Learning

Learning

Innovation in e-Health

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Yesterday afternoon, during the ITANS CEO Boot Camp in Halifax, we were treated to an excellent overview of e-Health in Canada. Dr. Mamoru Watanabe, of the University of Calgary, gave a quick survey of e-Health innovations from the clinical perspective. Currently, the federal government is funding initiatives to improve the IT infrastructure of the health care system. However, many primary care phyicians lack the resources and/or the know-how to take advantage of new IT systems.

Dr. Watanabe spoke of some marvels being developed in the health sector, such as inter-networked operating suites in Alberta, voice activated tools for surgery, robotics and – haptics [Defn: Of or relating to the sense of touch; tactile.]. For instance, haptics in surgical tools give specific tactile responses when cutting through different kinds of tissues, even at a distance. Thus, a surgeon can "feel" a procedure that is being done remotely.

Of more interest to those in IT is the new field of bibliomics, which is the linking of biological data with medical data. This field is driving innovation in customized medicine, where one size no longer fits all. The overall theme from Dr. Watanabe, and the panelists who followed him, is that there are many IT-related opportunities in the Canadian health care sector, including e-learning.

Information, Learning & Feedback

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If you have access to the Internet, then there is no shortage of information. For most formal learning settings, access to information is not a barrier. Therefore, I would suggest that content dissemination is not a major requirement of the instructor in any networked environment, and that includes schools, where students may have Internet access outside the classroom. Information is everywhere.

The recent post by Susan Nash at The eLearning Queen focuses on some of the ways that feedback, through active listening, can be given in an online class. I questioned Susan whether there were similarities with practise & feedback loops when learning a physical skill, as I had previously posted. Susan responded with some more insights and so the conversation continues.

My memory of formal teaching courses, in the military, at some professional development sessions or during my graduate studies, does not include much focus on the various types of feedback, and how best to use them. It seems to me that in this era of open source content, like MIT OCW or Google, then a major job of the instructor is to provide feedback at the appropriate times. Online learning is retrieving the master-apprentice model but with a twist, as the apprentice today may have access to more information (not necessarily knowledge) than the master. Instructors today need to master the teaching processes, not necessarily the content, but are our schools of education and our training programs preparing them for this environment?

Atlantic Wildlife Institute

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I have been volunteering at the Atlantic Wildilife Institute for just over two years. It started by helping with a funding proposal (I’ve written too many proposals to remember), and gradually I became the Director of Education. I help out with planning and fundraising when I have some spare time, but it hasn’t really been a hardship. On the other hand, Barry Rothfuss and Pam Novak, the founders, have dedicated their lives to the Institute. They often work 24 hours a day helping an animal in distress (as they did over the weekend with a moose), as well as the constant fund raising and operational issues to deal with. There are no full-time paid staff, so Pam and Barry have to take up all the slack, which they have been doing for the past nine years.

AWI is unique in that it is the only federally and provincially licensed facility in eastern Canada that can take in any and all types of wildlife. We have had moose, bears, seals, eagles and all other types of injured and orphaned animals. AWI is not just about saving these animals, as the hundreds of animals that pass through the facility are only a sampling of what is really happening in the environment. However, from the animals that arrive on our doorstep, AWI can identify key issues for public attention and response, such as animal-borne diseases and toxins in the environment. One wildlife care operation alone cannot address all of the distress factors affecting our wildlife, so AWI is also focused on education and community outreach. This is what attracted me to the organisation and keeps me with it.

To me, AWI represents how non-profit/charitable organisations can work to address issues that seem insurmountable. AWI does a lot of hands-on work with animals in distress, but it also provides an opportunity for veterinarians and vet techs to come on-site to learn more about wild animals. Veterinarians don’t see wildlife during their professional training and at AWI they get a chance to treat injured wild animals.

Our wildlife care services inform all of our work, but the critical part is in training and educating a growing network of supporters. This network includes environmentalists, businesses, resource companies, forestry workers, etc. There is no way that we can do all of this alone, and it’s not just about money – educating the public is the key. I think that this model, of action-based research and education, is a solid and sustainable model, and is what has kept the organisation going for the past nine years. Just addressing the symptoms of injured & orphaned wildlife, would not be enough.

At the Atlantic Wildlife Institute, I’ve been learning more than I’ve been teaching.

Blogs in Higher Ed

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Blogs in Higher Ed: Personal Voice as Part of Learning is a short article on four cases of blogs in higher education, including doctoral students, professionals, undergraduates and second language learners. The comments of the instructors and students make for a good read, and show the variety of reactions when a new technology is introduced into an older form (the university class). Some embrace it, some reject it and some learn to love it. However, the recommendations in the article miss the main point.

I think that the important lesson here is that good teaching and effective learning are the results of many factors. Blogs can be used to enhance the process, or they can distract from it. Missing from the recommendations are the links between the pedagogical framework, the instructors’ abilities, the learners’ capabilities and the technologies and tools available. I would suggest that if you wanted to increase self-reflection, and wanted to use blogs, then you might prepare the students with a framework, such as Marilyn Taylor’s learning cycle in formal learning – Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation, Equilibrium (see page 53 of this PDF for more on Taylor’s model – Adult Learning from Theory to Practice).

