Work opportunities in the learning field

by

When one door closes, many others open.

I never knew that there were so many work opportunities for instructional designers and others until Vitesse/Provinent closed its doors in Fredericton. The former employees quickly put up a wiki and started sharing information to support each other in this stressful time of job loss and uncertainty.

Paul Lyon’s wiki includes a job opportunities page that has dozens of postings in several professional areas. It’s great to see this entrepreneurial spirit and online collaboration amongst the former Vitesse gang. It also shows how the DIY Web is empowering the grassroots in all fields.

Learn About Value Networks

by

Fatsia

Photo by Crissxross

As previously announced (follow link for details), there will be a free workshop on Value Networks, on Tuesday, March 20th in Saint John.

The morning session (coffee at 8:30 AM, start at 9:00 AM) is a general overview and open to anyone. The afternoon session is a hands-on workshop focused on small and medium-sized businessses in the ICT sector. Come out and learn something practical to improve your business. In itself, this will be an opportunity to meet some interesting people in an intimate and comfortable environment.

Further reading:

What Is Value Network Analysis Verna Allee (PDF)

KM and the Social Network Patti Anklam (PDF)

Linux for schools

by

Novell is apparently becoming the leader in Linux installations for the education market:

Do these numbers make sense to you – $2,500 versus $100,000? This is the price difference felt between migrating over to Linux or instead, upgrading to the next version of Windows. What’s interesting is that I’m noticing that more often than not Novell is the company making this possible for schools.

I’ve recommended open source for our schools before, and even sent a letter to the Ministers of Finance and Education at the time, but to no avail. These cost savings are significant, but what is more important is that our education community can now own the primary means of production (operating system & applications) of knowledge artifacts, and not some multinational corporation. Students would be able to freely mirror their school computers and even play with new programs. Instead of just being consumers and users of software, students can become co-creators of software and the underlying knowledge.

With corporations like Novell behind Linux, it is difficult for education IT departments to continue to play the FUD [fear, uncertainty, doubt] card against open source. However, as Matt Asay reminds us, MS is not out of the game yet, “Importantly, the price comparison above may not be representative of reality, as Microsoft will likely discount to zero to keep a strong foothold in the Education market. ”

The bottom line though, is that open source in our government-funded institutions is one way to develop a sustainable Province, something that our Self-Sufficiency Task Force should know.

Intangibles

by

Jay Cross just created a short video discussing the importance of intangible assets. When examining value networks, which we will discussing in our free Value Networks Workshop on March 20th, one looks at tangible and intangible types of value, the latter described by Verna Allee as:

Intangible knowledge exchanges include strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design, policy development, etc., which flow around and support the core product and service value chain.

Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be offered from one person to another. Examples might be offering to provide political support to someone. Or a research organization might ask someone to volunteer their time and expertise to a project in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. These are intangible “products” that can be exchanged, as indeed people can and do “trade favors” to build relationships.

The relationship between intangibles and tangibles reminds me of the informal/formal learning continuum. In each case, it seems that the formal/tangible component is easier to measure, so that is where our industrial management methods have concentrated their efforts. As our organisations become inter-networked, and relationships create more of our value, we realise that we have to pay attention to the silent majority that is intangible/informal.

For further reading on value networks, check out Patti Anklam’s blog at Networks, Complexity and Relatedness.

Building Resilience – The Upside of Down

by

I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.

However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.

Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.

Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.

Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:

When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.

The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.

Everything is Political

by

This blog is not supposed to be about politics; well at least I didn’t set out to discuss politics three years ago. However, Jon Husband recently quoted Dante Alighieri, who said that, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Then along comes Jon (again) referring to a piece by Joe Bageant that ends with this line – “Divisive politics once again beats the snot out of reason.”

All of this reminds me of my current read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s, The Upside of Down. From the Chapter “Cycles Within Cycles”:

For the vast majority of us who sell our labor in the marketplace, our economic insecurity and relative powerlessness impel us to play by the rules. And in capitalist democracy, playing by the rules means not starting fights over big issues like our society’s highly skewed distribution of wealth and power. Instead it means focusing on achieving short-term material gains – such as bettering our contracts with our employers. Put simply, our economic elites have learned, largely through their struggles with workers in the first half of the twentieth century, to protect their status by creating a system of incentives, and a dynamic of economic growth, that diverts political conflict into manageable, largely non-political channels. As long as the system delivers the goods – defined by capitalist democracy itself as a rising material standard of living and enough new jobs to absorb displaced labor – no one is really motivated to challenge its foundations.

