Usability – KISS

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I’ve been enjoying CBC Radio’s Spark program that looks at technology and culture. The host, Nora Young, is knowledgeable and runs a great show. I pick it up on air from time to time and have downloaded a podcast or two.

As I was listening today, I heard that there was a wiki for sharing information and ideas so I thought I’d give it a try. The site is built on SocialText, which is an enterprise class system, probably good to be able to scale up as needed. I registered and added my two cents worth on one of the wiki pages. I found the interface confusing and got frustrated a couple of times when menus would pop up that made no sense to me. Now, I’m a fair bit of a web geek and am usually comfortable poking around these systems. I wonder what the more mainstream Web surfers do when they try to add comments here?

If you want people to really get involved in the conversation, you have to make it dirt-simple to do so. That’s one reason I don’t have captchas or membership requirements on this blog. I really like getting comments and feedback, so I keep it simple.

Update: Here’s the wiki I was commenting on. Craig Hubley’s comments after mine are worth reading.

A Pictoral Commons

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Flickr has initiated The Commons, initially in collaboration with the US Library of Congress.

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

Perhaps this idea will be embraced by Canadian cultural and archival agencies in order to share our common visual history, instead of letting these pictures gather dust.

The notion of putting these artifacts online for sharing may be an idea that’s ready for take off …

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… or in other words, we should cooperate for the common good:

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I would recommend that teachers covering US history in the periods of the 1910’s or 1930-49 [the two sets currently available], should get their students to check out these photos and contribute some tags to show that the community finds them useful.

Update: Stephen has picked this up and linked to some other comments on this initiative. The fact that these photos are on Flickr is important because it links them to a community that understands tagging and probably includes many people who would not normally visit the LoC site. Flickr may be a proprietary system but the photos are accessible to all.

Aggregating Bookmarks

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I’ve used various social bookmarking tools, such as Furl and Magnolia, but have settled on delicious for a while. If you use many bookmarking applications, as well as rating tools like Digg, you might be interested in SocialMarker, which lets you save a page for filing on several systems at once.

SocialMarker lists 31 tools, several which I’ve never heard of, and a new bookmarking service, Mister-Wong, which is targeted at the education field.

Fair Copyright for Canada

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Have you joined yet?

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From the Facebook group description:

In December 2007, it became apparent that the Canadian government was about to introduce new copyright legislation that would have been a complete sell-out to U.S. government and lobbyist demands. The new Canadian legislation was to have mirrored the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act with strong anti-circumvention legislation that goes far beyond what is needed to comply with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties … Instead, the government was about to choose locks over learning, property over privacy, enforcement over education, (law)suits over security, lobbyists over librarians, and U.S. policy over a “Canadian-made” solution.

 Update: Now is the time to put pressure on your Member of Parliament. Check out Michael Geist’s list of Copyright MP’s.

Site Stats

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Tony has asked several fellow bloggers to share their site stats. Obviously I use a different stats package than Tony does [actually, I use several, which all give different data]. Anyway, for what it’s worth and in the interest of finding some patterns in this mess, here are some screen shots of my raw stats. The first image shows this site since it started in April 2003 (the blog went live in late Feb 2004):

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Much of my traffic comes from referrals (61%); less from search engines (19%). Some popular search terms (2007) that bring people here are – learning; open source lms; moodle scorm 2004; benefits of blogs; training vs education.

Here are where most of my visitors come from:

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How clear is your business case?

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Stock markets are shaky and a financial crisis seems inevitable. What does that mean for e-learning or learning 2.0? Will the training department be seen as a critical business function and will online collaboration skills be viewed as essential for maintaining a flexible learning organisation? Or will training and education be seen as luxuries in a time of belt-tightening, layoffs and uncertain markets?

I think that it will be difficult for training and education to be heard above the clamour for scarce resources and investments. Much of the e-learning market is still courses online and it’s hard to give a direct measure of value per course in times when each dollar is counted. Just think, what are the perceived business costs if a course is canceled or put on hold? Learning-related initiatives will need to have clear long and short-term value so that executives will not be able to ignore them. Whether you’re a vendor or inside an organisation, are you ready?

On the other hand, creating performance support tools can be a much more obvious business case. If you’re not in the performance improvement field, you may have to be soon.

The e-lance economy?

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In 1937, economist Ronald Coase published an article, The Nature of the Firm, in the journal Economica. Within the article, Coase argues that firms exist because there are costs inherent to free markets – such as costs of communication, of sharing information, of trying to find goods and services. Given these costs, Coase suggests that firms are formed because it is more efficient and less expensive to complete many of these tasks internally within a formal organization rather than outsourcing them to the market and thus incurring these added costs.

