Controlling Chaos?

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Scott Leslie comments on the recent release of the CETIS Vocabulary Project, which includes two reports and a series of recommendations [my emphasis added]:

But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it.

I’m not an expert on ontologies, the semantic web, metadata or controlled vocabularies, but I’ve had enough conversations with enough experts to know that more control will not address our information management needs. Recent conversations with people smarter than me have me concluding that Smart Search is (will be) an excellent tool and that the RDF standard seems to be quite useful with its minimalist approach. From the CETIS Report (MS Word Doc, page 23):

What really sets RDF apart from XML and other things is that RDF is designed to represent knowledge in a distributed world. This means RDF is particularly concerned with meaning. Everything at all mentioned in RDF means something, whether a reference to something concrete in the world, an abstract concept, or a fact. Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge.”

I recently asked if metadata was dead and received some good advice:

  • From Anol: "Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode."
  • and from Keith, "Maybe metadata structures are dying, but there’s a distinct difference between metadata and metadata structures. If you’re going to ask, "Is metadata dead?" why not also ask, "Is tagging [with METADATA!] dead?"

After perusing the 121 pages of the two CETIS reports [I didn’t read every item], I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. Instead of asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s time for the learning industry as a whole to shift its effort to more pragmatic solutions, because the answers from CETIS et al are not very clear. Having watched the enormous efforts ($$$) that the military, academia and corporations have put into metadata and controlled learning structures, without any measurable improvements in learning or performance outcomes, I have to ask if this is worth the time and money. My suggestions:

  • like Lego, use the simplest of basic structures (RDF?)
  • build better search into online learning applications
  • only build taxonomies, ontologies & controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not "just-in-case"
  • give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc)
  • focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it

Individual and Company Blogs

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I recently received an invite from Ankush Gupta, who has the Learned Man! blog, to look at the company blog of Tata Interactive Systems. I’ve read Ankush’s blog on and off for a while and found that he provides some solid commentary on elearning, so I checked out the Tata Blog. It’s a multi-user effort with posts so far from the CEO and various instructional design consultants. The review of Allison Rossett’s First Things Fast is worth a read, as this is an excellent handbook for performance improvement.
It will be interesting to see how this corporate, multi-user blog evolves over time. One successful multi-user blog, though not from a single company, is the Learning Circuits Blog. Whether a company blog can have the same depth of conversation remains to be seen. So far, I like the initial posts on the Tata Systems blog, especially on their work for learning disabilities and participation in the Mumbai marathon.
A different approach to company blogging is SilverOrange, a web-systems company on Prince Edward Island. There are no direct links from the company website, but the individual bloggers proudly link back to their company. SilverOrange bloggers include Dan James, Daniel Burka and Steven Garrity.
Here are two approaches to blogging and work. In one the blogger is part of a corporate blog while in another the blogger is an individual who happens to work (or own) a company. The use of blogs is evolving over time and there may be a day when a company blog is identified (by the majority) as a separate entity from an individual blog. Does it matter? I think that the level of comments and interaction, especially when controversial subjects arise, will show if there is a difference. Dan James has even stated that "Companies don’t blog, people do".
My interest in all of this is how this medium is being used and what its effects will be. Will blogs become the equivalent of the e-mail scourge of the next decade? Will employees be forced to blog on the company site? These are the early days of blogging for the mainstream and it’s still fun to watch the field change and read new blogs.

nonscholae.org Launches

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It’s still very new with not much content, but James Farmer has one more website to his credit – nonscholae.org. The premise is:

nonscholae.org is a site devoted to the responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus
We learn, not for school, but for life – Seneca, Epistulae
We believe that these tools and resources should not be blocked or banned from schools. As educators, we should be familiarising learners with these technologies, supporting and facilitating their responsible use and equipping our students with the skills to keep them safe and savvy in the online world.
However, at the moment, many schools are simply closing their eyes, banning these technologies and doing their learners a disservice in the process.

Seneca’s words ring true for me, and I’m glad to see that James has taken this initiative. Enough of what educators want, let’s focus on what learners need, because Seneca was right.

