Learning

Learning

Professional Development – Cheap

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As a free agent, I’m always on the lookout for professional development oppotunities, especially low or no cost ones.

  • Learning Economics Group – Free membership is available to this non-profit focused on the business metrics of learning in larger organisations. The telephone/ppt presentations are quite informative, and you get to link to some smart and innovative people. Sign up for information about monthly meetings, discussion boards and shared resources.
  • Business Process Trends – this website and the accompanying newsletter links many business process methodologies together.
  • Synchronous Web Events on e-learning, by Horizon Live
  • The e-Learning Guild has some free and some fee-based resources and events
  • ISPI‘s Performance Xpress has many good, free articles on performance improvement.
  • The Knowledge@Wharton Newsletter is a free service of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It covers knowledge management and business issues.
  • LearningTimes.org is an open community for education and training professionals. There are various learning events offered.
  • Work-Learning Research makes its publications and other research-based information available through its website at.
  • Jay’s Emergent Learning Forum, online or onsite.

Go ahead and add your own recommendations.

Five Balls

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Here is a great metaphor on life;

Each of us is given five balls. One is rubber and four are glass. The rubber ball is work. If you drop it, it will always bounce back. The other four glass balls are family, friends, health and integrity. If you drop them, they are shattered. They won’t bounce back.

From Worthwhile [and thanks to Will for referring this group blog to me].

Blogs are Personal

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I’m currently managing a few blogs. One is for a community of practice focused on elearning for R&D. It doesn’t get much traffic, and so far I’m the only one to post. Another one is a joint effort, but there aren’t many posts. I noticed that my colleague Hal has not made many posts on this one either, but is writing for his own blog.

My experiences confirm (to me anyway) that blogging is personal. You can’t really just dip into it because you won’t be passionate, and your readers will know it – and leave. You also have to feel that you have ownership of the content. This blog gets the most hits of any of my blogs, even more than some of my previous blogs. I don’t think that group blogging will take off; an exception being Many2Many. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and blogs seem best for personal, passionate individual dialogue (is that an oxymoron?). Personally, I blog to connect with others and for the knowledge management aspects of blogging. It keeps a lot of my thoughts and ideas together.

Learning …

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I’ve been on my own for just over a year, and as I had a couple of days off over the holiday weekend, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned, or confirmed, this past year:

  • Learning: is a process, not a product — subject-based teaching is a mistake — we have to focus on process skills like metacognition, problem solving and collaborating, because the subjects will change. I first realized this through Kieran Egan’s writing, and it has been reconfirmed many times.
  • Work: Markets are conversations — it’s only through conversation that we begin to understand each other — success comes when producers and users understand each other, and help each other.
  • Technology: It’s a world of ends, and innovation happens on the edges — look at the edges to find opportunities (but not traditional financing).
  • All Three: Marshall McLuhan was right, especially regarding the Laws of Media.

These are the messages that are staying with me.

Goals of Public Education

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Jeremy Hiebert makes a good point about evaluating the goals of public education.

How well would you do on a Grade 11 algebra exam right now? How’s your current knowledge of your country’s political history? Photosynthesis? Even those of us who remember some of this stuff would have a hard time explaining how the "knowledge" had helped us in any meaningful way. Educational reformers would tend to agree that the system is not achieving its goals (maybe has never achieved them), but the solution isn’t to do more of the same thing … it’s time to question the goals themselves.

I agree that most public education tests the wrong thing. On Kirkpatrick’s scale; the public school sector would get to Level 2 (Learning), but we should be focusing on Level 4 (Results), or Phillips’ Level 5 (ROI). But it’s not even as simple as that.

We have to question the goal of public education itself – is it to develop better citizens, better thinkers, better individuals, or better workers? As Kieran Egan showed in The Educated Mind, some of these goals compete with each other. We cannnot ask our schools to help our children develop good behaviour, learn thinking skills and pick up workplace skills – for a workplace that has yet to be created. Schools should concentrate on what they can do best – develop thinking skills. A second area could be physical skills – Mens sana in corpore sano.

This lack of focus, and being pulled in many directions by every special interest group, ensures that our public schools never have a core area of focus. If we, as a society, can give the schools a mandate to develop cognitive skills (and we will take care of the behaviourial and social issues) then our shools can have something that can and should be measured. Until the mandate is clear, the results will be unclear.

Copyright in Education

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Via Mark Oehlert is this article from the Toronto Star by Michael Geist on copyright law in Canada.

The challenge facing Canada’s parliamentarians and copyright policy makers is they must find a way to reconcile these opposing visions [Internet as distribution channel versus Internet as creation medium]. The Supreme Court of Canada has indicated that a balanced approach is to be the guiding objective in that regard, noting in one recent case that “excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.

