Community Driven Renewable Energy

by

I’ve been helping to develop the business model for a sustainable energy investment co-operative in the Sackville area. We’re in start-up mode with Renew Coop and the cooperative is recruiting members to show that there is enough interest to attract larger investors. I like the idea of some day living in a completely sustainable region that is not dependent on fluctuating non-renewable resource prices and where there is an overall low impact on the environment.

RenewCoop has been formed to provide small, medium and large investors the opportunity to get involved in the development and ownership of renewable energy projects that directly benefit our region.  The timing is great, because the Government of New Brunswick, under the province’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, wants renewable sources to produce 33 per cent of the energy consumed by New Brunswickers by the year 2016. RenewCoop will be looking at ways to invest in renewable production, with potential projects in Wind Energy Production, Tidal Power Generation, Biodiesel, Hydrogen, Energy Efficiency and Conservation.

Membership costs $25 and we expect shares to be $10 each with a minimum purchase of 5 shares. The cooperative is aiming for 100 members by the end of January. If you’re still thinking about a New Year’s resolution, perhaps investment in sustainable energy is it.

Tools for Communities of Practice

by

The CP Squared online conference on Web 2.0 and communities of practice (via Nancy White) will be held during January 2006. In looking at the schedule, which focuses on tools, architecture and applications, I noticed that most of what is being featured is what we (Mancomm Performance) have integrated into a single Elgg application for the Sud-Lanaudière health region in Québec. Using only open source applications, this is the structure that we built:

Blogs & RSS Integral part of Elgg. RSS is very granular.
Wikis Integrated PMWiki each time a new community is created in Elgg
Tagging Automatic or created by the individual with Elgg, including a Tagcloud to see what’s happening
SNA, FOAF & Networking Integral part of Elgg and added an RSS calendar function
Podcasting & Audio Added a web music player to play self-created audio in blog posts
Mashups Nothing applicable
Interoperability Followed open standards so interoperabilty has been relatively easy. Working on connecting directly to Moodle.

This means that you can get an “almost” out of the box integrated community of practice platform that is free and open source. We even had to translate the entire system into French. Techies can connect through the Elgg development community for more information. Of course, the technology is the easy part in building growing a community of practice ;-)

Connecting formal & informal learning

by

Dave Tosh, co-creator of Elgg, has a model in progress of “how to facilitate the social interaction of learners and resources within the current architecture most institutions employ.” His two-layer model is similar to what Mancomm has developed for a healthcare institutional setting:

Layer 2 Personal Learning Landscape

e.g. Elgg

 Informal

Learner defined

Social
Layer 1 Course Management System

e.g. Moodle

 Formal

Institution defined

Task based

By using Elgg linked to a more formal system like Moodle you can provide traditional training & education, focused on specific tasks while encouraging emergent and informal learning in the less structured elgg learning landscape.

In a later post, Dave links to a concept map being developed by Andrew Chambers. This map shows the wide variety of tools currently available for informal learning, in order to organise, connect, create and share. These really are “small pieces loosely joined” for informal learning.

The trick will be in linking informal & formal systems so that the learner can easily move from one environment to another. This is probably the biggest challenge for institutions and their IT departments. If they aren’t linked, then learners may find less use for them. That’s why I continue to recommend the Elgg and Moodle communities because they are actively working on integrating these two layers.

Mancomm provides GPL Calendar to Elgg

by

Mancomm Performance Inc of Montreal (with whom I’m associated), have recently developed a calendar function for the elgg learning landscape system. The calendar plug-in allows multiple users to post events to a common calendar and in typical Elgg fashion restrict access by group, community or public/private. In the spirit of the open source community, Mancomm paid for the development of this software but has released it under the GPL. From the elgg developer blog:

We developed the ‘calendar’ unit for some of our customers, so that they can share their events with their Elgg friends, as well and in the same manner as they share existing blog posts and so on. We are now sharing (GPL) our calendaring unit with the larger Elgg community, as one good turn deserves another. :-)”

Yes, it is possible to be a small company, use open source software, give back to the community and still be profitable.

