Five plus Three Random Facts

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I’ve been tagged for the 8 Random Facts About Me meme by Michele Martin and Karyn Romeis. It comes with a set of rules and you’re supposed to pass it on.

Well, one random fact about me is that I don’t like to follow instructions. Interesting for someone who spent 23 years in the Army. For instance, when I wrote my military French language aptitude test in 1978, we were supposed to read a list of Kurdish words and commit them to memory. We were then asked to write down as many as possible. I thought the whole thing was absurd so I didn’t read the list and then failed the short-term memory test. I was placed at the lowest ability level and spent my Summer of language training in what we called, “Sandbox French”. But I did finish the Summer fluent in French, with a lot of help from a belle petite Québecoise.

A second fact is that I’ve been in the training  field ever since I was 14, when as an Army Cadet I learned Methods of Instruction and I still remember the picture showing the “sea of wasted effort” if you didn’t follow all the instructional steps. I don’t follow those rules any more.

Thirdly, I love sports that have few rules. I used to run every distance from the mile (4:21) to the marathon (2:38), but my knees won’t take it any more. I now enjoy nordic skiing and road cycling, and both have simple rules — keep going forward.

You might think that  I should add five more facts, but I already posted to the Five Things Meme as well as the Five Goals Meme, so I think that I’m up by five ;-)

Remaining true to not following instructions, I won’t tag anyone else.  Happy Friday.

Canadian mobile data rates stifle Can-Con

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Canadians pay way too much for mobile data (e.g. blogging from your cell phone) and this has been noted by Michael Geist in Uncompetitive Canada:

In fact, Canada not only trails the U.S. and Western Europe, but Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, Asian countries such as Malaysia, and African countries such as Rwanda all offer unlimited monthly data plans for less than $50.

Canadian mobile phone rates are between 3 and 20 times more expensive than those on the USA or UK. We can thank our telecom oligopoly for that. But it’s not just expensive rates that are stifling the Canadian economy. We may be strangling Canadian content as well, as Julien notes:

As a content-creating Canadian with an N95 smartphone, I produce value for my country by creating content, increasing Canada’s profile in the web/mobile space. By allowing data packages to remain at this price, they are letting Americans take control of the space instead.

It’s time for our regulatory dinosaurs to wake up before it’s too late for us to compete in the Internet age.

Fragmenting the PLE

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Jay Cross raises an interesting point about Personal Learning Environments (PLE), in that they eliminate the need to build your own way of engaging people and information on the Web. I haven’t followed PLE development in much detail but it seems to be a hot topic in public education and higher learning establishments. I’ve explained my own Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system, which keeps evolving over time. The concept of PKM on the Web is of some general interest, as it’s a favourite search term for visitors here.

For the past decade the learning management system (LMS) has been the required system for distributed teaching and training and it appears that the PLE is the next wave of LMS. But perhaps the one size fits everyone approach is the wrong way to support personal learning. Instead of trying to create THE BEST PLE for your organisation, it may be better to support individuals in weaving together their unique PLE, with small (learning) pieces, loosely joined.

It’s a different approach and won’t help you to become the local PLE system specialist with your own corner office, but it may actually improve lifelong learning.

For further reading: There is a similar conversation on Mike Caulfield’s blog about loosely coupled assessment.

Are you open for business?

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OpenBusiness is a website dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship based on open principles and is not just about open source software. These folks have developed an Open Business Guide, in the form of a wiki, to discuss the specifics of operating an open business:

Open Source [software] was the first sector in which peer-based production led to quality products. However, innovative business models have started to appear in other economic sectors experimenting with open approaches. Now there are online record labels using Creative Commons licenses, Open Source film projects, peer funded music labels, p2p finance services and the list of innovations regarding information management in the widest sense almost endless.

The wiki gives a lot of practical advice on how to profit by being more open. It is in many ways a simpler and synthesiszed version of Yochai Benkler’s work, The Wealth of Networks, which I would recommend as THE major reference on the digital networked economy.

On a related note, Matt Asay reports the COO of Fotango quitting when he found out that his company was abandoning its open source business model; stating, “Open source is not a tactic. It is not a strategy. It is the only practical way of competing in this marketplace.”

Closed companies are still making money, and profits, in much the same way that buggy makers continued to sell their products after the internal combustion engine was produced – for now.

carriage-factory-museum.jpg

The old, closed model is doomed and openness is something that every company and non-profit organisation had better understand – soon.

Top ten tools

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My top ten tools for work and learning have been added to Jane Hart’s Favourite Tool Index. There are lots of recommendations here, and Jane will be compiling a Top 100 list.

Many of the tools that I’ve noted are open source, which in most cases means free as well. Source Forge, home of open source software, has just launched the Community Choice Awards, so check out which applications and utilities have been nominated.

Community of Practice Case Study

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I’m working on a community of practice for green building technologies and am discussing business community networks here in the Maritimes. I thought it would be a good time to review some lessons from the first online community I was responsible for.

