Learning

Learning

Can OpenSocial become OpenLearning?

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One of the problems with our online social networks is that they don’t talk to each other. What is happening in our Ning learning community is walled off from some interesting Facebook groups, though many of us are members of both. With the announcement of OpenSocial, it seems that social networking has just opened up (to Google’s advantage again) enabling developers on the edges to create and connect.

I’ve found that the information technology community has always been years ahead of the educational technology community. There is little that is technologically innovative in any LMS or VLE that doesn’t already exist in enterprise IT. Ed Tech usually follows Info Tech [it’s all about the pedagogy] and I wonder if that means a similar opening up of learning environments, forcing training & education to follow. For instance, Clive Shepherd has been asking for input on Facebook about the use of this platform for learning. Of course, you can’t follow this thread unless you’re a FB user.

If you were investing in educational technology, where would you be putting your money as of today – into a walled garden or an open, worldwide, shared ecosystem? I’ll be interested to see if OpenSocial becomes the learning platform that some thought Facebook could be (as of yesterday) or if there is room for a separate learning-oriented social network.

Update: I like Dave Winer’s not so upbeat perspective on OpenSocial, as well as Dion Hinchcliffe’s Six Essential things you need to know about OpenSocial.

KM & Web 2.0

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How’s that for a geeky title?

Anyway, I took the time yesterday morning to listen to Jon Husband’s podcast interview with Dave Snowden. Let me say that this is worth your time if you’re interested in how knowledge management (KM) can be accomplished in our current technological surround. I intend on listening to this podcast again (thanks, Jon).

I took a few notes but there’s a lot more than this in the interview. Here’s what struck me [my comments in brackets]:

  • The most important word in Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is “Context” [same for learning, IMO]
  • There should not be any rewards/incentives/money for knowledge work. It should be intrinsic and based on trust. External rewards will only have people gaming the system. [Sounds like every organisation I ever worked in]
  • You cannot create a knowledge-sharing culture, but you can make it easier for people to connect.
  • Knowledge work is not subject to corporate objectives, it is by its nature, “informal” [so informal learning supports knowledge work?]
  • It doesn’t matter what tools you use, because all web 2.0 tools should inter-operate; so why do companies spend time trying to figure out what wiki/blog software to use?
  • Most effective knowledge exists in flows and is contextually created in times of need [makes it difficult to tap and impossible to stick into a database].
  • The major Web 2.0 KM issue is the recall of knowledge in blogs over time (keywords, tags, search, narrative).
  • Dave: “Since I’ve left IBM I’ve had fewer virus attacks working in an open Web environment than I did in a secure corporate environment.”

Update: Jack Vinson and Ray Sims have more commentary on this interview.

Creative Business in the Digital Era

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The Open Rights Group (UK) has created a wiki to collaboratively design a course on building businesses that are more open with their intellectual property:

Right now, this week, we need your ideas. What open-IP business models have you come across? And who is experimenting with opening up their IP? We’re thinking of examples like Radiohead letting their fans decide a fair price for the digital version of their new album. Or Magnatune’s use of Creative Commons licences to allow music buyers to sample songs before they buy. Or writers like Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and Tom Reynolds giving away their books for free under a CC licence whilst also publishing and charging for print copies. Or websites that produce an API so that others can build third party applications using their data, such as Google Maps. Once we’ve gathered a list of examples, we will pick a few case studies to focus our research on.

The easiest way to help is to add pertinent pages on del.icio.us (tag = org-cbde).

Teaching & Testing

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Ismael at ICTlogy covers a presentation by Graham Attwell on The Future of Schooling. There are some interesting (and confirming) comments that Google is much more the virtual learning environment of choice than any learning management system. Ismael also asks some questions and then raises this point:

Raquel Xalabarder reads my mind and states that, outside of the educational system, you maybe need some assessment to give guarantees to an employer, to a customer  e.g. a physicist’s patient.

A: Not that assessment is a thing to avoid, but it should be taken outside the learning process. On the other hand, self-assessment is reflection and thus becomes part of the learning process.

