Moodle now in the major league

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I received a mass mailing from HorizonWimba today about their Genie “course authoring tool” which imports content from Word. Usually I dump this stuff from vendors, as I prefer customer reviews, not marketing information; but this caught my interest:

This new version most notably features the ability for instructors to create Flashcards, insert code such as HTML and Java, and export their course content to new Blackboard, WebCT, and SCORM formats (ideal for Moodle users). Course Genie allows faculty to quickly and easily convert their Microsoft Word documents into content for their Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, and other online courses.

This is the first time that I’ve seen proprietary elearning companies selling to those who use open source. It shows that Moodle users are now in the same league as WebCT & Blackboard users, at least from a third-party vendor’s perspective.

Learning Technology Consulting

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In the learning business there are plenty of enabling technologies. First, we had a few learning management systems, like WebCT, which were developed at academic institutions. There wasn’t much choice then, and most in the field were cheering these advances. Then we had the elearning bubble with hundreds of LMS, LCMS, CMS & VLE. Now we have personal learning environments (PLE) and eportfolios vying for the spotlight.

When I worked for a technology vendor I soon learned that it was more important to sell licenses than to enhance performance & learning. Licenses paid the bills. That’s why I still urge my clients to separate their technology provider from their learning services. You cannot serve two masters.

Is it the same situation with open source learning applications? If I develop a platform, will I offer independent advice, such as switching to another system? Once we get attached to our favourite system, or one that we helped to develop, then it may be hard to pack up and leave. However, being open to adopt new systems is in the client’s best interest. On one recent project we went through three major content management systems before settling on Elgg Learning Landscape, which didn’t even exist at the beginning of the project.

As much as I like Elgg, I have to keep on the lookout for other products that may meet my clients’ needs. I believe that in this constantly changing web environment, there is a need for third-party service providers who are technology neutral. There may be a temptation to affiliate with only a few select technologies, and perhaps earn a little extra cash, but that doesn’t serve the client. For instance, a new system can come along and give your client a quantum leap in performance. You have to stay current in your research in order to give the right advice for the current situation. Being technology neutral is the difference between a vendor and a consultant.

Rx for NB Learning

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One of New Brunswick’s only learning technology development companies is in the process of being sold. Not sure if this is good or bad for the local industry. Ensemble Collaboration started up a few years ago and developed a collaboration platform for learning. The website is currently down, pending the sale.

I came to this province in 1995 and really became part of the industry in 1998. Since then we have had a few technology companies come and go. These are some of the ghosts of LMS past – Crescent Studio, IP Global, e-com and BKM. Today, the largest companies in the sector provide custom content development – Vitesse, PulseLearning and Innovatia. I think that there is a more sustainable business model on the services side of the industry, however I see these companies competing in a marketplace that is starting to view their services as commodities. I see more learning content companies competing by offering the lowest price per courseware development hour, or whatever other measure you wish to use. Because of this market tendency, companies need to grow their higher-end services in order to stay competitive. These are not evident in New Brunswick at this time.

As someone who has worked with many of the companies, academic institutions and government departments in the province, I’ll give my prognosis for this industry. First of all, there are only 740,000 people in New Brunswick and due to our size we will never grow any industry that is sustainable on its own. We definitely cannot do this without serious partnering or strategic alliances. However, we can capitalise on our small size by encouraging start-ups and sowing many seeds that will grow and survive, or even wither and die. It is through the act of creating new companies that we will improve our ability to create more. We need to develop a way to fail early and fail often. Failure in new business cannot be generally viewed as failure in business. Few entrepreneurs succeed on their first attempt. This Province has the resources, and connections, to create an environment that is friendly for start-ups, especially those that don’t require huge sums of money (e.g. Flickr before it sold to Yahoo).

This flies in the face of efforts to attract larger companies that can offer more jobs to local people. I believe that using the “job” as an economic indicator is a crucial flaw in our economic development policy. Instead, we should be helping to create many small, innovative companies. This will foster a more diverse economic foundation, where one failure will not bring down the entire industry. We have some learning expertise and we used to have some technology development capabilities. What we need now is a way to allow a thousand flowers to blossom. Some of these start-ups may even get purchased by larger corporations and move away, but their creation will be our secret sauce. I am suggesting moving from an indentured servitude model (the salaried employee) to an entrepreneurial model. This has its risks but it puts the means of production into the hands of more people (sounds socialist, doesn’t it?).

To enable this entrepreneurial renewal, without the need for huge amounts of venture capital, we must leverage open source software. Individuals and companies must get involved in the global communities created by open source. That is why I am concerned about the lack of technology companies. A viable learning industry also needs to be in control of its enabling technologies.

As I said, our advantage is our size. It’s easy to contact someone in government here. For instance, the Province has a unique regulation for the creation of online universities. To be a fertile ground for innovation, we need more of this type of unique legislation; not more subsidies or government sponsored trade missions.

