Learning Design as Gardening

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Jay’s recent post on Another way of Looking at Instructional Design connects well with Rob’s post on Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Jay moves from the traditional ADDIE model of instructional design to a garden metaphor:

Gardeners don’t control plants, and managers don’t control people. The most that either can do is nurture growth by supplying nutrients and pulling weeds. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.

Learning is a continuous process, not a fill-er-up course and you’re on your way. The garden metaphor could go a long way in changing attitudes about learning and our approach to training and educational design.

It’s Your Turn, New Brunswick

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Massachusetts has led the way in embracing open standards, many of which are used in open source platforms and applications. According to CIO Today:

The State of Massachusetts is migrating to open-source software for all government documents. The move will come at the expense of Microsoft and other proprietary technology providers.
The latest iteration of the state’s technical reference guidelines states that the OpenDocument format will become the de facto platform for text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents produced by the government to ensure future access to the records.

OpenOffice.org uses the Open Document format. It is open source, free and with the impending release of version 2.0 (now in Beta Release 2), even easier to use. Just converting to OOo could save a significant amount in licensing fees and allow anyone, anywhere to use the same office suite for free.
New Brunswick’s "e" initiatives come under the umbrella of eNB. In looking at the site, as well as the latest draft of the eNB Action Plan, I cannot find any reference to open standards – a critical component for long-term accessibility to our own data. So come on New Brunswick, open up.
Update: And one more reason why standards are important is that – "The poor people from New Orleans and the Gulf, who drastically require access [to] the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] website can only do so with IE on Windows!" As Doc Searls puts it:

Without standards how would the Meter, a Gallon of gasoline or water or the weight of gold be measured? How many dead or hobbled sites does it take before your company wakes up and smells the truth?? I sincerely hope Mr. Balmer and Mr. Gates read web blogs. If they do, please make sure they see this.
We must comply to W3C standards. The whole world needs them. We have a responsibility to everyone, even the one who needs our help in such troubled times.

Small (Learning) Pieces Loosely Joined

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Rob Wall talks about what he learnt after his DIY Learning presentation. In his OPML presentation (click on the page to continue the 8 page slide show) on eLearning Processes Using Small Technologies Loosely Joined, Rob quickly goes over the argument against monolithic systems that purport to do everything. The major components of small pieces for learning are – blogs, wikis and RSS. The key message here, which I agree with, is that "The components of the DIY eLearning System are the Learning Objects".

Remember – Any digital resource that can be reused to support learning
A blog is a reusable digital portfolio
  • easy content entry
  • comments and reflections by peers
  • student work is published to the world
A wiki is a reusable digital whiteboard
  • Monitor students work on reports as they are working
  • Give feedback instantaneously
  • Publish knowledge to the world

This is still a difficult message to get past many educational institutions and training organisations. You don’t have to spend a lot on the technology. You need to focus on getting the people and processes aligned so that learning happens. Save the money that you would spend on an LCMS and put it into the time to let people develop processes that work for their unique contexts.

Gas up or plug in?

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An interesting dichotomy is appearing in our world. The price of communication is decreasing while the price of transportation is increasing. Most of our transportation systems rely on oil and it is becoming more expensive to travel any distance. At the same time, many of us have the luxury of cheap global communications, with fixed monthly long-distance rates, e-mail and more recently – voice over IP.
I’m wondering if the recent price increases in gas will finally push us into new models of work. Some organisations allow for tele-commuting and there are virtual workers with satellite offices spread all over the world, but the norm is still the worker going to the workplace. For some this is a necessity, but in many cases it’s a job requirement to ensure that employees are kept under control.
Working at a distance – with the Internet as my medium and software as my tools – has been my work reality for a few years. It takes some skill and knowledge to work virtually but I sure am glad that I no longer have my 110 km (68 mile) daily commute with gas at $CA 1.30 per litre (=$US 4.15 per gallon).

