Inukshuk Call for Proposals 2007

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Once again, Inukshuk Wireless is calling for proposals for its learning plan, part of its licensing agreement with Industry Canada. Project proposals, by province, can be submitted in two categories:

EITHER

An innovative and creative project to develop multimedia and feature rich learning content, applications or learning environments for Canada’s learning communities;

OR

A Connectivity Project which results in the provision of wireless broadband internet access to un-served or underserved communities in the region. The goal of the connectivity projects is to bring wireless broadband connectivity to both public and private sector customers, including learning organizations.

The deadline for submissions is 8 March 2007 and details are available on the Inukshuk website. Funding available is different for each province. For example, New Brunswick’s envelope this year is $59,883 while Nova Scotia’s is $75,685.

Recommended reads on informal learning

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There are about 15 people signed up for the Ottawa informal learning workshop. This post is for anyone who is keen and wants to get in some early reading. Of course it’s not required, but these could spark some ideas for interesting conversations.

Jay Cross has just posted Internet Culture & the Evolution of Learning. This is a great read if you’re interested in the big picture of why this stuff may be important. Jay’s article is more comprehensive than my previous post on the forces of change.

Here’s a short post, by Tom Haskins called, I found it inside my blog reader, that gives you an idea of how some people in the educational technology field are connecting and learning informally – without any direction ;-)

If you’re looking for something concrete, here’s a post on How a restaurant uses stories to keep staff motivated.

An aggregated listing of various Definitions of Informal learning by Mohamed Amine Chatti.

If you want to dig deeper into social networking, then Dave Pollard’s Whirlwind tour of social networking for business covers a lot of the available tools.

SoulSoup on Why companies try to avoid informal learning, knowledge sharing and even innovation in the workplace.

Finally, I would recommend watching an interview (33 minutes) with Robert Paterson, done by Iowa Public TV in 2006, in which Rob explains the power of blogging.

… or just have a laugh:

Managing Time Management

Forces of change

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I’m conducting a workshop on informal learning on Tuesday, January 30th. In preparation for the workshop and hopefully to foster some early conversations, I’ll be posting my thoughts on informal learning here for the next week.

My initial reaction, when asked to present a full day workshop on informal learning, was to ensure that what I was going to talk about was not just a bunch of hype on the latest Web 2.0 tools that are being tested by the early adopters in the educational technology field. I didn’t want to be selling a new brand of silicon snake oil, so I tried to look at what forces are actually changing the way we work and learn.

First of all, the ubiquitous connectivity that over a billion people now have has had a significant impact. Search (or Google as a verb) is an integral part of most of our lives. Today, we can publish something online as soon as we feel like it – whether in the form of blogs, wikis, social spaces like MySpace or FaceBook, as well as pictures or videos. We can find almost anything online and we can share our digital creations with the world. We can also connect with individuals.

The main force of the Web is that you don’t need anyone else (postman, broadcaster, photo developer, social convener) to help you reach out to the world and find others who may be interested in the same thing you are. Until recently, we needed an organisation (company, union, association, school) to help us connect with others. Now we can pretty well do it on our own.

One of the main forces of change that will affect how we learn is the weakening of the industrial command & control organisation. We don’t need a third party to mediate our learning because we can find interesting stuff and interesting people (interesting to us, at least) on the Web. I see those workers, who one could call the “Cluetrained’, as already dropping out of the bottom of the industrial organisation’s pyramid and doing it on their own. “It” meaning working, learning, creating and collaborating.

We’re seeing signs of this weakening of the industrial hierarchical model (see Wirearchy for more details), with workers dropping out of the “Corporation” and becoming free agents. Will this trend continue? I don’t know; but it sure appears that a job for life is a thing of the past and learning how learn for yourself, or at least with your own online network, might not be a bad skill-set. Unfortunately, many of us have come through school and training programs where we’ve been told what the learning objectives are and that we will be tested at the end of the course. On completion, we get a certificate to hang on the wall to simulate some kind of actual competence.

The figure below is my first attempt to synthesize these thoughts into a graphic. I’m not an artist, but I’m learning informally ;-)

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In a less structured and networked world, we all will need to learn in unstructured and networked ways. More to follow …

Where would we be without school drop outs?