Hot & Cool Election Campaigns

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While I was in Montreal this week I received a call from a newspaper journalist, looking for some comments about the use of blogs in the current election. I was engaged in meetings and the deadline was only a few hours away, so I wasn’t able to to add an insights (not that I had any pithy comments ready anyway).
Instead, the journalist should have contacted Mark Federman who has some excellent comments on the election, especially around McLuhan’s work on Hot versus Cool media. For instance:

You cannot "label" a medium as hot or cool by looking at the medium, but rather by observing its effects. A hot medium is one that is hypnotic, decreasing awareness by providing explicit, often simplistic, information. It is intense, and tends to separate and fragment. There is little active, cognitive participation because of the explicitness; rather we take it in and nod in agreement, eyes glazing over. If you find yourself mindlessly echoing tropes and memes without really thinking them through (to discover a hidden context, for instance) you have likely been exposed to a hot media environment.

Mark goes on to show how a party could use the Internet as a cool medium:

One of the effects of UCaPP is for "consumers to become producers." In the context of the current campaign, this might mean that ordinary people could be given a venue on the campaign sites to upload their own podcasts. Consider the Liberal Party dilemma of lack of trust. Now imagine if the archetypal "ordinary Canadian" was given an open and free opportunity to upload a "why I’m planning to vote Liberal" podcast directly to the Liberal party site. At the very least, all the ideas that the central campaign can’t think of would immediately become available to them. What’s more, (as we learned from the Howard Dean Experience) even anti-Liberal trolls (a troll, of course is relative to the venue; one person’s troll is another person’s freedom fighter, so to speak) would be contributing to the passion, fervor and motivation of the Liberal team and their supporters (Dean raised a huge amount of money through people pledging donations for every troll post to Deanspace). Most important, allowing such a forum for democratic participation and conversation is the move that would help to create the trust, openness and welcoming that a cool campaign requires.

Montreal during a Winter Election Campaign

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Currently sitting in downtown Montreal on a client project. Typical consulting gig – fly in; check into the hotel; spend a long day in a meeting room; repeat; fly out. I happened to be in the same hotel as the Liberal Party of Canada (the French leaders’ debate was last night) so there was more traffic than usual for a week day in January. Speaking of political campaigns (and I try not to) Rob Wall has an interesting post on a candidate who really blogs.
Perhaps during the next election the two-way web will be the norm and TV/Radio will be ignored. For myself, I’ve ignored the mass media and have read a few blog posts, including this one from Dave Pollard. I see elections like final exams; you have to do your homework prior to the end of the coursework, not during the pressure of exams.

Wikibooks

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Dave Cormier is proposing more work be done on the concept of textbook wikis, or wikibooks. According to Dave:

I would see a well funded wikibook project as a viable alternative to the current publisher textbook hegemony. With the work done at wikimedia as a backbone, the right input, enthusiasm and knowhow, a full wikibook science program could be up within a year. The key to the success of such a project would be getting ‘everyone’ involved. Not just science people and curriculum designers, but teachers, science institutions and students as well. A solid organizational structure, a place for debate and disagreement, as well as areas for student input. It has all the potential for being a real turning point for education.

Most of us have used wikipedia, or at least heard of it in the popular press, and the wikibook is another open source model for education using the power of community built web pages. Dave goes through some of the pros and cons including the question of validity, or  "How do we know that the information in the textbook is ‘true’?". In this world of information abundance I don’t believe that it’s necesssary to prove that something is true. Once posted, facts can easily be cross-checked, and a strong community will make sure that the information is fact-based. Learners and educators have to be media savvy and understand how they can check the verity of an information source. Truth is what we believe and we need to understand why we believe something.
I remember a course in third year on Canadian historiography (the wikipedia definition is number one on Google) that covered three textbooks, one English Canadian, one French Canadian and one American. Which one of these university textbooks contained the "truth"? In many courses, only one of these texts would have been required reading or required to purchase. A more open wikibook, transparent to all and open to debate, is a much better system, and cheaper, than an unchanging textbook.

New Year, New Tools

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This year I got a digital camera (finally) for Christmas. It was a gift from my wife, but I had a fair bit of input (about 100%). The Olympus Stylus Verve 5.0 megapixel camera is very compact, weatherproof and looks cool. It takes great photos and I’ve picked up an extra battery as reviews say that it eats them.