So here are some concrete recommendations for my colleagues in this industry. First, get involved in the global community. Personally, I champion Elgg Learning Landscape, Moodle and ATutor. I am involved with the Education Bridges project, initiated by Dave Cormier on PEI. Through blogging, I am also speaking with others around the world. This can yield some interesting connections. For example, Indian companies may be looking for partnerships or involvement in other communities, as mentioned recently on the Learned Man blog. I would be keen to see a webcast of our LearnNB activities done in cooperation with some Indian companies. I’m sure that we have much to learn from each other.

Basically, we can’t focus on this Province alone and we need to use our small size to our advantage. If we stay small, we remain nimble. In a flat world, that may be the right prescription.

Please don’t push my learning

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This week I’ve been back into a classroom training environment, something I haven’t experienced for many years. Much of my learning has been informal, or as Jay Cross recently put it, it’s PULL vs PUSH [link updated to newer post]. Going back into push learning (formal, training, curriculum, mandated, just in case) has forced me as a learner to slow down. For the past several years I’ve been learning in the fastlane by pulling my learning (informal, performance support, collaboration, self-service, just in time).

This week has reinforced my opinion that training is too often a solution looking for a problem. Many performance issues can be addressed through non-training interventions, or as Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps said in Stop wasting money on training:

“… most performance deficiencies in the workplace are not a result of skill and knowledge gaps. Far more frequently, they are due to environmental factors, such as lack of clear expectations; insufficient and untimely feedback; lack of access to required information; inadequate tools, resources, and procedures; inappropriate and even counterproductive incentives; task interferences and administrative obstacles that prevent achieving desired results.”

The amount of information and knowledge available are increasing at an exponential rate and we need to improve our methods to support learning. Focusing training in the right place would be a start.

A Weblog on the 21st Century

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Nine Shift is a great blog, based on the book of the same name. It’s one of my essential reads in my feedreader, so here are some of the sample posts:
This article on Jeremy:

Jeremy can’t focus. He’s a guy. We can focus on basketballs, footballs, deer, enemies, breasts, money, new ideas, etc. But not on tedious domestic tasks like checking out a movie without some daydreaming, dallying and who-knows-what-other intermediary thoughts that might eventually some day produce a great invention for humankind.

On the death of cursive writing:

Which led me to daydream that since chopping wood (a favorite pastime) enhances eye-hand coordination, maybe they should teach that in schools. And while they are at it, it is absolutely positively true that people who can their own vegetables and jam have an enhanced work ethic, so they ought to teach that in school as well. I’m sure shoeing horses enhances something….

And another post on boys and education

1. Limbic system shuts down.   When boys are under stress, the limbic system "shuts down" and  another part of the brain devoted to self-preservation and fight aggression kicks in.  The limbic system is where emotional stability is, where that affective comfort level resides.  Boys need that emotional comfort level to be able to learn.
2. Safe environment.  Schools have to create a safe environment in order for students to learn. When students feel as though they will be criticized, chastised, accused, and so on  when they walk into the school, that safe environment dissipates.

I noticed that there aren’t many Bloglines subscribers to Nine Shift, so I thought I’d pass the word :-)

Why AdSense makes NoSense (for me)

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I’ve toyed with the idea of advertising on this site, as it might pay my hosting costs, but Guy Kawasaki’s Total BS (Blog Statistics) post has set me straight. For instance, Guy’s blog is ranked #289 on Technorati while mine is #43,064. His site has about 100 times more visitors than I do (well-deserved I might add).
So what is the main lesson for me? It’s that Guy earns an average of $9.85 a day with Google’s AdSense. Were I to use AdSense, I could possibly make a few pennies a day. This is definitely not worth the effort and potential scorn of the few readers that I have.

Failure of Online Communities

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Jay Cross is at ASTD TechKnowledge 2006 in Denver and provides this observation on communities of practice:

Next up was Bill Bruck of Q2 Learning on Creating and Sustaining Online Communities of Practice. After the session, several people told me they really appreciated Bill telling it like it is. Early on, he said that while he thought he was pretty good at fostering online communities, 90% of the communities he sets up fail.

I have had similar experiences, with the failure of the R&D for elearning community in New Brunswick as well as our local Sackville SOHO Society, which has died a natural death. I believe that it’s natural for online communities of practice to fail and that we may be putting too much emphasis on their longevity. If they serve a temporary purpose then I would say that they are successful, even if they don’t last.

Blogs seem to work this way. First you start reading other blogs, then you may aggregate them in a feedreader and then you may start to make comments. Later you may create your own blog and continue the conversations of others by linking to their posts.

However, your focus and links will change over time, as will the flow of the conversation. The ‘communities’ in which you are actively engaged will change and some conversations will stop entirely. This is similar to the failure of an online community.