Blog Day 2005

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In honour of Blog Day 2005, here are some new blog recommendations, not necessarily to do with learning, work & technology:
At the intersection …
by Jillaine Smith, it’s "An inquiry into the intersection of strategic planning, Internet communications, leadership development and organizational effectiveness…"  – I also like the name ;-)
Le Blog de Cyber-Langues
Le colloque Cyber-Langues 2005 se tient cette année à Artigues-près-Bordeaux du mardi 23 au jeudi 25 août 2005, coordonné par Domingo Bayon-Lopez. Cette rencontre estivale informelle a pour thème principal “Pratiques concrètes et usages transférables : enseigner et apprendre les langues avec les TIC” de manière à privilégier le rapprochement entre collègues utilisateurs et collègues désireux d’en savoir davantage sur les apports des TIC pour les élèves.
The Soap Blog
Eie Flud’ is our small company that makes and sells luxury handmade toiletries and natural botanical perfumes, based in Melton Mowbray – we have a workshop and shop at Staunton Harold Hall, Ashby de la Zouch and shop in Uppingham, Rutland.
Stone Creek Coffee Roasters
"At Stone Creek Coffee Roasters, we work hard to create amazing coffee." And what can be wrong with that?
The Mobile Eye Guy
By Ben Ramsey; "Here is where you can read articles and ask questions about the Eyewear Industry that you were afraid to ask or did ask but didn’t get answered at a chain store."

Oregon Targets Open Source Business

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I have suggested this strategy to economic development folks in  Atlantic Canada for several years now, especially for learning-related OS. Open source can be a real accelerator for smaller players, as the barriers to market entry are much lower. It fell on deaf ears though.
Anyway, here’s what the Oregonian has to say:

Gov. Ted Kulongoski pledged Tuesday to do his part to make Oregon an attractive place for open-source software development, promising to raise the state’s profile within the open-source movement and to raise the movement’s profile inside Oregon.
"This is a growing segment of Oregon’s economy, and it’s the future. And it’s little-known outside the industry," Kulongoski told a roundtable discussion of 20 leaders from the state’s open-source community.
The governor said Oregon would contribute $40,000 in state economic development funds to help hire a "coordinator" to promote the state’s disparate open-source activities and reach out to businesses and software developers thinking about doing business in Oregon.

Gloria Gery on Performance

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I read Gloria Gery’s Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) in 1994. At the time, I was responsible for training development on a helicopter that the Canadian military had just purchased. EPSS became a key reference book for my approach to training design and the later creation of a specification for computer-based and web-based training. The focus of our team became much more one of performance versus training, and luckily I found that air crew were very open to the idea of performance support.

Jay Cross and Tony O’Driscoll have just written an excellent review on Gloria’s contribution to the work, learning, performance field. According to Jay:

The first time I heard Gloria speak, seven years ago, she provided the mantra of my efforts, “Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”

In my experience as both an internal and an external consultant, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. Gloria Gery was ahead of her time, as there is still a shortage of good references on how to develop performance-centred workplace interventions. EPSS Revisited is a more recently published book on the subject but as I have noted there are few how-to resources on EPSS and fewer on workflow learning.

In the words of Gloria Gery:

Performance Support focuses on work itself while training focuses on the learning required to do the work. Integrating resources in the workplace is inevitable, and the need is urgent. Filtering resources so people get the tools and resources they need while actively working is the goal. Work process and roles are the primary filters. The mechanisms vary: portals, performance-centered workflow interfaces, enterprise applications, integration projects, etc, but what’s important is that performer be able to name that tune in one note, to perform in exemplary fashion.

Natural Capitalism Without Venture Capital

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Business Opportunities Weblog found this article  from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the fact that few companies actually receive their funding from venture capitalists:

In fact, a recent report from Babson College and the London School of Business concluded that fewer than one in 10,000 companies in the United States receive their initial funding from venture capital firms. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report also found that entrepreneurs provide 65 percent of their startup capital, with the rest of the funding typically coming from friends, family or co-workers.
"If self-funding by entrepreneurs and informal investments dried up, entrepreneurship would wither and die," the authors wrote.

This data supports the model of the Natural Enterprise developed by Dave Pollard, one that I have used and counselled its use for some start-ups. Dave advocates organic financing:

Natural Enterprise differs from traditional business (even traditional entrepreneurial business) in two critical ways:
  • Where the traditional business develops its product, mass produces it, and then advertises to create demand for the product, Natural Enterprises start by identifying unmet customer needs, developing customized solutions, then delivering to the pre-qualified customers, and marketing virally.
  • Where the traditional business has a hierarchical organization structure and common shares, with control of the business often wielded by corporations or people other than those who run it, Natural Enterprises are flat and unincorporated, controlled equally by their members.

Is this the real form of capitalism, especially for Internet-based and small businesses?

Skype opens up

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Last week, Google Talk was all over the news. However, Skype has not been standing still:

Skype, the pioneering Global Internet Communications Company, which offers free high-quality phone calls to anyone with an Internet connection, is preparing to mark its second anniversary next week by opening up its platform to anyone who wants to integrate Skype’s presence and instant messaging services into their website or application. By opening up Skype’s platform to the web, it will now be simple for anyone to connect to Skype’s fast growing member base, which has already passed more than 51 million people in just 2 years.