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Nine Shift (required reading in my opinion) explains in “Schools depend on drop outs”, that the education monopoly is not primarily responsible for innovation in our society. Bill and Julie show how young men (yes, it’s usually boys who quit) who drop out of school are often the ones who go on to achieve great things. Notable drop outs:

Bill Gates – Microsoft
Steve Jobs – Apple
Michael Dell – Dell
Larry Ellison – Oracle
Mike Lazaridis – Blackberry
Shawn Fanning – Napster

What technologies would schools use without these guys?

How Computer Games Help Children Learn – Review

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Will Richardson commented on my recent post where I referred to the book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

The thing I find so much more effective about the network learning I do is that it’s asynchronous and done on my time. And yet IM and Skype and others make synchronous discussion imminently possible when needed or necessary. And all of that is what to me at least poses such a challenge to the traditional work of classrooms where we are all expected to learn the same things at the same time.

This is an excellent book for anyone interested in learning and education, but the title is a bit misleading. It’s more about the theory and practice of authentic learning experiences than specific computer games. Many of games mentioned in the book, like the debating game, are not computer-based, but could be computer enhanced. David Williamson Shaffer’s book is really about epistemic games, or “games that are fundamentally about learning to think in innovative ways”.

He begins by showing the fundamental weaknesses of our Industrial School System, itself a game:

Not surprisingly, the epistemology of School is the epistemology of the Industrial Revolution – of creating wealth through mass production of standardized goods. School is a game about thinking like a factory worker. It is a game with an epistemology of right and wrong answers in which Students are supposed to follow instructions, whether they make sense in the moment or not. Truth is whatever the teacher says is the right answer, and actions are justified based on appeal to authority. School is a game in which what it means to know something is to be able to answer specific kinds of questions on specific kinds of tests.

Shaffer shows the need for teaching how to think and how to be creative, instead of how to memorize, and lays the argument for the use of games in learning. Most of his examples are outside of the classroom because it is obvious that these kinds of epistemic games would disrupt classes and the curriculum. The games that are discussed are called monument games, or exemplars of good practice. None of the games is available “out of the box” but the ideas and concepts are critical for anyone who wants to use games in learning, not just playing bingo and using words or figures out of context. The latter does not help learning.

The use of epistemic games is an approach that resembles cognitive apprenticeship. As our society moves from a linear print-based medium of knowledge creation to a networked and computer-assisted medium, we need new, post-industrial learning models:

As the late Jim Kaput and I have argued, if written symbols led to a theoretic culture based on external symbolic of storage, then computers are in the process of creating a digital or virtual culture based on the externalization of symbolic processing. This is the kind of change that has happened three of four times in the course of human evolution – a change of similar magnitude to the development of the printing press and the development of writing and language itself. What it means is that being “literate” in the digital age is not about reading and writing but about solving problems using simulations. What matters in the digital age is not learning to do things a computer can do for you but learning to use the computer to do things that neither you nor it could do alone.

I have emphasized what I see as the core argument of the book. We need to do things differently because the world has changed.

I highly recommend “How Computer Games Help Children Learn”.

Other books I recommend.

The Woz Wows Sackville

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Steve Wozniak, author of iWoz, gave a superb performance at Mount Allison University this evening. The Woz is a very open and friendly person who freely gives of his time in the spirit of learning and collaboration. His presentation this evening covered much that it in his book, but in person you get to feel the passion. People came from all over the region to listen to his inspirational speech, as witnessed by the capacity audience.

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Our son, Nicholas, is reading the book and he found the presentation very interesting. Being able to hold the attention of a 14-year old, using almost no computer-generated effects is no small feat. Steve Wozniak spoke as if he was on fire, and some people felt that they could barely keep up listening to his fast-paced speech. At the end of the presentation, my friend next to me said, “now that is a very nice man”.

I really liked the part when Woz talked about his time working at Texas Instruments and how he got a job designing calculators because he had the skills and therefore didn’t need the formal certifications. He definitely believes in informal learning and taking charge of your life and your learning.

Afterwards, Nick got his book signed and Dad got the picture.

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LCD Projector Rentals

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I’m conducting a workshop on informal learning in Ottawa on January 30th and there seems to be some difficulty in finding a decent price for an LCD projector rental. I can probably borrow one and pack it with me but I’m heading to Las Vegas right after the workshop and that means lugging it around and getting through Customs and back.