World is Flat – Streaming Video

by

I just listened to Thomas Friedman’s presentation at MIT which is available online as a streaming video. It’s over an hour long and covers the first three chapters of his book, The World is Flat, which I have previously mentioned. Having read the book, I’d recommend the video as a good overview (including some of the same stories) and then you can decide whether you want more information and purchase the book. Friedman is quite entertaining in this lecture and you can tell that he’s been on the speaking circuit for a while.

Learning Objects as Activities

by

Here is an example of the power of the Internet, blogs and asynchronous communication in the development of ideas. It starts with Teemu Leinonen’s post on the "Urinal as learning object". Not as strange as it sounds (just read the whole post) but the point is that objects aren’t learning objects until they’re used for learning. The post is picked up by Stephen Downes, which of course means that it’s beamed all over the world. Albert Ip then posts on the comments that have been made and adds his perspective, which, in my mind, puts it all together. The result of this conversation can now be shown as:

object + learning context = learning opportunity; and
learning opportunity + appropriate learning activity = learning

This makes me think about a previous post on teachers’ roles in learning & problem solving.  The key is to focus teachers, instructional designers, etc. on finding and facilitating "appropriate learning activities". These formulae indicate that educators should concentrate on stimulating action. Educational technologies based on these premises could actually enhance learning. Sure beats this model:

digital content + short-term memory testing = e-learning

Public Education (K-12) Resources

by

A friend of mine is going to be starting a very interesting & unique job in the educational sector; working for a private corporation (that’s all I can say for now, but hope to be able to tell more in the new year). We were discussing various sources of information and community nodes in this field so I thought I’d put down my references in one spot.
Here is my annotated webliography.

  • Good summative post on blogging in education, by Australia’s James Farmer.
  • James also has created free blog spaces for Educators and Students (a safe place to blog)
  • The platform that is, in my opinion, the best for building education communities and providing user-controlled access rights is Elgg.
  • An excellent resource on the science of brain-based learning is the Eide Neurolearning Blog.
  • The ultimate site on blogging in public education is by Will Richardson.
  • Scott Adams offers another perspective on technology in education and distance learning. I really like his Edutrain meme.
  • Albert Ip’s blog on how we should prepare our next generation for life in 2020 is always worth a read.
  • My own list of bookmarks on Public Education issues. I also have a list of online Student Resources, as recommendations for our two school-age boys.

I’m sure that I’ve missed many other good sources of information, so feel free to add your recommendations in the comments. I’ve done some work in the K-12 education sector but it’s not really my specialty.

Ubiquitously Connected & Pervasively Proximate

by

Mark Federman has made some interesting observations in a paper that he recently presented. Here’s an excerpt from “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, And Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies”:

The UCaPP world “ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate” is a world of relationships and connnections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

I presented this observation at the LearnNB quarterly meeting last week and I think that many people are in denial in the training & education field. These people see online learning systems as replications of the industrial classroom. Many don’t understand the premise that “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy”. The generation that knows only a world with the Internet has a very different perspective on knowledge acquisition, sharing, learning and who’s really in charge.

Local paper reports on blogging

by

I was interviewed this week by a reporter from the Telegraph-Journal, one of our provincial papers. The article, "Small business picks up on blogging", appeared in today’s Business Section and included a reference from Mark Federman of the McLuhan Institute. The article offered no new information for bloggers but it’s heartening to see some good press on blogging for business. Beats all those guys in pyjamas jokes [BTW, my PJ’s are blue]. As the journalist, Nina Chiarelli notes:

Web logs can be valuable as a firm’s "human face"

All in all a positive article but it could have been enhanced with some URL’s so that readers could further delve into the subject online. Hyper-linking to references is one of the key enhancements that blogs offer as a medium. Some other small business blogs, not mentioned in the article, can be found here.