Technology

information & communication technology

Moving down-scale

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Jim Kunstler spoke to a packed audience at Mount Allison University last night, covering much of the material in his book The Long Emergency with updated data. You can watch his 2004 TED Talk on The Tragedy of Suburbia.

Kunstler opened with a most informative graph developed by C H Smith:

Yes, that’s right; sometime in the near future, oil will trade for $1,000 per barrel. In this post-peak oil period, Kunstler’s basic conclusion is that the age of continual growth (2-7%) is over. He showed how the US economy was based almost entirely on suburban development and that has now come to a crashing halt. He also predicted the collapse of the aviation industry in the next 48 months. Dwindling oil supplies and higher costs will affect every sector of society, and we will see major changes in:

  • how we inhabit the landscape as our cities & towns adapt
  • how we grow food as we are forced to be more local and use animal power once again
  • how we do business after the collapse of the industrial retail model (e.g. farmers markets vs Wal*Mart)
  • how we will make things on a more local level
  • how collector schools premised on cheap transportation will disappear

There will soon be a major down-scaling of everything we do because we will no longer have the energy to continue with our current system. Kunstler’s suggestion for a pragmatic North American project to get society motivated to tackle these huge issues is to restore our passenger rail service. It’s feasible, much-needed, requires no new technology and will employ many people. Cars (and suburbia) are dead, no matter how many hybrids we buy.

Networks

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For several years I called this blog “Conversations at the intersection of learning, work & technology” and still use that tag line from time to time. During the past decade I’ve worked at that intersection, sometimes more focused on one aspect than another. I’ve seen a merging of work and learning as more of our lives are lived in larger and more complex networks. Working in what my friend Jay Cross calls Internet Time, blurs the lines between work and learning. The blurring of lines between the silos of disciplines and knowledge is happening everywhere as we get the ability to quickly jump from one field to another, and it’s reaping the reward of innovation, as Franz Johansson notes in The Medici Effect.

This decade has witnessed an increasing use of social network analysis and value network analysis, while social media are starting to permeate every type of business, especially marketing. In learning theory we now have Connectivism – the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Understanding networks provides new insights into learning and business.

So what lies at the intersection of learning, work and technology? NETWORKS

Selecting OS learning technology platforms

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Dave Cormier has written a great article on selecting a content management system (CMS). Dave discusses three platforms, all of which I have used – WordPress, Moodle, Drupal. All are open source and there are a variety of hosting models available for most budgets. Like Dave, I’m not crazy about Moodle because it replicates the institutional course-centric education model, which I feel is outdated. I use a similar approach in initially analysing technology needs, succinctly stated by Dave:

I like to put CMSs into three simple categories based on the CMSs that I think of as being best of breed in the open market right now. Do you want to do a wordpress project, a moodle project or a drupal project. (you could also say ‘a wordpress.com project, a moodle hosted project or a ning project if you don’t care about controlling your data… which I do… but you may not)

I would add Elgg to mix if there is an interest in the functionality of Ning, but with the advantage of open source.

I used to use Drupal for this website but switched to WordPress a few years ago. Drupal is much too powerful to be running a simple blog like mine. Dave covers the pros and cons of these systems quite well in his post and I would recommend it to anyone considering platform selection. Yes, it can get much more complicated, but looking at these three for education or training projects is a good start.

Throwing sheep in the boardroom

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Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom could be sub-titled everything you wanted to know about social media but didn’t have the time to ask. The book is definitely comprehensive and is complete with hundreds of stories about the effects of online social networking. Anyone who is active in using and understanding social media may find this a bit of a repeat of the last few years of commentary on the subject, but those new to the field can find it here in one book, with plenty of end-notes.

The authors cover in detail the banning of Facebook and other sites by government agencies, schools and corporations. They also address some of the more positive aspects of social networking but I would not accuse them of being cyber-evangelists. There is some good analysis around open versus closed social networking sites. Citing the French aristocracy as an echo-chamber that failed to realise the factors that led to the Revolution, they use many other historical examples to place today’s situation in context. For instance, readers of this book will also get a short history of the Knights Templar.

This sums up the authors’ intent, and I think that they have achieved it:

What has interested us most is the Web 2.0 revolution’s impact on the three social dynamics that gave this book its structure: identity, status and power. It will be recalled that we describe our analytical approach to these themes as “3-D” – dis-aggregation of identities, democratization of status and diffusion of power.

Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom reads a bit like an academic treatise on Web 2.0 and would be useful for someone wanting a lot of information in one book. It could make a good course text book. For excellent analysis, without all the details, I would recommend Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and for a deeper look at the fundamentals underlying the Internet economy I still consider Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks the most comprehensive examination to date.

Drupal for Education and E-Learning

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Bill Fitzgerald has written a comprehensive technical guide for the Drupal open source content management system with a focus on its use in formal education. Drupal for Education and E-Learning, by Packt Publishing, walks you through the setup of a Drupal installation, step by step. This is a how-to book, covering everything from themes to modules to backup and maintenance. The core of the book is on education-specific aspects, such as teacher blogs, forums, enrolling students and managing classes. It also covers the use of various media and there are many comments on considerations from a learning perspective.

Drupal is not specifically designed for education, as Moodle is, but Bill gives a good map on how it can be used. The Drupal developer and user community is also larger than Moodle’s and an important factor in choosing an open source system is the strength of the developer/user community. Also, Drupal can be used for other aspects of the institution, such as alumni relations or digital asset management

I would think that this book would be excellent for the system administrator at an institution, the project lead or senior instructional designer. Parts of it would be of interest to individual teachers. Since Drupal has no licensing fees, institutions can afford several copies of this book.

