industrial workplace:

If I am not mistaken, the issue of centralised control remains one of the core issues in play … when it comes to considering whether and how to engage with or commit to a path towards Enterprise 2.0 architecture, applications and dynamics.

How can we have effective businesses without centralized control? Wirearchy is one potential framework but we need to seriously discuss this because our environment is far too complex for mechanistic models. Instead of tweaking the existing ineffective organisational models that many labour under I want to focus on the root causes of our challenges. Workers feel disconnected and disempowered especially when layoffs are the first corporate reaction in any economic downturn. We need more resilient organisations that can in turn foster a more resilient economy. There is much inspiration from the natural sciences:

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed – Charles Darwin