Wikis Support F2F

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A few (many?) years back it was unthinkable that anyone would register and pay for a conference via the Web. Then Web only conferences came along. Face-to-face conferences gave out CD-ROM’s of proceedings, and later followed up with web-access for conference attendees. Vendors can now see their booth space on the Web and position it relative to their competition – for a price. Conferences also precede events and follow-up with mailing lists and contact information. The conference media keep changing.

The latest that I’ve heard of is from Eugene Kim, who discusses the use of wikis as a way to tap the energy produced at face-to-face meetings. It’s not as easy as just placing a wiki on the web and everyone will merrily contribute to it, but Kim offers a lot of good advice. My own experience with wikis is limited, but we were successful in using them as a way for physically distributed social workers to stay in touch and develop policies & procedures. It may take a lot of of hand-holding and support to get someone to the "ah ha" moment of understanding the potential of wikis, but after that moment you have to run to keep up to them.

Measuring Organisational Effectiveness

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I had previously mentioned Marshall McLuhan’s work in the context of forecasting for the elearning industry. A quick review of McLuhan’s Laws of Media tetrad:

Enhancement. What does the medium enhance, extend, enlarge or intensify?

Obsolescence. What does it make obsolete? When an old medium enters its obsolescence phase, it becomes more ubiquitous, often changing from a utilitarian to a recreational role (e.g. fountain pens).

Reversal. When something is extended beyond the limits of its potential, its characteristics are often reversed. For example, cars which promote greater freedom, when multiplied to the extreme can result in gridlock.

Retrieval. What medium that was previously rendered obsolete does the old medium retrieve from the past? This is usually something from the distant past.

Mark Federman shows how these laws could also be used as a metric to measure organisations:

The Laws of Media in particular allow us to anticipate and articulate the totality of effects, both those that we wish to bring into being, and those we might wish to avoid.
Organizational effectiveness can then be expressed (as a percentage or any other appropriately scientific measure) as the degree to which effects deemed desirable can be achieved, those deemed undesirable can be avoided or mitigated, and effects that were originally unanticipated can be anticipated prior to their occurrence and achieved/avoided as appropriate. Thus, with this conception, effectiveness measures the leadership’s ability to anticipate, execute, and perform the inevitable mid-course corrections as new information becomes available. Seems pretty effective to me!


So the measure of effectiveness could be whether an organisation was able to identify when its technology product was "extended beyond the limits of its potential" and shifted its focus to a new product or service. For instance, has Learning Management System technology become extended so far that it no longer manages training and educational requirements, and now hinders the sharing of learning experiences? Would an effective organisation shift away from a reliance on pushing this technology?

McLuhan’s tetradic lens judges everyone in the same way.

Innovation for eLearning

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In my previous post Community is King, I summarized Rob Paterson’s post on Reed’s Law and put it into the context of the elearning industry. Dave Pollard has added to Rob’s view of Reed’s Law and discusses what customers really value – service for the long-run.

What’s especially interesting is that customers know that high-value service cannot be outsourced (see my Dell story for an explanation of the internal distrust and finger-pointing that outsourcing inevitably produces) or offshored (no matter how competent they are, people in India can’t give me good service simply because they’re not here looking at the product that doesn’t work).

My take on this would be to stay as close as possible to your clients. Not just in terms of proximity but in understanding the culture.

Dave Pollard goes on to look at James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, and combines Reed’s Law to come up with two new processes in his Innovation Model. One is to help to create user communities, and use the wisdom of the crowd, as eBay has done. This means that you have to let the community self-define, and you stay out of the way. No mean feat for control freeks. The other is to poll the community/crowd in order to determine what next innovation will fly. This of course requires a mechanism that will be unobtrusive and used by the majority. Kind of like opting in to Google rankings.

For elearning companies, I think that innovation with this model is possible. We have seen some of it in the academic community, but it too has its walls and silos. Open source software is one way of keeping the community open; in that no one owns the structure, and will not feel locked-in. Since product price descends quickly to zero, then start at a zero product price anyway. When the product is free, you can’t complain. And if you have the source code, don’t complain, fix it.

Just using open source software will not be enough. You need to foster community. Blogs or other two-way communication tools can help communication, but what will you blog about? You have to find out what’s really important to your market. eBay found out that people want a trusted method to buy and sell things. An elearning example could be – what are the limitations of using Google for your learning needs? What could you add on to a Google search that gives just a little more learning value? This could be anything between the results of a web search and a structured online course. Anyway, the key seems to be to offer good service at a reasonable cost, to a community to which you are committed, that you understand and support. Easy, n’est-ce pas?