According to Geist, our elected representatives in the Bulte committee (part of the Standing Committe on Canadian Heritage), have not taken the time and effort to arrive at a unique Canadian solution for copyright in the education sector, but “… rather than working toward a balanced and limited Internet exception for education, the Bulte committee simply considered the competing proposals presented by educational groups and rights holder groups and recommended the latter proposal.”

The section of Bulte’s report on technology-enhanced learning is interesting. Instead of recommending to “Amend the Copyright Act to clearly state that the “fair dealing” defence in section 29 applies to education and teaching purposes, in addition to research or private study, review or news reporting”, the committee recommended:

… that the Government of Canada put in place a regime of extended collective licensing to ensure that educational institutions’ use of information and communications technologies to deliver copyright protected works can be more efficiently licensed. Such a licensing regime must recognize that the collective should not apply a fee to publicly available material (as defined in Recommendation 5 of this report).

More efficient licensing is not going to help us provide the access to quality online education that we need. It will only increase the costs of development for educational institutions. But the federal government is not responsible for education; the provinces are. These extra costs will be foisted on the Provincial departments of education and our universities.

CSTD-NB Meeting

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The NB elearning Industry and the New Brunswick chapter of CSTD will be holding a meeting on 24 June in Fredericton in the Chancellor’s Room at the Wu Center UNB Campus – Fredericton, 10:00 AM – 2:30 PM. Coffee starts at 8:30 AM. On the agenda:

  • International Strategic Plan for eLearning NB
  • Election of CSTD-NB Executive

The interim executive asks:

Do you have any industry issues that you would like to have addressed leading up to and or at the next industry meeting?

Personally, I would encourage all training & development professionals as well as those interested in learning issues to join the CSTD chapter. You can join online, at the CSTD website. This is the first time that I can remember that we have a professional association for our field. A few years back, some of us had considered creating a chapter of ASTD or ISPI. It’s good to have a Canadian organisation that we can belong to now.

Please consider joining, and please consider attending the general meeting. Our chapter will only be as strong as our members.

Here is the agenda (for those not on the e-mail list):

9:30 AM – Learning Industry Networking Breakfast

10:00 AM – Opening, Steve Kelly, CSTD NB

10:03 AM – Presentation: ASTD Expo – Background/Overview – Steve Kelly and Ben Watson, VP CSTD NB

10:15 AM – R & D Community of Practice, Harold Jarche, Jarche Consulting

10:25 AM – LearnNB Web-site, George Butters, Web Developer

10:35 AM – Presentation: International Marketing Strategy – Development Plan and Implementation Alternatives, Gary Stairs, President, CSTD NB

11:05 AM – Break

11:20 AM – Group Discussions (Marketing Strategy Recommendations)

11:45 AM – Group Responses

12:00 PM – Learning Industry Networking Lunch

12:45 PM – Election of Officers

1:00 PM – Announcements/Soap Box

1:20 PM – LearnNB Executive Activities – Alan MacAulay, Treasurer

1:30 PM – Presentation: Innovations Symposium 2005 – Krista Kennedy, Interim Project Manager

1:40 PM – Q&A followed by Adjournment

There is also a discussion document that was sent by Steve Kelly. You can ask me or Steve to e-mail you the PDF, entitled – Four Key Recommendations for the NB Learning Industry 2004-2007.

Great Value from NRC’s e-Learning Group

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Seb Paquet, who works at the National Research Council’s e-learning group, with Stephen Downes and others, has been asked to quantify his impact on the research community. Personally, I see the connections that Seb and Stephen make on a daily basis. They are two critical nodes in the research dialogue of the e-learning community of practice.

Seb has helped me get started as a blogger and connected me to the work of some brilliant researchers, such as Lilia Efimova. Seb’s contacts helped to connect the open source bloggers at the last Moncton Cybersocial. Without Seb, Steve Mallet would not have showed up. As a result of the connections made at this event, a number of us are already discussing new business relationships. Seb’s published research informs my own research and practice, as many of my clients are interested in this "blogging thing". Seb’s perspective of the global community is a real inspiration for those of us in underpopulated, somewhat rural, New Brunswick. More recently Seb created the Atlantic Canada Bloggers wiki, a great map of who is blogging – the link is shown on my External Links [no longer available].

Stephen’s OLDaily is a great source of information, and I’m not sure how he finds the time to do it. His website is a treasure trove of information, insight, and sometimes contention (a good thing). Stephen’s Edu_RSS and Ed Radio are two small innovations that he developed in response to requests from the community. Stephen is someone who seems to be constantly giving back to the community.

I definitely feel that I am getting great value for my tax dollar from Seb, Stephen, Rod and the rest of the staff at the NRC.