Learning

Learning

The Medici Effect

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In reading Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, I was able to take away a lot of practical ways of increasing innovation especially by looking for the intersections between fields of practice. Kind of like my tag line ;-)

Johansson tells you to look for reversals which may give you insights into new ways of doing things. He uses a restaurant as an example, saying that the assumption is that restaurants have menus, but the reversal would be a restaurant without a menu. This would be one where, “The chef informs each customer what he bought that day … the diner selects the desired food items and the chef creates a dish from them, specifically for each customer.”

Looking for reversals is the same strategy that Federmann & deKerkhove advise in McLuhan for Managers; based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media. You might want to read these two books in tandem.

Johansson states that those with lots of good ideas are also those with lots of bad ideas. The important thing is to generate many ideas, and follow through on those that show promise. Innovation is the following through part. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”

Johansson suggests that the way to be creative is to start early and let the idea develop over time. Don’t wait till the last minute:

… we should start by working hard and in a focused manner on a problem or idea and develop it as far as possible. Then we should wait, move on to something else, and forget about the problem for a while. [and repeat]

The Medici Effect is a quick read and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend this book as a window on some new possibilities.

A Bridge from Nowhere

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Robert Paterson has taken the chasm analogy and applied it the population of PEI. He even has a new curve to show how the Island rates. New Brunswick and many other rural regions are not much different from what Rob describes.

I said yesterday that my work focused on bridging the gap between innovators/early adopters and the pragmatic majority. Rob’s premise is that government panders to the majority and ignores the innovative. Given that innovation is the current buzzword of bureaucrats and politicians, you would think it isn’t so. To take the analogy further, PEI (and many other regions) are so focused on the pragmatic (and visionless) majority that they have forgotten that ALL of the innovation comes from the left side of the curve. It’s not just bridges across the chasm that are needed, but something has to be there to get across. Kind of scary when you think about all of the innovators leaving for places that rate higher on the Creativity Index.

Rob’s solution – “If I was King, my Population Strategy would be to build the cultural container to attract the creative to come here and to keep our best young here as well.”

If I was King …

I would limit the centralized control of departments of education, and allow for independent solutions. The government should get out of the education delivery business, and get into the supporting learning business. Let people decide the best way that they want to learn. Learning and experimenting, not Education, will breed innovation.

But I’m not King; so I guess on a local level we have to support innovative, small companies that can attract and retain a few good people. One graduate, one dropout, one entrepreneur, one SME, and one new venture at a time. Let’s continue to help these folks and that will help all of us.

University Enrolment in Atlantic Canada

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On a previous post on University & College Trends, I questioned whether there was any data showing enrolment trends in Canadian universities. A recent report from the Association of Atlantic Universities shows some interesting figures. For instance, both Acadia and Mount Allison are down 7.4% and 6.8% respectively in undergraduate enrolments this past year. Overall Atlantic numbers are:

Full-time Undergraduate + 2.2%
Full-time Graduate + 1.9%
Part-time Undergraduate – 0.1
Part-time Graduate + 4%
Visa [international] students + 8.3%
Total First Year Students – 7.4%

The distribution is not even, but there appears to be a trend to more international students, which can only be beneficial for Atlantic Canada in the long run. I hope that our industries and government know how to capitalise on this.

The Past Year as a Free-Agent

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It’s been a typical consultant’s year for me — periods of feast and famine and never being able to plan more than a month in advance. An article by Rob Levinson in the Wall Street Journal shows that even with success, free-agents ask different questions than would a full-time employee:

In my past life as a full-time employee, compensation, bonus structure, benefits and title were all that mattered when comparing assorted job offers. What else was there? For a consultant, the criteria for determining next steps are less clear. What are the relevant factors for solo consultants trying to chart a career path?
…
That’s because I have serious personal questions for myself. Do I focus on partnering with my colleague Kate and building her consultancy? Should my consulting firm be my first — and only — priority? Should I chart a growth strategy and think about hiring employees?

From Michael Cage, I also learned business lesson #1 again, and I became seriously immersed in blogging — moving to my own hosted site after having used Blogger and Quicktopic. A blog is definitely the best marketing tool for free-agents and small businesses, and it’s not about publishing a diary, but more about the network effect that makes blogging so powerful for small business. As Jon Udell says:

We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.

Probably my greatest work achievement this year was in extending my network of friends, colleagues and fellow professionals through blogging in order to expand my own scope of learning and work. Knowing that I have this extended network makes me more optimistic about the coming year, because I know that I’m not alone :-)

eLearning is Dead

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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.

Design Learning that Digital Natives Will Love

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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.

Happiness is a choice

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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 :-)

“… learning technology is for me becoming increasingly empty”

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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.

Claroline 1.5.2

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I recently received an update on the Claroline open source learning system, which is available in 28 languages.
It is now at version 1.5.2, the administration has been improved since 1.3, and the developers consider it an easy system for those with little Internet experience.

LearnNB December Event

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The next LearnNB event is scheduled for December 8, 2004 at the WU Conference Center in Fredericton. The event is being held in conjunction with CSTD and the NB Animation Industry. Entitled Fun@Work, the day will feature Marc Prensky, whose presentation is Developing Learning that Digital Natives Will Love.

Registration information is available online and Marc’s presentation will be webcast for free via Elluminate.