Freedom for Learning Innovations

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From Elliot Masie:

Urgent: Freedom for Learning Innovations! Dear Learning & Training Colleagues:I am appealing to you for immediate help to stop a disruptive set of
lawsuits that threaten the heart and soul of the e-Learning innovation
process.

In a nutshell, one small company has applied for and received a number of
patents that they claim stake out their ownership of a wide range of the
processes underlying e-Learning. For example, they claim to have patented
the process of tracking learning based on jobs or test performance. In
addition, they claim to own the patents that break documents into learning
objects; and even to use one computer to access learning data from another
computer via a network.

They have gotten the patents and have filed multi-million dollar suits
against several of the e-Learning companies. A few of the e-Learning
companies have settled to avoid the huge cost of litigation and the fear
of losing in a trial. In conversations with the CEO’s of Learning and
Technology companies, it is clear that these lawsuits are going to add
increased costs that will be passed along to the customers, as well as
have a chilling effect on the e-Learning innovation process.

We MUST join together to overturn these patents by showing them to be
false and without basis. The company that is filing these suits is
called IpLearn (www.iplearn.com) They are a company with no products and
a patent attorney. Iplearn calls their business activity:
“intellectualware” They filed their patents between 1996 and 1999.

[You may contact them at – info@iplearn.com]To overturn these highly questionable patents what the industry needs to
do is to gather a full set of “Prior Art” that documents that e-Learning,
learning technology, adaptive testing and network based learning pre-dated
the papers written by these patent holders.

The MASIE Center is organizing a Freedom of Learning Innovation Project
with 2 simple goals:

1) Build a public domain listing of any individuals or companies that have
“Prior Art” that can be used to defend against these claims. If you have
printed manuals, software or other documentation showing the use of these
processes prior to 1996 please contact us. If you were personally
involved as a developer, customer or academic with adaptive testing or
network based learning prior to 1996, please contact us. We will build a
reference list of resources that can be used by any company defending
against the IpLearn lawsuits.

2) We want to provide STRONG SUPPORT for e-Learning companies to NOT
SETTLE these suits. As customers and users of e-Learning, we do not want
our vendors subject to this process of intimidation. There are clear
needs for reform of the Patent Process that allows these questionable
patents to be granted. But, in the meantime, customers of e-Learning
vendors must give them the support and backbone to fight and defend
against these suits. Tell your suppliers to join together to fight back!

Please send me an email if you can help in any way.

Yours in learning,

Elliott Masie

President, The MASIE Center
Founder, The e-Learning CONSORTIUM

What is happening in the USA will affect us in Canada. Our industry has reached a sad state of affairs :-(

The Petition for Users’ Rights

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The Petition for Users’ Rights is being circulated for presentation to Parliament. Whether you agree or disagree with this petition, there is no doubt that most Canadians are unaware of the intricacies of copyright law. Here is the petition’s text:

To the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled

We, the undersigned residents of Canada draw attention of the House to the following:

THAT the Copyright Act is properly recognised as being a careful balance between the rights of
creators and the rights of the public (including viewers, readers and listeners);

THAT the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously affirmed this view in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law
Society of Upper Canada;

THAT digital technologies have recently given copyright holders the ability to upset the balance in the
Copyright Act by preventing Canadians from accessing works for purposes that have been legally
granted to them;

THAT the creation of original works is nourished by wide accessibility of earlier works, including a
vibrant public domain;

THAT dissemination of cultural ideas requires that they be preserved in a form that is accessible to
future generations; and

THAT historically consultations regarding changes to the Copyright Act have mostly taken place with
creators, intermediaries and only some special users (such as educators and librarians)

THEREFORE, your petitioners call upon Parliament to ensure generally that users are recognised as
interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about proposed changes to the Copyright Act and to
ensure in particular that any changes at least preserve all existing users’ rights, including the right to use
copyrighted materials under Fair Dealing and the right to make private copies of audio recordings. We
further call upon Parliament not to extend the term of copyright; and to recognise the right of citizens to
personally control their own communication devices.

For further reading go to iCommons Canada, Creative Commons or my previous post on copyright in education.

[Also, here is a UK perspective on music and copyright.]

Via Steve.

Blogs – The Killer App

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Maish Nichani, author of the well-known elearning post, has contributed this recent article on blogs:

Weblogs. They are everywhere. This humble publishing technology is proving to be the silent killer application of this decade. In this article I define what weblogs are and explore the malleable attributes that make them so remarkably flexible under various contexts.

