Canada’s Last Great War Veteran

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A petition from The Dominion Institute:

“We the undersigned feel enormous gratitude for the sacrifice made by all the Canadian Armed Forces through the ages in defence of this country and its values; acknowledge the very special nature of the sacrifice made by those who fought in the First World War in appalling conditions and with terrible loss of life; note that only three First World War veterans remain, and urge the Prime Minister that their sacrifice, and all of those they served with under arms from 1914-1918, be celebrated by offering a state funeral to the family of the last veteran of the First World War resident in Canada.”

Over 600,00 Canadians served in the Great War and almost 60,000 were killed. At that time, Canada’s population was about 8 million. To put it into perspective, the current Canadian Forces number about 62,000 personnel and our population is 33 million.

Well, the sun it shines down on these green fields of France,
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance.
The trenches are vanished now under the plough
No gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it is still No Man’s Land
And the countless white crosses in mute witness stand.
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that was butchered and downed.

The Green Fields of France

Aliant delivers

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For those not familiar with my high speed Internet woes, this story began in July 2005 with a significant update in September 2006.

Here’s the basic storyline. I purchased an additional, higher speed, ADSL Internet service from my ISP (Bell Aliant), but was not able to get the advertised speed. I called customer & technical service and checked the hardware and firmware at my own end. I posted my situation on my blog, and over the course of a year I received some good information in the comments. This caused me to push harder and finally, after two technical interventions, confirmed what the problem was – the switch had never been set by the ISP.

Two months after my speed had been correctly adjusted, I still had not heard from the company, nor received a rebate. I contacted customer service, but they were not authorised to give me a full rebate, and had no record of my July 2005 experiences.

A little bit of searching and I found the e-mail of one of Bell Aliant’s VP’s and sent my story, with links to my blog. Within 24 hours, Aliant had delivered:

  1. an apology directly from a VP
  2. a rebate on the High Speed Ultra service for which I paid
  3. a year’s worth of free Ultra service

I am satisfied with this situation, and am particularly glad when the company tells me that they have learned from the situation:

We have made some changes to our processes and done some coaching with our representatives to ensure we improve the customer experience.

Here are my personal reflections on this experience:

My problem was a result of customer service not being able to level with me and treat me as an individual – I was a protocol to be followed. In spite of my insistence that I had checked all wires and connections, I was initially told that the problem was at my end.

Even though customer service stated that they had no record of my July 2005 experience, I was able to show the date-stamped public record of my experience on my blog, thus giving my case more credibility.

The highly trained technical service staff are professional, knowledgeable and friendly. Customer service staff, who have the first contact with any problems, should be treated and trained in a similar manner as the technical staff.

Had there been a forum, such as a blog, to discuss these issues and concerns, the situation would have been rectified much quicker.

Once senior management understood the problem they were able to take action very quickly, and I greatly appreciated this. It took little effort to keep me as a customer.

Finally, it’s very difficult to understand the differences in Internet and telephony services. For instance, during this past year, I’ve learned:

  • If you have telephone service with Eastlink, you only have 30 minutes of local stand-by battery power in the event of an outage. Aliant’s telephone service has a separate power supply for the system.
  • It’s next to impossible to compare one company’s bundle of services with another, and this is done on purpose by the respective marketing departments.
  • Aliant’s ADSL gives you a dedicated pair of wires, whereas Eastlink’s cable service, which has higher speeds, is shared and may decrease with additional users in your area.

Anyway, after 11 years as a customer, Aliant is still my best choice, especially since my issues are all resolved. Hopefully, this is the end of the story.

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Moodle Manual

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I’m back into learning how to use Moodle, after a couple of years (yes, it’s been that long) away from Development (the second “D” in ADDIE). We are using Moodle to create the knowledge base for our Unworkshops, so I’m back into content development. What we’re doing is less structured than a course but Moodle fits the bill quite nicely.

I’m using the book, Moodle: e-learning course development by William Rice as my guide, and it’s quite practical. I had already asked Wendy Wikham for feedback on this book, and here is what she told me:

So far, I’ve found 2 Moodle books – Rice’s and Jason Cole’s Using Moodle. They seem to be written for different audiences.
Rice’s book is more for course administrators and more technically-oriented teachers. It describes the setup and functions in detail. During the initial basic Moodle setup – it was easier to find the information in this book than in the forums. Since we are installing Moodle within a corporate network, we had more issues than the book rightly covered. Ta found it was a good introduction to what Moodle does from a technical perspective. For more advanced issues – the forum is more useful.
Rice doesn’t focus on the pedagogy and doesn’t give step-by-steps for completing particular tasks. Cole’s book focuses more on step-by-step how to’s and the pedagogy behind each of the modules. I would hand teachers the Cole book before the Rice book.
I suspect that I will be referring more to Cole’s book than to Rice’s book now that we have the baseline courses set up. Cole’s organization makes more sense and he does a better job of putting the tools in context.