I agree that teaching and testing should be separate activities, as testing puts the teacher in a position of power and control, beyond what is healthy for learning. My suggestions from two years ago, still stand:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Instructional Design Needs More Agility

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A few years back, while working on the Pan-Canadian Online Learning Portal definition project, my colleague Grigori Melnik introduced me to Agile Programming. The Future of Software Development discusses some of the major differences between agile programming and the earlier, less flexible Waterfall Model. You see, at one time, software engineers assumed that they could design a program and then build it based on those specifications. However, the world changes and we never really have a clear picture of all the necessary factors at any given time. My read of the article had me asking if instructional design [or ISD or ADDIE] is also arrogant:

“The problem was that the Waterfall Model was arrogant. The arrogance came from the fact that we believed that we could always engineer the perfect system on the first try. The second problem with it was that in nature, dynamic systems are not engineered, they evolve. It is the evolutionary idea that led to the development of agile methods.”

Instead of factory-style production teams, agile programming uses far fewer, but better, programmers. The principles of communicating, focusing on simplicity, releasing often and testing often are all applicable to developing good instructional programs.

 

no-addie.jpg

Software development has embraced the iterative and flexible Agile model, but not without a major re-education program. It is up to industry to educate customers so that requests for proposals don’t force vendors into using an older and outdated model. I still see educational and training RFP’s that leave little choice but a quick analysis (if any), little design time (and only at the front end) and then get into production based on a specification whose premises were never tested and cannot be questioned later.

It’s time that the training industry develop its own agile approach or risk becoming redundant.

Learners as hackers

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My son sent me this link to The Hacker Manifesto (1986):

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

There is also a reference to the definition of a hacker. I like this one:

One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

Those who have chosen the red pill already see the absurdity of many of our hierarchies and structures. As parents and educators, we should help all learners become good hackers.

Informal Learning – Show me the money

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Jay Cross has made Chapter 3 of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance available online. I went through my copy and noticed that I had  a note stuck in this chapter, when I had used it for a previous workshop:

The leading human performance authorities “have all demonstrated that most performance deficiencies in the workplace are not a result of skill and knowledge gaps. Far more frequently, they are due to environmental factors, such as lack of clear expectations; insufficient and untimely feedback; lack of access to required information; inadequate tools, resources and procedures; inappropriate and even counterproductive incentives; task interference and administrative obstacles that prevent achieving desired results” (Stolovitch & Keeps, 2002, p. 1).

I’ve discussed this before, but it’s worth repeating.

Is education over the Internet already the killer app?

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In 1999, everyone in the nascent e-learning industry was citing this quote by John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems:

The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error in terms of the Internet capacity it will consume.

Yah, right, say the skeptics who lived through the Dot Com bust and have watched as e-learning (education and training) continues to play a junior role at the boardroom table. Even the largest e-learning companies are mostly unknown outside the industry.

Well, I think that Chambers was right. We’re just measuring the wrong things. Education over the Internet is huge. Consider – Wikipedia, Wiki-How, Google search, personalised information pulled through RSS, social learning networks, learning with blogs and collaboration with wikis. Add all of these together and e-mail is starting to look like a rounding error.

Step outside the box of academic courses or training departments and online learning is growing and not looking like it will stop. As learning becomes essential for our knowledge society, we will become like fish in water, not realizing what it is we’re swimming in. One challenge for learning professionals will be to remain relevant as all of the action moves beyond their traditional turf.

Search for search help

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Over breakfast yesterday I asked our boys if they had ever been shown how to use a search engine. I know that they use Google all the time, but wondered how much they knew about advanced search features, Boolean operators or even vertical search engines. Both answered that they had never been shown how to do a Web search nor had any of their teachers discussed how to use Wikipedia. I see them on Wikipedia for almost every homework assignment, so I’m sure that it’s more widely used than any other reference source.

Let’s face it, search engines aren’t that new. I was using Altavista in 1995 and now, 12 years later, our local teachers are not helping students understand these powerful tools. We are in an age of search and if schools don’t cover these tools, then who will? I know that I will tutor our boys but what about everyone else? Will mentioned this weekend that we need role models for social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. We also need role models for digital information literacy.

Here is my question to the community at large – is there a suite of websites or especially videos that parents can use to help their children master the basic tools of the web? I’m thinking of the excellent Commoncraft videos on RSS, social bookmarks and wikis. Is there something similar for advanced search? So far I’ve found:

Google Advanced Search help page

How to Choose a Search Engine

Google WebSearch for Educators

… but no cool videos yet.