For my first transfer of photos to my computer I used Adobe Photo Album which had come with my Palm. I found it cumbersome, and when I wanted to do anything extra I found out that I needed to upgrade to a paid version. I therefore installed the Olympus master program that came with the camera. It took forever to download the updates from the web and when I started using it I discovered that it was a crippled version of the pro version which I could purchase from Olympus.

I therefore uninstalled both of these programs and downloaded The Gimp. It is a free and open source image editing suite that does much more than I need but there is no nag-wear and I know that it has everything that I’ll ever need in terms of functionality. I should have done this first, but the process reinforced how many good open source products are out there. If you install The Gimp for Windows, make sure that you install the GTK+2 Runtime environment first. I’m playing around with a Flickr account too, to start sharing some photos.

I’ve also tried some new tools for this website. In the External Links on the left you’ll see an OpenSource4Learning link which takes you to a Squidoo lens. Squidoo is an experiment in focused content, based on the premise that everyone is an expert on something. I’d appreciate any feedback. My intent is to see if one of the subjects of this blog requires its own special place. Is it any easier to find stuff this way?

I also built a swicki, which is a specialised search engine. I had it installed on the navigation bar but it slowed the loading of my pages so it’s off for now. You may see it re-appear as I test it some more.
Now it’s back to real work for the month of January ;-)

Jay Cross on Informal Learning

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Jay Cross has posted a Breeze presentation that you can watch and listen to online. It’s a review of his research over the past year that informed his in-press book on informal learning.

There’s a lot here and worth the time (35 minutes) to sit back and learn. Jay and I share perspectives on many things, including the importance of performance & the power of networks. In this presentation Jay gives a lot of food for thought on the important role of informal learning.

His statement that only 0.4% of behaviour change is attributable to formal learning should make training organisations and educational institutions shake in their boots, but of course it won’t (until it’s too late).

Mapstats blogging resource

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I’ve been using MapStats, which is a function of Blogflux, as an additional statistics tool on this website for a while. What I like about Mapstats is that you get the real number of actual visitors to your website. It eliminates spammers & bots and also anyone reading from an aggregator. As for the latter, I at least have an indicator of regular subscribers from Bloglines.
Mapstats also shows where each visitor comes from, what browser was used and what search query was presented to a search engine. Since it’s in beta, the system has had a few hiccups but it is quite promising and gives some interesting detail that I don’t get with my ISP-provided search package. For instance, since October:

  • 91% of visitors using a search engine use Google (no surprise)
  • 47% of visitors use Internet Explorer while 42% use Firefox (not exactly reflective of what the popular press is saying about Firefox’s 10% of market share, but I’m sure that I have a lot of "early adopters" visiting this site)
  • 45% of visitors are from Canada, 26% from the USA,  4% from the UK, 2% from India and 7% unknown
  • +99.99% have Flash enabled (looks like Adobe-Macromedia has won the game)
  • Top search queries include "lms comparison", "benefits of blogging" and "training vs education"
  • The most popular blog post since October has been the one on the Blackboard WebCT merger

I’d recommend Mapstats for any blogger (only bloggers can use this free tool) as it provides just another level of feedback that may keep you motivated on those long cold winter days.

Those who teach will not test

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First post of the new year – best wishes to all – after a somewhat fallow period since the holidays began and the boys have been at home and family arrived, etc.

I haven’t created a ‘best of’ for 2005, and will not make any predictions for 2006. I know that life in perpetual beta will continue for me and I’m feeling fairly optimistic in spite of the large challenges facing human kind.

I’ve had many discussions these past weeks on the failings of our education systems (public, private, higher, government-sanctioned). Like many others I see global changes on the horizon that will affect our economic and political systems. However, in one short conversation, I believed that we hit upon a small incremental change that could have some really positive results. That is to remove teaching from assessment:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Whether it be in public school or higher education, teachers should be there to help the learners. Others, who design and administer the tests must show how these tests are valid and reliable and be able to publicly defend the principles upon which they are based. When, or if, learners are tested, teachers are advocates not judges.

By removing the role of assessor, I think that we can do a lot to advance learning. I know that there are many other challenges in our education systems but this one change could be the start. I also know that this will not be a panacea, but it could give a new sense of purpose to many teachers. It does not require a wholesale dismantling of the system (not that it’s a bad idea) but is a pragmatic start while the hierarchies come to the realisation that the world is changing faster than they can even conceive of adapting.

The mantra can be – Those who teach will not test, period.