This is a good read if you are new to blogs and wondering what they can do for your business. For instance Maish covers this year’s best blog pitch event, which sought out a succinct business rationale for blogging. He also refers to some excellent blog site examples and has links to blogs for project management. This is a good place to start on your understanding of the blog medium.

Some of my previous posts on blogging including one on blogging’s similarity to speaking enagagements and blogging as a tool for knowledge work.

Community is King

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Rob Paterson recently discussed Reed’s Law and the Support Economy. Here are some selections from Reed’s Law, but you might want to read all of it.

First:

In networks like the Internet, Group Forming Networks (GFNs) are an important additional kind of network capability. A GFN has functionality that directly enables and supports affiliations (such as interest groups, clubs, meetings, communities) among subsets of its customers. Group tools and technologies (also called community tools) such as user-defined mailing lists, chat rooms, discussion groups, buddy lists, team rooms, trading rooms, user groups, market makers, and auction hosts, all have a common theme – they allow small or large groups of network users to coalesce and to organize their communications around a common interest, issue, or goal. Sadly, the traditional telephone and broadcast/cable network frameworks provide no support for groups.

Then:

What’s important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, “content is king.” That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe’s Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.).

Now:

I’d like to close with a speculative thought. As Francis Fukuyama argues in his book Trust, there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which he defines culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations. There is a clear synergy between the sociability that Fukuyama discusses and the technology and tools that support GFNs-both are structural supports for association. As the scale of interaction grows more global via the Internet, isn’t it possible that a combination of social capital and GFN capital will drive prosperity to those who recognize the value of network structures that support free and responsible association for common purposes?

Rob’s take on this is that, “What he is saying is that the big value to come will not be in selling a thing, not in having a broadcast network or even a association network but will come from facilitating the development of communities.” Rob specifically names eBay as successful and Dell as unsuccessful in creating communities.So how would you include this insight into your business strategy? Let’s say that you are an elearning company:

  • Should you focus on developing content? Apparently not.
  • Should you provide a learning portal or sell learning objects? Probably not a good investment.
  • Should you find ways to connect people and address their learning and performance needs? Yes.

So content is not king. Context may be important, but community is the new king (queen, ace, or whatever you prefer). The next ultimate learning solution may be the ability to link trusted experts with novices and help communities of practice to develop. Blogs may be a precursor, and the next technology to exploit this could be an eBay model that allows for apprenticeship in a virtual, caring environment.

Typology Maps for Learning

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I have referred to Don Clark’s site many times over the years, as it’s a great resource for instructional design and educational theories. I recently noticed that he has updated it with typology maps, some under construction, so you can watch them evolve. Check out Big Dog and Little Dog’s Bowl of Biscuits and see for yourself. I like the Performance Typology Map.

Now wouldn’t it be nice to have a wikipedia of typology maps that could be collaboratively developed?

Browser Security

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The web browser is ubiquitous, and I had previously mentioned my security concerns about IE. From Mozilla comes this news:

The Mozilla Foundation today announced the Mozilla Security Bug Bounty Program, an initiative that rewards users who identify and report security vulnerabilities in the open source project’s software. Under the new program, users reporting critical security bugs – as judged by the Mozilla Foundation staff – will collect a $500 cash prize. The new initiative was launched with funding from leading Linux software developer Linspire, Inc., and renowned Internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.

This approach is better than hiding security issues until someone cracks the code and then trying to quickly patch the problem. Open source just makes more sense.

Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

The Business of Learning

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My friend Hal Richman said the other day that he is now in the business of working with clients who are excited about the potential of learning, and who want to see real results from learning initiatives. Working with an auto mechanic view of filling people’s heads with "training" is not where he wishes to spend his time. Life is always short, and Hal’s writings on critical health issues can attest to this. I like Hal’s attitude, and am glad to be his business partner. Another perspective for entrepreneurs comes from Tim O’Brien:

"Finding solutions for your clients and not clients for your solutions is the fastest way to success, (and the least expensive too)." It is much easier and effective to keep a current client happy than it is to find a new client. Strong, long relationships are a part of business longevity.

Life as an entrepreneur is a balance between finding solutions for your clients and just working on solutions until the right clients come along. Beating your head against a brick wall trying to sell the latest product/service mix can be a waste of time.

Establishing relationships of trust and solving problems together makes more sense in this complex world of inter-related systems. Once you have trust, you can work together to solve problems; or you can recommend someone else; or at least you can say that you cannot do it. Once trust is established, your client knows that you are not trying to sell something, but are doing what you believe is best. Within a trusting business relationship, you might actually be allowed to screw up once in a while – and so will your client.

Markets are conversations, and conversations coupled with action will develop trust. What more do you need?