Work is learning. Learning is the work.
A short interview with Guy Kawasaki [Author: The Art of the Start], by Blogfonk. Here is Guy’s response to the question, "what is your motto?":
I’m getting a lot of comment spam from some low-life who is sticking links to an internet gambling site on my blogs. They’re easy to find & erase with Drupal, but still a pain. I like Alan Levine’s solution to disrupt comment spammers, and perhaps I’ll enlist the help of the International Spam Counter Attack Force (SCAF):
I’m open to comments and criticism on my blog, but completely unrelated comments that link to a gambling site are not acceptable. Since I pay to maintain this site, it’s my editorial privilege to keep it clean. Here are the multiple hosts from which this roach posts:
17 Dec: And the roach struck again early this morning (already removed) – any Drupal experts have suggestions?
NetDimensions is a Hong Kong based LMS vendor. My post for today, eLearning is Dead, Long Live Learning, is as a guest on their blog. It’s not very positive about LMS vendors, but they posted it anyway.
These folks seem to have the right attitude for a sustainable business model in the learning field. They are self-financed (employee-owned), they have a real conversation going on their blog, and they say that "we don’t have to pretend to being more than we are or try to paint pictures of the LMS market as being more than it is". To me, this indicates a good client focus, and there a number of high profile clients noted on their main website. The recent blog post by Jay Shaw, CEO, on this year’s Online Educa in Berlin is worth a read.
For the community that actually reads my blog posts, here is the most popular content since I started blogging on this site in February:
Thanks for your interest and please excuse the low number of posts until I’m better – which should be soon :-)
Yan Simard has written a recap of Marc Prensky’s presentation yesterday on how to design learning that digital natives (mostly younger folks) will love. It was given to LearnNB and the web community via Elluminate. I would have written a review myself, but since I’m still injured, my typing time is limited. I think that Marc made some very good comments, such as stating that most e-learning is really e-teaching. Thanks Yan.
Dave Pollard can’t find a publisher for his book, Natural Enterprise. I have used parts of it in my own work and have found it to be a refreshing perspective on how to grow a business without sacrificing your values. You can read most of it online, and I’m sure that others have used it as well. I would gladly buy a copy, as it is destined to remain on the desk, not hidden on a dusty bookshelf, like The Fifth Discipline. Natural Enterprise ranks up there with The Art of the Start in usefulness for business planning.
My colleague at Mancomm Performance Inc, Pierre Harvey, uses a term to describe his field of study and work – Communautique. In North America, some people call this Community Networking, but Pierre’s definition means more than this English term conveys. He says that Communautique comes from the terms communication, community and networking, plus nautique or nautical/navigation. Communautique can be defined as the applied science of the analysis, design, co-creation and deployment of knowledge and understanding via networks. There is a strong cultural component as well.
Communautique is a multidisciplinary applied social science that links information sciences and communications theory. Communautique systems are not designed and built once, like traditional knowledge management systems, but provide a reference framework and a network architecture development cycle that adapts to the emergent needs of individuals and groups. It is the kind of methodology that leads to the creation of a network of "small pieces, loosely joined", instead of a monolithic system that individuals have to adapt to.
Blogs, wikis and socio-constructivist learning systems like Moodle are the current tools of choice for my colleagues who practice communautique. What I would like is a better term in English than community networking. Is there already one that I don’t know? Any ideas for a new term?
Bloglines est devenu disponible en français, et selon Bloglines:
Voici, vous pouvez organiser vos blogues en français maintenant.
No matter what happens, it’s up to us on how we deal with it. Our own happiness is our own choice.
Learning is the same. It’s up to the individual to learn. Once the learner is motivated (internally) then instruction is really simple. I’m told that in the early days of the Peace Corps, the new recruits taught themselves languages while they were waiting for their new assignments. No curriculum. No learning outcomes. Just a few books and some limited expertise, but many people learned because they were motivated. As in learning, once we decide that we will be happy, then the rest is a heck of a lot easier.
Nothing profound here, but I needed to reiterate it :-)
Stephen Downes’ Buntine Oration has been referred to many times in many blogs. Presented last month in Australia, Stephen quickly chronicles some of the major themes during his career in learning technology.
I can closely relate to his journey, as I’ve arrived at similar conclusions, via a somewhat different route. I learnt the trade while in the military, which helped me to develop the rigour necessary for large-scale instructional design, and I worked on multi-million dollar projects that could afford the newest learning technologies. I know that bigger is not better.
Stephen covers the early development of web-based learning systems, and the hope that they fostered for a new worldwide, open learning environment. This was quickly co-opted by technology hawkers who moved the new “e-learning” industry to the low hanging fruit of linear courses online, within a proprietary box. For instance, the vision of constructivists like Dave Jonassen, who tried to implement an instructional design model for problem-based learning on the web, never received the support of any major LMS vendors (you know who you are), as they were only interested in selling more licenses. Learning was just the mot du jour to make a buck.
Stephen finishes his essay with a new vision of hope for distributed, collaborative learning. Simple, cheap technologies like blogs and RSS are enabling a decentralised, user-defined learning experience.
You may not have seen some of the things I’ve talked about in this paper, things like learning objects, learning management systems, content packaging, federated search and learning design, but if you haven’t, you will. Soon.And you’ll probably hear about them from a sales representative or network administrator or supervisor (if you hear from your students, it will be about blogs and RSS, iPods and online games, or if they’re honest, file sharing networks).
And if the sales representative comes to you and tries to sell you an LMS or (worse) an LCMS, ask them why you have to pay them so much money for something the web and web browsers do for free.
If the sales representative tries to sell you online course and lessons, ask them whether it supports random access so students can use it when they want, even if they’re not at school, or ask them where you can access the dynamic feed with daily updated content, or how easy it is to place images from the course content in your blog.
If the sales representative tries to sell you learning design, ask for the open ended improv version, the game outliner, the simulation editor. When he shows you the software, ask him where the student content goes in, ask him to show you the blog aggregator.
If you are asked to join a federated search network, ask the providers why are they afraid of the market place, what content are they keeping out, where the third party metadata is.
And when they speak of your students as human resources, knowledge workers, consumers or target markets, ask the sales representative if he remembers when he was a child, his mind a little network, small and fragile, but open and free, an ecosystem ready and wanting to support a jungle of diversity and growth.
The Buntine Oration 2004, presented by Stephen Downes, is an exceptional synthesis of some of the major issues on learning and the web, and a good place to start thinking about tomorrow.