For me, getting back into the technical aspects of creating and organising a knowledge base, the Rice book is great. I’ve also noticed that Susan Nash has reviewed this book:

Packt’s Moodle is a fantastic resource, although the title is a bit misleading. It is, in reality, a technical manual for using Moodle. It has very little to say about e-learning, except in the sense that it is implicit that learning via Moodle is e-learning. Its major deficiency is that it does not include any elements of instructional design that would allow a user to start developing courses that are pedagogically sound in terms of commonly accepted best practices for e-learning. Further, it does not contain templates for typical courses, which would also be quite valuable for institutions that would be most likely to be interested in open-source learning management systems.

Anyway, it’s one more for my virtual bookshelf.

Whither ISD, ADDIE & HPT?

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Here is the question of the month from The Learning Circuits Blog:

Are ISD / ADDIE / HPT relevant in a world of rapid elearning, faster time-to-performance, and informal learning?

First, some definitions:

  • HPT – Human Performance Technology
  • ISD – Instructional Systems Design [or Development]
  • ADDIE – a process incorporating Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation, stemming from the Systems Approach to Training (SAT)

SAT, ISD and ADDIE stemmed from the need to train military personnel for the Second World War. They were necessary to train lots of people really fast. My initial experiences as a military trainer were from the point of view of ISD, SAT, & ADDIE.

Later I became immersed in HPT, and found it a good method to analyse certain aspects of organisational performance. One thing that HPT does well is to ensure that training, which is costly, isn’t prescribed unless it addresses a verifiable lack of skills and/or knowledge.

SAT, ISD and ADDIE are excellent methods to develop training that is stable. I spent several years using these methods to develop helicopter training for aircrew and maintenance personnel. These methodologies were highly suitable for the task. These methods are not suitable for developing educational programming. The problem with using training development for education is that the performance objectives are not clear. What are you supposed to do at the end of this education and how do you measure it?

As I have said before, I think that one of the problems with our education system is that there is too much of a focus on getting quantitative data, like testing. These functions are more suited to a “training” system, where the performance requirements are clear, measurable and observable. In education, the performance requirements are fuzzy. There is nothing wrong with either a training focus or an education focus; each one has its merits. The problem is when you try to mix the two.

So, are these methodologies suitable for today? The short answer is yes, but not everywhere. Too often we see training as a solution looking for a problem. Training often worked before, or at least didn’t create more problems, when work processes and organisations were stable. As we move to more networked businesses, training’s weaknesses are becoming evident. These weaknesses are also evident when we don’t really know what the performance objectives are in a constantly evolving society, economy and marketplace.

Enter the two-way web and the ubiquitously connected computer. We now have several new tools to address other performance issues that training was never good for anyway:

  • Unclear expectations – collaboratively constructed wikis and up to the minute blogs
  • Inadequate resources – user generated knowledge bases through tagging and social bookmarking
  • Unclear performance measures – direct feedback from customers via blogs

The Web is also providing an open platform for people to connect and converse with others all over the world, expanding informal education opportunities for millions. Both training and education are being opened up and exposed as individuals create their own networks and converse with each in their personal searches for knowledge and community.

The Internet is forcing us out of our self-constructed disciplinary boxes. As work and learning become connected online, the barriers are blurring between organisational development, HR, training, education, HPT, etc. A new, amalgamated field of practice requires better tools and integrated theories from which to base our practice.

These models are relevant, but they’re not enough.

Elgg Spaces Launches

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Elgg Spaces is the new offering from Curverider for hosted informal learning applications. I’ve used Elgg a fair bit and like the amalgamation of blogging, social networking and online portfolio applications on one platform. I also like the ability to control the access levels for each entry, so that Elgg can be used for closed group discussions.

Elgg Spaces offers tiered hosting, as well as a free, unsupported version. What I am looking forward to is the ability to “Allow your users to collaborate with those in other communities, both on Elgg Spaces and across the web”. Lack of integration with other systems has been the main reason that I haven’t fully adopted Elgg, even though I still recommend it for individuals or inside a “walled garden”.