Any technology will have effects (Enhance, Retrieve, Reverse, Obsolesce) on the learning process, and no technology is truly neutral. But we still need to base any formal learning environment on some pedagogical framework, or we will continue to just grab the next technology for no real reason.

From e-Learning to s-Learning

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James Farmer has started an excellent conversation on learning management systems and how new systems can be developed on a looser configuration of individual controlled nodes by using blogging software. The general theme is that less management is better, and that individual learners could write all of their posts, assignments and papers from their own site, and these could be directed to each class as web feeds. The classes would aggregate the feeds from all the students and instructors. The beauty of this kind of system is that each student keeps all of his/her content, and it does not get locked away in an inaccessible archive of a centrally controlled LMS.

Boris Mann and Will Pate add their comments, especially from the Drupal perspective, with Will pushing for a move away from electronic learning to social learning. I think that a shift of focus (and development effort) away from the management aspects of learning and more on the social aspects of learning can only be positive for the learner.

We have the technology to do this, and Drupal only needs a few more functions in order to be a “learning community in a box”. It’s exciting to know that we are getting to the point of having a real alternative to the LMS. I have tried in the past year to convince some organisations to move away from the LMS model, but the alternatives have been a bit messy, especially for the IT department. Rob Paterson’s course at UPEI showed that an online course could work without an LMS. The development of an “off-the-shelf” social software tool, designed for formal learning interventions, could really kick-start a new direction for learning technologies.

Update — and the Drupal development community has begun to discuss the creation of a module for educational sites, starting with quizzes, but ending who knows where.

Pedagogical Praxis – Shaffer

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David Williamson Shaffer’s paper on Pedagogical Praxis: The professions as models for post-industrial education provides a theoretical model, with case studies, on how educational institutions can better bridge the gap between learning in formal education and learning in the workplace. These three studies show how relatively easy it is to ground a learning program in a post-industrial workplace context, by using what are today quite cheap and accesible technologies.

Perhaps the power of new technologies to bring professional practices closer to the purview of middle and high school students provides an opportunity to move beyond disciplines derived from medieval scholarship constituted within schools developed in the industrial revolution. Learning environments such as
those described here, based on professional learning practices and deliberately
constituted outside the traditional structure of schooling, suggest a
way to move beyond current curricula based on the ways of knowing of
mathematics, science, history, and language arts.

These case studies include students working as biomedical negotiators, online journalists and architects using complex mathematics. These three stories make this academic paper a delight to read.

For a more academic review, see this eLearning Review.

Update: Link fixed :-)

Theory & Practice for Innovation

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In reading Christensen, Anthony & Roth (2004) Seeing What’s Next, I found patterns linking three strategic innovation approaches.

First, in McLuhan for Managers, the authors synthesize much of Marshall McLuhan’s work, and provide a lens for managers and owners to make business decisions. The important piece of this book is how to use McLuhan’s laws of media to understand the changes that are possible with a medium. The authors suggest that it is in the retrieves quadrant of the
probes ” … we may be able to glean valuable clues as to the effects of the new medium from more easily observed effects of the old.” Understanding retrieval can give a clearer vision of signal versus noise.

Johansson, in The Medici Effect says that new businesses should look for reversals in order to find possibilities, especially at the intersection of fields or disciplines. These can result in order of magnitude business opportunities.

Christensen, also the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, gives new business entrants and incumbents a theory-based set of tools to understand and use disruptive innovations. One of the strategies for new businesses is to target non-core customers of the incumbents. These come in three categories (overshot, undershot and non-customers) and by targeting these customers entrants can avoid direct confrontation, while developing skills and expertise (swords) in areas outside the core business of the incumbents. Once the entrants have grown “under the radar”, they can grow to directly confront the incumbents.

This is an over-simplification of these three excellent books, but my intent is to grab your interest, as I see patterns in each book that reinforce each other, and I believe can be beneficial to your business, existing or new. Finally, Seeing What’s Next includes chapters on the healthcare and education industries, two fields of my own practice. The chapter on education was worth the price of the book for me.

Here is my first attempt at summarizing some of these concepts in a graphical form.

Why Moodle?

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From Global Literacy is an overview of comparisons of the Moodle learning system with several others. Moodle is multilingual, SCORM compliant, based on a constructivist pedagogical model and is free (as in free beer and free source code). We (Mancomm) have been using Moodle rather successfully with a group of Montreal area nurses, who are co-developing their knowledge base on a new nursing care methodology.

Via incsub

Thinking longer

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Via Jay Cross, are these comments from some of the most interesting and thought-provoking people in the world, through Edge: the World Question Center. The comments of Esther Dyson really struck a chord:

We’re living longer, and thinking shorter.
Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now.

As a consultant, you are often called in as a last resort, and asked to come up with a quick and pragmatic solution. Don’t bother us with details and an analysis, just get the job done. However, getting down to the root causes of a messy problem may take some time. Fixing systemic problems takes even more time and effort.

We have to learn how to slow down. This can be through regular time for spirituality, exercise, reading or socialising. Organisations should incorporate slow time into their workflow. I once read that in Japan it was OK to sit at your desk and read, whereas in North America we take that as a sign of having nothing better to do. As Socrates said, “The unreflected life is not worth living”. I will take “thinking longer” as a new year’s resolution.