Needed – Open Source Formative Evaluation Tool

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I was recently asked if I knew of any OS testing/evaluation tools. Stephan List is looking for something that he can use to put evaluations online that will give immediate feedback to the user. Something like your typical magazine quiz, on “how good are you at …” with the results available for your own instant gratification.

I thought of Atutor’s AForm and Stephan mention I Give Test, but the former seems to be designed for academic testing while the latter is open source but charges for license fees.

Any other suggestions out there? Please respond, even in the negative, so that I know that my new feeds are working from this WordPress installation. Thanks.

Personal Knowledge Management 2

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Note: If you are looking for the summary page on personal knowledge management/mastery (PKM) it is now here: jarche.com/pkm/

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Jay has recently posted on Learning Circuits that blogs can be used as knowledge management (KM) tools. Using these tools brings some new challenges, as Lilia has noted “In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.” I won’t deny the cultural change issues in using blogs for knowledge management but I will show how I, as an independent worker outside an organisational hierarchy, use blogs and other tools for personal knowledge management. [This is an update & re-write of a previous post from last year.]

I write on my blog for several reasons. First of all, it’s the platform by which I try to make implicit knowledge (e.g. not codified or structured) more explicit, through the process of writing out my thoughts and observations of what I have come across in my life. By forcing myself to write a summary or an observation, I have to reflect on my own learning. Also, by making my thoughts public I know that they will be scrutinized – now and in the future. There’s nothing like public visibility to make you check your logic. I also view my blog as my main communication medium, letting me converse with potential clients or provide them with a venue to get to know me without any feelings of obligation. Basically, it’s all out there for the world to see.

But how do I get from “Gee isn’t that interesting?” to a written blog post?

Many of my observations come from the blogs that I visit regularly. These feeds are aggregated in my Bloglines account which is made up of +/- 100 feeds. This feed aggregator is sorted into various folders and feeds are routinely added and deleted depending on my preferences and information needs. If I’m working on a project in a specific field I may add some feeds for the duration of the work. The feeds I select are a reflection of the work that I’m doing. I also keep a couple of feeds that have little relation to my work for any serendipitous learning. The ability to scan, preview, read and save posts makes this a simple and easy process – better than visiting each site.

There are also some web pages, posts or sites that I find interesting but I feel are not worth the effort of writing a blog post. For these sites I use Furl, a social bookmarking service. Furl not only saves the page but allows me to tag the item by category. My Furl archive is public so that I can share these pages.

Items and thoughts that are not ignored or stored in Furl usually get saved into a temporary bookmark folder in my browser. Over time I review these and may find a few others that relate to each other. When I have the time and inclination, usually after exercise, I’ll draft a post, review it and post it.

But what use is my blog?

Because my website is searchable, I’m able to retrieve two years of thoughts and comments and easily review these. This is quite practical for presentations, papers, proposals and responding to questions. If I didn’t write a blog, I would have a lot more bookmarks, without annotations of my reasoning and reflection at the time. After two years, my blog is becoming a valuable productivity tool, and the comments and links from others only add more value.

My blog is also a great way to meet people interested in similar subjects, and has helped to create an evolving community of practice. As I’ve mentioned before, this blog is like a very detailed business card, and those who disagree with my points of view may decide not to engage my professional services. This would be a good thing; from both perspectives.

As an independent consultant, a blog is probably the simplest, cheapest and most effective knowledge management tool there is today. Some other benefits are listed here.

Entrepreneurship

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I attended a local business gathering last night and the government-sponsored economic development folks gave a briefing on their programs and support (So Patrick & Isabelle, here are some articles that may be of interest; if you get to this website).

First of all, especially if you are looking at entrepreneurship as an early career option, I would recommend Dave Pollard’s list of reasons Why Young People are Afraid to Start their own Business and would call this Understand your Market for the economic developers. Reasons include:

Can’t handle failure
Don’t know the process
Can’t handle the stress
Can’t handle loneliness

For further background material I would read all of Dave’s work on Natural Enterprises, which will soon be a book. I’ve used much of this material with my own clients.

For those who are supposed to be preparing people for entrepreneurship, take a look at Jeff Cornwall’s post on Entrepreneurship Can, and Is, being Taught:

I believe there are two critical aspects of entrepreneurship education that increase success rates. First, we teach them what deals not to go into through the process of opportunity assessment. We teach them how to “fail on paper.” They learn how to create discipline around their instincts and drive to move ahead blindly into the pursuit of their ideas. Second, we teach them about how to manage growth effectively. Any banker will tell you that this is where most businesses fail. We teach them about the challenges that success can create as their ventures grow. As one banker likes to say, “Too much success leads to failure.”

Finally, I would recommend the Bootstrappers Bible to get a fresh pespective on starting a business with little money.

8.01.BootstrappersBible.pdf

Back to blogging

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This is my first post in WordPress and I think that it will take some time getting used to it. My previous Drupal installation was very good, but a bit of overkill for a plain blogging site. The spammers were getting pretty bad too. During the past three days I was getting three comment spam messages on the server every minute. James Farmer has told me that akismet should solve any comment spam issues in WP, so I’ll have to check it out.
I’ve also reconfigured my SuprGlu public aggregator to reflect more learning feeds since Stephen has announced his hiatus and I know that Jay is trying to set up something to replace Stephen’s Edu_RSS.
For anyone using an RSS feedreader, you may have to resubscribe to the new feeds. They’re shown on the top right of the page. It will take some time to work out any bugs on this site, so please bear with me.