Words of discomfort

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I spent this evening with several concerned parents who were discussing their concerns with the amount of homework that their children in elementary school have to do. Near the end of our talk, I was told about a recent article in a national newspaper, written by the Canadian Council on Learning. You may remember that the CCL received $85 million from Canadian taxpayers last year to set up five knowledge centres. In Words of Comfort to Parents About Homework, posted on the CCL site, Paul Cappon states:

Research supports the idea that homework assignments in reasonable amounts can substantially contribute to learning. Not surprisingly, students who do homework perform better on tests and other assessments than students who duck it. And, up to a point “there is such a thing as too much homework” the more homework students do, the better they perform.

Please Mr. Cappon; what research? The only positive research that I know of was conducted by students; was not peer reviewed; and had small sample sizes. Please post references to any other valid research data here, in case I am ignorant of some reputable studies on the subject.

So, do reasonable amounts of homework contribute to learning? The authors of The Homework Myth, The Case Against Homework and The End of Homework, strongly disagree, and cite several studies to support this position. In our small group of parents, several with PhD’s and statistical analysis expertise, not a single person has been able to find any data to support this statement by the CCL. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, puts it quite categorically:

For starters, there are no data whatsoever to show that elementary school students benefit from doing homework. None. And even in high school there’s only a modest correlation between time spent on homework and achievement – with little reason to think that the achievement was caused by doing more homework. Then there’s other evidence, including a brand-new study of TIMSS data from 50 countries, and it shows no positive effects from homework, even for older students. I wasn’t able to find any reason to believe that students would be at any sort of intellectual disadvantage if they had no homework at all.

So why is a publicly-funded learning institution making flawed statements in the national press about educational practices? These are words of discomfort for me.

Sacrificing the joy of learning

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This week we had “take you child to work day” for our son in Grade 9. He wasn’t interested in seeing what a home-based consultant does, as he sees this every day. Instead, we arranged a day with a family member who is a helicopter pilot. We drove the 150 km to the hangar and on the way our son did his homework.

His math work had to do with exponentials and reducing equations to a less complex form; or something like that. I looked at the equations and realised that I did not have a clue how to do them. Not only that, but I couldn’t tell him where he might apply this later in his life. So here I am, unable to do Grade 9 math, even though I have two years of university-level calculus and algebra, as well as two years of physics [I went to a military college where even those majoring in History had to have a “well-rounded” education in the sciences].

My inability to do Grade 9 math got me thinking about the usefulness of the public education curriculum (again). I can see the requirement for having skills in mathematics. Of particular importance today would be understanding statistical analysis and how stats can be used to tell almost any lie.

A couple of days later, I came across this article by Roger Schank; blaming the laziness of college professors for the focus on arcane subjects:

“Universities dictate curricula to high schools to make professor’s lives easier. If everyone takes physics and calculus and most never use it, well, professors claim it was good for the students anyway when in fact it was only good for making sure professors didn’t have to teach it in college. As long as professors don’t have to teach the basics it is okay that high school students are forced to study stuff they will never use in their whole lives. We have ruined an entire generation of high school students who don’t like learning and think the subject matter is irrelevant because professors only want to teach the good stuff.

We sacrifice the joy of learning for an entire generation so professors can have an easier time teaching incoming students.”

I have 18 years of formal education, 25 years of work experience, have never used exponential equations outside of school, and don’t remember how to do them today. What are we teaching, and why?

Networked Work Needs Networked Learning

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In a recent discussion on informal learning I was asked how it could be integrated into formal work environments. What I have learned so far about informal learning is that it is more of a cultural issue than about process or technology improvements. The key factor is control. To foster informal learning, organisations have to give up control. We see this with social networking on the Internet and that organisations that let go of centralised control are able to adapt quicker. The Dean campaign was one example, as is viral marketing.

The fact that small, loose organisations can adapt quicker has been evident for a couple of centuries, when you examine guerrilla groups fighting against large hierarchical military organisations. Guerrillas proved their worth against Napoleon in Spain in the early 19th century as well as against the US in Vietnam in the latter part of the 20th century. Many military experts now talk about network warfare, or netwar.