Alex Slawsby on the Innosight Blog looks at the nature of the corporation and how advances in information and communications technologies may be enabling a more modular approach to work, especially networked free-lancers, or e-lancers.

… the ‘e-lance economy’ may represent a modular stage of organizational evolution – indeed, an architecture of easily swappable or plug-and-play components (e.g. individuals or resources). In an age where closed, proprietary systems are recognized as inhibiting the ability of organizations to respond to or even identify innovation-borne change, modularity seems a promising answer; virtually every element of the value chain could come together on an ad-hoc, objective, modular basis without being hamstrung by the subjectivity and myopias brought on by business process and the long-term commitments to physical infrastructure, a capital investment in which innovation may quickly make irrelevant.

An example of this economy would be open source software development, with its lack of organisational structure and the ability for anyone with the right skills to plug in or out of the project, yet maintain the integrity of the code. A key question though is whether e-lancing will become the dominant economic model, as the corporation is, or only suitable for certain industries, such as the film industry’s project-based work model. If e-lancing is more effective in most industries and becomes our dominant work model, then organisations will have to rethink everything from HR to supply chain management.

TrainShift

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According to Nine Shift, one of the nine predictions for shifts that will occur during the first decades of this century involves our preferred mode of transportation.

Chapter 9. Trains Replace Cars: Shift Four
Time becomes more valuable. Since one cannot work and drive at the same time, knowledge workers migrate to trains where they can work and travel at the same time.

This past week I took VIA Rail’s The Ocean from practically my doorstep to within one block of my hotel in Montreal.  There are not many options for train travel, but this time it worked well with my schedule. I left Sackville at 4:00 PM, reviewed my notes and presentation for the next day, had a relaxing dinner and had a good night’s sleep. In the morning I arrived outside of Montreal and was able to have a shower, eat breakfast and arrive downtown at 8:15 AM, ready for a day’s work. I left on Friday evening, again had a pleasant supper and a full night’s sleep. Saturday morning was a time to review some work, catch up on a couple of Google videos that I had downloaded, and arrive home just after noon.

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My usual business trip to Montreal would have meant getting up at 4:00 AM, driving 50 KM to the airport, paying for parking, going through security, squeezing on board a small aircraft, and arriving on the west end of the island of Montreal to then take a taxi or airport shuttle downtown. The return trip would have been the reverse, with an arrival around midnight and then a drive home, perhaps in a snowstorm.

On the train you can get work done. Billable work in my case.  The airfare was the same price as the train, and I had two night’s accommodations included with the train. I also had a heck of a lot more room. The only thing missing was Internet access, though wi-fi is available in the central corridor between Quebec, Windsor and Ottawa.

For trips between 100 and 1,200 KM, the train makes a lot of sense. Now we just need more trains on the schedule.

Going to get me some learnin’

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Coining the term eLearning was the beginning of a problem that is the root of the issue in Tony’s post, where he looks for better terms to describe different interventions, suggesting ePerformance.

And the answer is that there is not a well known term to describe kinds of eLearning solutions that are not typical courseware. I talked about definitions of eLearning a while ago and the basic conclusion I came to is that when you say the term, while it could mean a wide variety of possible solutions – most people think of formal training delivered electronically (virtual classroom, courseware).

The term elearning has been co-opted, especially by software vendors, to only mean courses online, when it could mean much more. However, if one wants to really question our terms and definitions, there is an inherent flaw in using the word “learning” anyway. More accurate descriptors of our various endeavours would be instruction, training, education or performance improvement. I don’t see any great value in creating new terms for interventions that don’t help with our understanding.

For education and training via the Internet we have courses online, and can further describe these as synchronous, asynchronous, instructor-led, facilitated, collaborative, etc.

Barry Raybould’s 1991 definition of performance support as “a computer-based system that improves worker productivity by providing on-the-job access to integrated information, advice, and learning experiences“, only needs to be updated to include network-based systems.

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I’ve used the above diagram before to show how I describe the difference between instructional and non-instructional interventions, with the course being a prime example of an instructional intervention while an information job aid is a good example of a non-instructional intervention. Allison Rossett, in Job Aids and Performance Support, provides this definition:

A helper in life and work, performance support is a repository for information, processes, and perspectives that inform and guide planning and action.

Rossett’s definition could easily describe communities of practice or personal knowledge management as performance support. I believe that the main reason behind any confusion in our terms is because we used learning and elearning to describe what is really instruction. There is a clear difference between instruction (whether it be in the form of training or education) and performance support. We don’t really need a new term, we need to get rid of the old one – learning – which is an internal process and cannot be something that is done to us externally. And yes, I am also guilty of using the term learning inappropriately.