We don’t view a discontinued blog conversation as a failure, but an unused community of practice is seen as a failure. I believe this is because we create most communities within an enclosed web space to which the members must go. On the other hand, most blogs are built around the individual and the community is dynamic (it flows).

Centering on the individual, who then decides on which people to connect to, is more natural than creating a box to which you must subscribe to be a member. With Elgg Learning Landscape, communities have the same properties as people and individuals link to a community as they would link to a friend. It is not necessary to go ‘inside’ a community space. This seems to be more natural. If more communities are built around the way that people naturally work and socialize then that 90% failure rate might drop.

Edublogs.org Needs Support

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James Farmer has been offering one of the few educational blogging services that is free, non-commercial and just about perfect for those looking for an alternative to Blogger.

edublogs.org is a non-profit adventure into providing free blogs and hosting for teachers, students, researchers, librarians, writers and other education professionals.

I know that there is a demand for this service because many people pass through here while searching for "free educational blogs" or similar search terms. What James needs to keep edublogs going is some financial support.

But I’m fundamentally against putting any advertising on blogs. Down the line I’d like to leave that option up to you (i.e. advertise if you want to & for yourself) but I certainly don’t want to slap ads on any edublogs.

So, it’s going to have to be sponsorship & partnership. Here’s the deal…

  • Plain old simple advertising as a ’supporter’ on edublogs.org
  • Inclusion (and write up) in the edublogs.org newsletter
  • Inclusion in the ‘backend’ of each blog (this can be done in a number of ways)
  • Partnership in offering edublogs.org users tools and services

Life in Perpetual Beta

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One definition for a Beta release is, “A version of the vendor’s software that is given to selected installations prior to the product becoming generally available. This version is often not free of defects.”

I can relate to the second sentence when I think of my personal and professional life being in a state of continuous Beta releases. This perspective has been my norm for a few years, particularly since I’ve become a free-agent and have to do everything, including my own tech support.

Perpetual beta is my attitude toward learning — I’ll never get to the final release and my learning will never stabilise. I’ve also realised that clients with a similar attitude are much easier to work with than those who believe that we will reach some future point where everything stabilises and we don’t need to learn or do anything else. I believe that this point is called death.

My wife has often told me that my current situation as a consultant is the best vocation for me because I bore easily and need constant challenges. Life in beta seems to suit me. This may be because I am male, as there is more research coming out that our ‘drill & fill’ education system doesn’t work for boys, as the Eide’s note in The Trouble with Boys. A solution could be what Christian at Think: Lab refers to in a recent article on schools in perpetual beta:

Beta schools.  Perpetual.  Environments that promote infinite discovery.  Student and teacher as co-researchers.  Form.  Intent.  Re-mapping the entire premise of ‘school’.

Given the abundance of information and connectivity, or what Mark Federman calls “ubiquitously connected & pervasively proximate”, we may find that in the near future hyperactivity is no longer diagnosed as a problem.

The issue is copyright reform

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This blog is not about politics so I didn’t discuss the past election, other than a post last week about the role of the Internet. I did follow Michael Geist and CopyrightWatch on the Toronto riding where copyright became an election issue, especially the question on the Liberal incumbant receiving monetary support from the media industry. For me, copyright is a critical issue in the economic and cultural development of our country, and it seems that more Canadians agree.
From Michael Geist:

But they are not the most important part of the story.  More important than the story about blogs, is the substantive lessons to be learned from the past three weeks.  Building on a copyrightwatch post that mines the same theme, I offer three:

First, the recent events send a clear message that Canadians want copyright policy (and indeed all policy making) to be both fair and to be seen to be fair.  That means accounting for all stakeholders and removing the lobbyist influence from the equation.  My article on the role of the lobby groups in the copyright process attracted considerable interest as many people expressed surprise at just how badly the system is broken.  It was this message that resonated with many people in the riding who may know little about copyright policy, but can identify a perceived conflict of interest when they see one.  Going forward, all parties must work to clean up copyright.

Second, among the most important voices in the debate came from artists such as Matthew Good, Steven Page, and Neil Leyton.  As groups such as CRIA were rightly identified as lobbyists who represent predominantly foreign interests, Canadian artists and Canadian interests began to speak up.  If (or more likely when) a new copyright bill comes to committee, it will be incumbent on Canada’s politicians to hear not only from the lobby groups, but also from the creators and users, many of whom are singing a much different tune from the lobbyists.

Third, this could have been about any issue, but it wasn’t.  It was about copyright.  Copyright is often described as a fringe issue, yet to millions of Canadians it has an enormous impact on their daily lives, affecting education, culture, creativity, the use of personal property, privacy, and security.  Labeling those concerned with these issues as pro-user zealots or claiming that this is merely about music downloading is to miss a much bigger story and to fail to connect with a segment of the population.