If network warfare was possible years ago, as witnessed during the Peninsular War, why is netwar something new? I think that the original guerrillas showed what was possible, but it took the ubiquitous information and communication network, the Internet, to make it the default organisational model. As a retired soldier, I always considered the military to be a conservative-minded organisation. If the military is seriously considering network warfare, then it seems that the need to understand networked business & learning is pretty obvious.

One example of networked businesses is the animation field, where creatives live all over the world. With some companies, the creative team is physically separated from the production team by several time zones, so that work can go on 24 hours a day, as the day’s work moves back and forth between teams. Even when they’re spread out, excessive control is not necessary. Christopher Sessums reports on why Pixar is so successful as a creative force, citing the fact there are no studio execs to control the process. Control is the enemy of innovation and flexibility.

Effective work and learning networks are composed of unique individuals working on common challenges, together for a discrete period of time before the network begins to shift its focus again. This is like small groups of guerrillas joining for a raid, conducting it, and then going their separate ways to reform as a different set for a new mission. If armies and businesses organisations are changing to networked models, then the best learning support has to be informal, loose and networked as well. We are shifting from a “one size fits all” attitude on work and learning to an “everyone is unique” perspective. If everyone is unique then there are no generic work processes and no standard curricula.

If everyone is unique, we need to seriously reconsider our models for training and education. Brian Alger has shown the severe limitations of standard curricula and Bill and Julie at NineShift sum up the issue as:

The issue is also about the biggest educational struggle in this early century: the switch from making every student “normal” to understanding that every student is not normal, in other words, unique.

In warfare, work and learning we are witnessing a major change in command and control and we will have to shift with it or suffer the fate of several defeated armies.

Open Courseware Consortium

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MIT’s open courseware initiative (OCW), which put all of its course notes and resources online for free, has expanded to the Open Courseware Consortium, asking participating higher education institutions to freely share material.

An OpenCourseWare site…

  • is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses.
  • is available for use and adaptation under an open license.
  • does not typically provide certification or access to instructors.

Only one Canadian institution participates in this +100 member consortium; Capilano College in BC.

SmartDraw 2007

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I’ve been using SmartDraw since 2003 when I first looked for a Visio replacement to create diagrams and other visual graphics. My initial search had me looking for something cheaper than Visio, and at the time, SmartDraw was about 75% cheaper. I purchased SmartDraw 6, actually wrote an unpaid endorsement for the product and became a beta tester for SmartDraw 7, for which I received a free copy of that version – a good deal. I’m also an affiliate which means that I can refer potential customers and receive a small commission for my efforts. Since SmartDraw is a small company with what I consider a good product, I don’t mind this relationship.

After downloading 2007, I found it to be a quantum leap beyond the previous versions. It is much more intuitive and I was creating floor plans in minutes (my next task on our Commons project). I had tried with the previous version but it was a heck of a lot more work. I should add that if you create drawings in the new SmartDraw 2007 you won’t be able to open them in SD version 7, even though they each have the same *.sdr extension.

So what are the pros and cons here? First, SmartDraw has reduced their free trial period from 30 days to 7 days. I don’t think that this is enough time to really evaluate it. The 30 day free trial for version 6 helped me to decide to purchase it. As for price, SmartDraw 2007 is currently selling for $197 ($100 off until 7 Nov). That compares with Visio Professional at $499 or $199 for Visio standard. We cheapskates also have another free, less featured, online product available called Gliffy, and yes it does floor plans. Anyway, you have several choices.

You can check out SmartDraw 2007 by clicking on the picture below and I’ll receive a small commission if you decide to purchase it (thanks if you do).
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Update:

From feedback on this post as well as some e-mails I’ve received, I’d say that one of SmartDraw’s main drawbacks is that it’s not flexible for people who do intensive graphics, and they may prefer something like Adobe Illustrator. Personally, I use Gimp (free & open source) if I need to do any serious graphic editing. A couple of people have said that they are having difficulty removing SmartDraw from their Windows PC’s but I didn’t experience any problems. SmartDraw is a good tool if you need more than an online application like Gliffy, but you don’t create large diagrams that may need two monitors. Basically, SmartDraw is a mid-level application, with lots of built-in features that advanced users may find a pain (similar to the way that professional photographers don’t like automatic cameras).

Update 2:

Tony [see comments # 26, 27, 28 & 30)] has set up a Google Group, Drawing-Smartly, to discuss drawing programs (including but not limited to SmartDraw). I think it will be a better medium than this blog post, so please join if you’re interested in learning more

Final (I hope) Update: There is now a SmartDraw Blog to voice your opinions.