Does anyone know of a company in Ottawa that rents LCD projectors for less than $400 per day and might even be willing to deliver it to the hotel?

Update: we found one – thanks for all the help :-)

On professionalism and creativity

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I’m reading David Shaffer’s “How Computer Games Help Children Learn” and will be writing a detailed review once I finish the book, which is excellent so far. I can also say that this book is not just about how children learn, as it’s applicable to learners of all ages.

In the section on professionalism, I found a connection between informal learning and professionalism. To quote Shaffer:

Creativity is a conversation – a tension – between individuals working on individual problems and the professional communities they belong to.

This reflects much of what is happening between the bloggers in the informally-bounded educational technology community. We are discussing our individual concerns and issues with the larger community of “professionals”:

A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.

Shaffer goes on to discuss Vigotsky’s zone of proximal development [the gap between a learner’s current development level and the learner’s potential level of development]. I believe that professionals immersed in communities of practice or continuously pushing their informal learning opportunities can have a larger zone of proximal development. They are more open to learning and to expanding their knowledge. I have had a huge growth in my professional network since I started blogging. These professional conversations are not possible off-line when you live outside a major urban centre, as I do. Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field.

To paraphrase Jay, informal learning is more about your network than your knowledge. This seems obvious when you use Shaffer’s definitions of creativity and professionalism. You need the network to engage in the problem-solving conversations at the edge of your expertise.

Court understands what teachers’ college should already know

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An Ontario Superior Court has directed the Ontario College of Teachers to find an alternate method to evaluate an Iranian refugee teacher’s qualifications without “official” documentation.

To teach in Ontario’s publicly funded schools, a teacher must have a Certificate of Qualification from the college, which was created in 1996. Officials there deemed her few documents insufficient to judge her abilities to teach and refused her requests for a personal interview or to develop alternate means to evaluate her abilities.

Will this first crack open the floodgates of competency-based testing for professionals? Too many professional associations have used the premise that only official documentation from a recognised and accredited institution is acceptable to show competence in a field. This is a load of hogwash, but it has helped to create entire industries around training, certification and accreditation. Some of these industries have transformed into oligopolies and monopolies, such as for the healthcare professions.

The Court has recognised that there is more than one way to exhibit competence in a field. I would go farther and say that a formal training or education program has less correlation to actual competence in a field than a well-designed performance based evaluation. How you become competent in a field should not matter. What matters is actual performance. However, such an approach would put many training and education programs out of business.

Perhaps this decision is an indication of changes to come. Formal training already accounts for very little in the IT or Web media sectors. Most employers want to see actual products or code, and don’t really care what credentials the worker has, as long as he or she can produce the goods.

Linux; best for your average home user

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You know the TV commercial with the hip Apple computer talking to the nerdy Windows PC? Well, it’s not just Macs that can work right out of the box. Today, Linux is simple and easy enough for the mainstream.

This morning I went downtown and bought a new hard drive for my +3 year old Dell Inspiron 8500, as the old one was shot. I inserted the backup installation CD (Win Professional SP 1) and went through the install process. It took about an hour to get the Windows desktop up and running. I then tried to connect to my broadband but could not, so I next installed the network drivers from the backup Dell utilities CD, but still was not able to connect.

During the installation process I used the option to partition the hard drive and only used 50 GB of the available 80 GB for Windows. The rest remained unformatted.

I turned off the computer and then booted from the CD (F12) and inserted an Ubuntu Linux CD that I had previously downloaded (for free of course). On boot-up from the CD I clicked on the “Install Ubuntu” icon on the Ubuntu desktop (very obvious to see). I followed the half dozen instructions and installed Ubuntu on the unformatted portion of the hard drive. This took about 10 minutes.

On re-booting, I selected the main Ubuntu option and was soon looking at the Ubuntu desktop. I did not change any settings and I did not install any other programs. I just opened the Firefox browser (a clearly marked icon) and was on the Web – immediately.

It’s a few hours later and my son is still playing with Windows and trying to connect to the Net.

Update: 24 hours later and we haven’t been able to get Windows connected to the Net. Linux is still working fine.

Update 2: Three days later and still cannot get Windows drivers working to connect to the Net. Linux working like a charm.
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