Moving to WordPress

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On Monday, March 6th, I’m moving this website and blog to a new WordPress installation. The URL will remain the same.

There will be a different look and structure, but all of the previous posts will be carried over and permalinks will work. I’ve been testing it this week with Tantramar Interactive and everything seems to work fine. We even think that the RSS feeds will continue to work, but just in case – you may lose this blog in your aggregator. If you subscribe to my blog feed (jarche.com/blog/1/feed) you might have some difficulties, though we are re-pointing these feeds. If you subscribe to the main feed (jarche.com/rss.xml) you should be OK. There will be only one main feed on the new site, plus a comment feed (something new for me).

I will also be closing off comments as of Monday morning, so that we can transfer all of the data.

This is post #700 and after two years I figure that it’s time for a change. I’ll try to keep these transfers down to every two years ;-)

Update: It’s Monday morning and the comment function is now disabled. It’s good timing because this site has been under “comment spam” attack from IP address 195.225.176.160 for the past 48 hours.

Bloggers’ Rules

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I’m currently in Jay Cross’s Informl Unworkshop and we are discussing some guidelines for bloggers. From Dave Pollard’s front page is this great advice:

Blog readers want to see more:

  1. original research, surveys etc.
  2. original, well-crafted fiction
  3. great finds: resources, blogs, essays, artistic works
  4. news not found anywhere else
  5. category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
  6. clever, concise political opinion (most readers prefer these consistent with their own views)
  7. benchmarks, quantitative analysis
  8. personal stories, experiences, lessons learned
  9. first-hand accounts
  10. live reports from events
  11. insight: leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
  12. short educational pieces
  13. relevant “aha” graphics
  14. great photos
  15. useful tools and checklists
  16. précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
  17. fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content

Blog writers want to see more:

  1. constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
  2. ‘thank you’ comments, and why readers liked their post
  3. requests for future posts on specific subjects
  4. foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
  5. reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
  6. wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
  7. comments that engender lively discussion
  8. guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs

Update: This was quickly posted while listening to the unworkshop, so perhaps I should add some commentary, especially since Stephen has picked it up. I would think that one blogger could not address ALL of the readers’ wants nor could every reader give writers everything that they want. I think that the “reader wants” show how varied are the demands of this worldwide audience, and why sites like BoingBoing are so popular. This site will never be in the top 10,000 blogs of the world, but there are some points about reader wants that make sense for my particular situation, such as — original research; personal stories; relevant graphics; first-hand accounts. Anyway, I think that Dave has made a thought-provoking list.

A new threat for our universities?

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From Daniel Lemire is this news from the Guardian (is it news to our academic institutions?) that China is looking at becoming an exporter of degrees, attracting students to study in China where it will be cheaper than here. Today, many Western universities are exporters of degrees to Asian students. One strategy of traditional universities is to create online degree programs. Daniel makes a couple of conclusions about this tactic:

However, before online degrees become a distinct exportable good, you need to have your local students freely choosing the web instead of the classroom. Asians are not going to buy degrees your local population doesn’t value dearly.
I really think China can reverse its status as far as education goes, and by doing so, hurt badly Western Universities in the long run. I don’t think online degrees are going to be a viable escape for Western Universities. If China goes ahead with its plans to become an education provider, it will hurt, no matter what!

I’m sure that there will be a growing demand for online degrees, it’s just that a cheaper alternative may make for a more competitive marketplace.

As if changing demographics weren’t enough of a challenge, now it seems that China will be taking some of the international students that our universities are starting to depend upon for sustainable revenue. The world is flattening and direct competitors are now half way around the world. I wonder if our boys will go to university in China and learn Mandarin at the same time.

Copyright – a model for a previous era?

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I’ve been reading the OpenBusiness blog for a while, trying to get a handle on copyright, which I’ve previously described as being important for our society and our economy. This article, via OpenBusiness, in The Times, is a good start in describing the big issues:

Economists tell us that, as the marginal costs of reproduction shrink, so should unit value. People still want physical books, but the only reason to restrict the digital reproduction of music and film today is to support artists, or — more to the point — to make money. The attempt to use restricted access as a business model in the face of this gigantic change seems not only unethical, but increasingly impractical.
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So we need to examine new models for funding creative works — to address the question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. New approaches to copyright and reproduction are not just necessary, but inevitable. Copyright — the right of a creator to control the reproduction of a work and to sell this control to others — is a legal device that was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.

Life as a Free Agent

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I read Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation just before I started working for myself and would recommend it to anyone else looking at making the leap to freelancing.

After almost three years, here’s a partial list of what being a free agent means to me:

10. Doing my own tech support

9. Only working seven days a week

8. Paying cash & avoiding monthly payments

7. Time for exercise and reading

6. Lots of short breaks, but no long holidays

5. Getting asked to volunteer more

4. Seeing more of my banker

3. Seeing more of my family

2. Looking forward to Mondays

1. Creating my own opportunities

Aliant Highspeed and NetAssistant

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About six months ago I wrote about the difference between advertised and actual Internet connection speeds from my service provider, Aliant (a Bell Canada company). This post gets quite a few hits so I checked the links to make sure that they’re up to date.

I found that Aliant’s speed check is no longer web-based and now requires a 9MB download of a program (motivesb.exe). I haven’t downloaded this software, which might slow down my computer, and I’m wondering if this is as benign as Aliant says on their website:>

Net Assistant* is a FREE service that delivers leading edge self-healing tools directly to your desk top. These tools automatically detect possible issues on your computer that may cause problems accessing the Internet, sending/receiving emails or browsing Web sites, and enables you to fix them easily.