The first online community of practice for which I was responsible was a project to enhance collaboration of members of the learning industry here in New Brunwsick, Canada (LearnNB).

The initial focus of this CoP was research and development, especially business models and commercialization. It was not intended to be a theoretical or academic community, but one looking at the development of practical applications- be they products, services, standards or models. Membership was open to anyone.

The major events during the course of this project (2003):

  1. Establishment of an initial blog
  2. Report on best practices in the establishment of a community of practice
  3. Interview protocol and initial interviews in New Brunswick, PEI and Nova Scotia
  4. Evaluation of technology platforms for the web presence of the community
  5. Discussions/conversations/interviews with interested members
  6. Establishment of two web-based systems for discussions, one private and one public
  7. Continuing discussions in person, via e-mail and through blogs with interested parties
  8. Fine-tuning of technology platforms

Here are some highlights from the Case Study:

Conclusions

  • A sense of community cannot be forced;
  • Communities are self-defined;
  • Communities are conversations; and
  • Communities evolve over time.
  • Face-to-face contact can be the impetus for online conversations, while
    • online contact can be the impetus for face-to-face meetings.
    • Communities of individuals appear to have stronger bonds than communities of companies;
    • blogging helps to define dispersed communities; and
    • password-protected web sites do not encourage conversation.

Recommendations

It was recommended that if there are future efforts in this area, then we should:

  • Keep the online community spaces for special projects and events.
  • Advertise the community space for others to test out blogging.
  • Encourage more community members to use blogs as a community building tool.

I felt that any efforts to foster community should be addressed at the grass roots level. Centralized command and control does not work well in this inter-networked world. Regional initiatives or very local initiatives seem to stand the greatest chance of success. Provincial [state] boundaries are blurry, and not part of many people’s sense of community.

Finally, the online community space never became an active place for discussion, conversation or sharing of ideas and knowledge. I keep plodding away with this blog, and Stephen Downes is also a local voice with a larger worldwide audience. Other Maritime bloggers who discuss learning & technology include Robert Paterson and Dave Cormier, both on Prince Edward Island. A more recent blogger is Charlene Croft in Nova Scotia, with some excellent insights.

The real me

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It seems that this is the real me; that is, if you think that five questions can determine your essence:


You’re Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don’t know what to believe, but you’re willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you’ve spent some time in every camp. But you still don’t have any idea what camp you belong in. This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It’s time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in fairies.

Take the Book Quiz  at the Blue Pyramid.

Design for collaboration

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David Sean Lester is focused on collaboration and makes some interesting points on what to consider when designing for collaborative learning. David’s premise is that collaborative learning happens best in a middlespace and then he provides a comparative list of design considerations to support collaborative versus individual learning, for example:

  • practice vs theory
  • learning environment vs learning requirement
  • distributed leadership vs designated leadership
  • role seeking vs goal seeking

This is a good list for any instructional designer who is looking at incorporating collaboration into the design of a program, not just adding a few collaborative activities.

I should note that David and I had corresponded several years ago but lost touch. Thanks to Facebook we reconnected and I came across his new website.

From Troops to Teachers

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An article in The Pulse [offline] shatters some stereotypes about the military and those who serve. The author teaches at a university where military personnel are enrolled in education programs to become teachers. In speaking with these soldiers, Etta Kralovec finds out that the military culture can be much more inclusive than academia, “My experiences with these students has changed fundamentally my views about the military and who serves in it and what these folks can offer to students in our public schools.”

I learned early as a military instructor that everyone is teachable. Our training organisations worked on the premise that if a trainee failed, it was probably the fault of the instructor. This put the pressure on the instructors to find the best way to help soldiers to perform while the the trainees learned to work together. Kralovec observed that military students were more focused on supporting learning:

These students understand the notion of community in a very personal way. As soldiers, they learned to watch each others’ backs as well as work as a team member. These will not be teachers who close their doors and don’t share their websites. They are comfortable working in groups, bringing along everyone in their group as they complete projects. Unlike most other students, TTT [troops to teachers] students never say, “I don’t want to work in a group on this project.” They pitch in, divide up the tasks and get to it. Rather than try to negotiate an assignment, these folks just do it.

Sometimes we can learn from the most unexpected sources.

Online mind mapping

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Mindmeister is an online mind mapping application, similar to tools like Gliffy (diagramming) which offer a single type of application for free or a with a paid premium service. Like many Web 2.0 services, it’s easy to learn and gives you many export and sharing options. I created this map in a few minutes and exported it as a *.jpg.

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It won’t be long before most of our applications migrate off the desk top to the web. Here you can see several of the web applications I use to manage my online work. What I really like about these tools is that they are exceptionally easy to learn and they have collaboration built in. Oh, the fact that most are free sure lowers the barrier to trying them out :-)