Open source for learning costs less

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In my 2009 predictions for eLearn Magazine I said that “There will be an increased interest in open source software as well as tools and methods that enable online collaboration.” Ryan Cameron took me to task on open source in the comments:

Open source is not, actually, free. Someone has to build it, someone has to maintain it. Open source is simply transferring an up front and usually meagre licence fee for a long term highly specialized labour cost, which in many cases ends up creating situations where organizations are completely hamstrung by their IT department/gurus.

I agree, OS is not free, however it is free of licensing fees and free from many other licensing constraints of proprietary systems. If it is GPL it is free to hack, modify or build upon, with some restrictions.

My research and experience over the years shows open source, especially in training and education, to be significantly cheaper. One example is a Moodle installation that had a total cost of ownership at 3-10% of the compared proprietary system. Another example of open source versus a proprietary learning management system showed a savings of $345,000. Here’s a study from the Quebec Provincial Department of Education that showed savings of 59-75% over 5 years.

While OS is not free, and does incur some costs for implementation and support, I have yet to find examples where open source learning management systems cost more than proprietary ones. An OS learning management system may not meet all your needs, but it won’t be because it costs too much.

It’s not about the technology?

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INATT makes sense because most of us realise that people make things happen, not technology. It’s not about the technology is a rallying cry amongst many in education or in fields that are being disrupted by information technology. Perhaps INATT, but:

  • Imagine organising an international group of collaborators without access to Voice over IP (costs increase) or without presence monitoring (who’s available in what time zone) or without shared documents online (what’s the latest version?).
  • Try to understand a different geographic market with no travel budget. Using Twitter, you could follow people who live and work in that area and get to know what’s important to them (free competitive intelligence).
  • Create a presence in a field while living in a small town far from a major urban centre (that’s me, using my blog for the past five years).
  • Keep up to your professional field without access to paid journal subscriptions, lectures or conversations with experts (many experts now publish material online – TED.com, as well as universities publish lectures online, and you can engage other professionals on blogs or Twitter).

Just think about the advantages that these technologies provide us in connecting, collaborating, sharing and learning. Now imagine organisations that do not use them. Would you say they are at a disadvantage? It’s not about the technology but it’s definitely not about ignoring the technology.

Make commenting easy

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Blogs have 3 primary characteristics that make them different from other media. 1) Blogs have a permanent resource identifier that does not change over time, 2) Blogs publish an RSS/Atom feed to notify services of updates, and (most importantly) 3) Blogs allow comments. What differentiates blogs from other published information is that there is a feedback loop.

I should note that there are now third-party services that let you comment on articles and blog posts without using the blog’s comment function. For example, Facebook allows comments via their platform.

For bloggers, comments add depth and insight to what would otherwise be a monologue. I think that it’s very important to make it as easy as possible for people to comment on your blog. However, too many services do just the opposite and I have passed on writing a comment many times when confronted by multiple-step comment forms. Captchas are one example.

I’ve made it as easy as possible to make a comment on this site and I get very little comment spam. First of all I use WordPress, designed specifically for blogging. The first line of defence is Bad Behavior, an easy plug-in for WP.

If this does not catch the bad guys, Akismet is the next line of defence. Akismet is another simple plug-in that will hold identified spam for 30 days or until you check it. It learns from the entire community of users, so it’s pretty darn good.

I also have my comment controls set so that first time visitors must be approved by me. I even allow pseudonyms and fake e-mails if the comment is relevant. Once approved, you are free to post at will, or until I revoke your privileges, which I have never done. This works very well and lets the conversation flow, even when I’m not online.

So if you’re wondering why you don’t get many comments, perhaps you’re just making it too difficult.

Innovation and Learning

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In Innovating in the Great Disruption, Scott Anthony suggests three disciplines necessary to foster innovation in difficult economic times – placing a premium on progress; mastering paradox; and learning to love the low end. He also discusses the importance of learning;

Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.

Rapid learning is not PowerPoint slides turned into online courses but rather increasing the ways to connect ideas and people. This is the future of training and e-learning, or what I call ABC (anything but courses). Anthony’s third point, love the low end, also speaks to the use of inexpensive tools such as web services or open source software. If learning professionals can be seen as catalysts for innovation, then even in difficult times will their future look bright.

Blogs are not a “substitute”

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Print media are in dire trouble – but blogs are no substitute says Andrew Sullivan in the Times Online:

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

I’m not a journalist nor a reporter and have no experience in mainstream media but I understand the Web and I think Sullivan gets it completely wrong. First of all, there is no such thing as a “one-man blog”, as all blogs are connected to other blogs and media. Also, blogs are not limited by print space, so articles can be much longer than print media offers and most have hyperlinks to more information. This is a richer reading experience, where facts can be checked while reading and engage the reader to do more than receive the wisdom imparted by the journalist. Comments and self-corrections keep blogs on-track, as opposed to corrections that appear in a newspaper the next day on page 12. What Sullivan proposes with a slimmed-down paper and online presence already exists with magazines, like FastCompany. On one thing I will agree; blogs are not a substitute for newspapers, they are an entirely new medium and are just starting to find their place after the initial exuberance.

Directly comparing print media with digital media is the wrong approach but is often heard in education as well. A webinar is not as rich as a classroom, or you cannot replace face-to-face interaction with the instructor, are common complaints. Digital media enable new kinds of relationships, some richer and some more limited, but the Web offers much that we did not have before. I am certain that democracy, and learning, can be enhanced with digital media, but we have to stop looking back with simplistic and direct comparisons, and get on with making our interconnected world work.