I’ve previously written about Corporatism Run Amok, but I may take more forays into the political realm, particularly as politics continues to affect my own intersection of interest – learning (state-run education), work (support of corporations) & technology (digital copyright & IP) .

Green Domain Hosting

by

For Canadians, I have found two ways of becoming a “greener” presence on the Web. One is to use Green Hosting, where everything is powered by renewable energy:

All the electricity required by the server and ancillary operations (101% of demand) is generated by wind turbines in Alberta, and is distributed through the Greenmax© program of the Calgary utility ENMAX. Both generation and distribution are certified under Canada’s national EcoLogo© program to ensure that this service contributes directly to the reduction of GHG emissions and supports new renewables facilities.

Another possibility is to use Ethical Hosting’s service, which uses offsets, or green tags:

Obviously we can’t just throw up a Wind turbine outside our office and it would be very expensive to do so (but would be very cool if we could!) This is where green energy certificates or Green Tags come into play. After auditing our energy usage, we were able to calculate the electricity usage of our office and computers. We are then able to purchase the necessary amount of Green Tags through a nationally recognized provider: The Pembina Institute.

Definitely a couple of considerations if you’re looking for a new host or considering changing your current host.

Team Sports and Ethics

by

When we mention that we will be home-schooling, many people say that our children will miss important socialisation activities, especially team sports. Personally, I was never interested in most popular team sports and neither was my wife, so our family doesn’t have a history of playing hockey, basketball, football, baseball and other team sports.

This report released by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which surveyed 5,275 high-school students across the USA, shows some interesting findings regarding ethics and team sports, such as:

Some Sports Are Worse Than Others. Boys engaged in baseball, football and basketball are considerably more likely to cheat on the field and in school and to engage in conduct involving deliberate injury, intimidation and conscious rule-breaking than boys involved in other sports. Generally, boys participating in swimming, track, cross country, gymnastics and tennis were markedly less likely to cheat or to engage in bad sportsmanship than their male counterparts in other sports. Girls involved in basketball and softball were more likely to engage in illegal or unsportsmanlike conduct than girls involved in other sports.

They also found that “Many Coaches Teach Negative Lessons”, specifically – Illegal holding; Using the other team’s playbook; Faking an injury; llegally altering a hockey stick; Illegal start; Wrong player shooting free throws; Altering the field of play; Soaking the field to slow down the other team.; Throwing at a batter; Mistake in score; Trash talk; Showboating; Motivation through insult; Swearing at official to motivate team; and Holding back an athlete in school.

ethics.jpg

Like anything else, we have to be careful about generalising, but these data show that we shouldn’t take for granted that all team sports teach good socialisation skills.

Energy Efficiency Information Session in Sackville

by

Passing on this information I received via e-mail.

EOS Eco-Energy and Efficiency NB are hosting an Energy Efficiency Information Session on 16 March 2007 at 7:00 PM. It will be held at the Sackville Civic Centre and admission is free. The presentation will cover existing homes, new homes and multi-unit residential buildings. To learn more about existing New Brunswick energy programs, go to the Efficiency NB site.

Open Source is (still) best for customers

by

I’ve been an advocate of open source software for quite some time now. Part of the reason for this advocacy was my experience selling a proprietary learning management system. I saw how customers could become hand-cuffed to a technology once they had put a critical amount of data into the system and could no longer get it out. This wasn’t just our company but everyone in the business.

Matt Asay, in a case study from University of Nebraska (that’s an academic client folks), once again shows why open source is better for the customer in the long run:

You buy into a Microsoft (or Oracle, or ….) ecosystem, and they provide all the tools to get you in deeper, and to keep you there. There are good reasons for Microsoft to do this, reasons which have nothing to do with pernicious business practices. One reason is that Microsoft can better control the total user experience if it controls all the interlocking pieces, just as Apple does on its computers.But therein lies both the promise and peril of a vendor-dominated ecosystem. It’s hard to get out once you get in.

Here are some of my past discussions on open source for learning:

How open source has a much lower total cost of ownership.

A Canadian case study on open source in education.

Open source is recommended by impartial research organisations.