Technology

information & communication technology

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).

Ruby Wednesday

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Bruce Tate gave an energetic presentation today to about 100 people who packed in to the NRC’s conference room in Moncton. The presentation was on the development platform Ruby on Rails and obviously there was a lot of interest. For instance, one of the sponsors, Spheric, is looking to hire at least 20 more developers.

Bruce’s presentation was just at the right level for a non-programmer like me. He calls Ruby the perfect platform for “clean database-backed Web apps”. He also showed how a lot of development steps required in Java are no longer necessary with the Ruby on Rails framework. What really struck me as a business advantage though, was the fact that the programmer can write the high level logic in plain language and this can be reviewed by the business lead before any code is written. I’m sure that this can save a lot of time and frustration.

Ruby on Rails is relatively new and the community is not as large as it is for more established languages. Developing skills in this rapid development platform could become a competitive advantage for NB organisations and is worth checking out. Given our small population, we need to develop asymetrical skills to take on new markets.

Please check out Bruce’s charity site, Changing the Present, because they granted him the time to come from Texas to New Brunswick.

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Photo: Dan Martell, President of Spheric Technologies with presenter Bruce Tate

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.

e-Learning Bootcamp Next Week

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Join Me at The Brandon Hall Innovations in Learning Conference Community!

This is my “quick connect card” for the Innovations in Learning Conference. One week from today, Janet Clarey and I will be conducting a workshop [a.k.a. Bootcamp] on e-learning. We’ve had a chance to talk to some of the participants and the final outline is shaping up. We’re planning on using a flexible framework and hope to run it more like an unconference.

Themes so far include e-learning today & tomorrow,  case studies, networks & informal learning and personal learning environments. There are still a few places left if you’re interested in this pre-conference workshop on 24 September in Santa Clara, California.

Local Industry and Researchers Gather

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Last night was the monthly gathering of the Moncton area knowledge and IT industry, hosted by Mount Allison University’s research services. I really enjoyed Bruce Robertson’s presentation on his work with the semantic web, and more specifically the Historical Event Markup and Linking Project. It’s great to know a professor of Classics who also runs his own Linux server.

Another event of note that was announced last night is the free Ruby on Rails workshop to be held in Moncton on 10 Oct 2007, to be followed by a two-day training session. The host, Spheric, is a local company that has embraced open source development applications in order to better grow its business and offer enterprise-level software.

PLE’s et al

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“But it’s alright now, I’ve learned my lesson well.
“You see, you can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself” Ricky Nelson

I’ve been getting some questions about personal learning environments and of course hearing and reading lots about them in the past few months. If I thought about the PLE, it was a concept around the use of tools and processes to be a better learner. The PLE was akin to the process of personal knowledge management (PKM), in that it was a sense-making effort.

Some of the discussions around PLE’s seem to be going in the direction of PLE-as-platform, like a learning management system (LMS).  Having a “PLE in a box” might please everyone, but learners have to please themselves.

Tom Haskins has been adding excellent insight into this conversation, first with The LMS vs PLE Debate and then  Growing PLE’s from Seed and now PLE’s come in sizes :

When we think of Personal Learning Environments as things, we are on the same page as construction workers, factory stewards and warehouse operators. We are dealing with the components to assemble a PLE. We describe the PLE as “what we’ve got in it” like Web 2.0 tools and archives of our own creations.

When we think of PLE’s as processes, we’re on the same page as designers of architecture, software interfaces and customer experiences. We’re dealing with what components do, how they function, what purpose they serve, and which difference they make. These intangible qualities are more difficult to visualize.

It’s like electricity, which can be thought of as particles or as a current. PLE’s, in their current free-form, are what individuals are putting together because the tools are cheap and available. The processes are drawn from many fields – knowledge management, cognitive science, information architecture, etc. These processes, with newer tools every day, are fairly ill-defined.

Who knows where the PLE will go, but let’s give it a chance to grow first. Seeing how various artists use some kind of PLE would be fascinating and much more informative for our field than any standard PLE format selected by company ABC for all of its employees.

INATT

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Jay Cross is working on a research paper, which if it turns into a book, he will name it INATT (it’s not about the technology).

  • Blogging isn’t about the technology, it’s about easily publishing your thoughts and allowing others to join in and add to them.
  • Wikis aren’t about the technology, they’re an easy way for everyone to write, edit and comment on the same space and not worry about operating systems or word processor document formats.
  • RSS isn’t about the technology, it’s about having one place to watch the multi-person, multi-channel, multi-perspective Web universe.
  • Podcasts aren’t about the technology, they’re a way to share your voice and let others listen on their own terms and on their own time.
  • Multi-player roleplay games aren’t about the technology, they’re about immersing yourself in another world and learning things you might not in real life.

Many people cannot use these practical tools in school or at work. If it’s not about the technology, why are we letting IT departments decide what’s best for us?

Canadian mobile data rates stifle Can-Con

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Canadians pay way too much for mobile data (e.g. blogging from your cell phone) and this has been noted by Michael Geist in Uncompetitive Canada:

In fact, Canada not only trails the U.S. and Western Europe, but Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, Asian countries such as Malaysia, and African countries such as Rwanda all offer unlimited monthly data plans for less than $50.

Canadian mobile phone rates are between 3 and 20 times more expensive than those on the USA or UK. We can thank our telecom oligopoly for that. But it’s not just expensive rates that are stifling the Canadian economy. We may be strangling Canadian content as well, as Julien notes:

As a content-creating Canadian with an N95 smartphone, I produce value for my country by creating content, increasing Canada’s profile in the web/mobile space. By allowing data packages to remain at this price, they are letting Americans take control of the space instead.

It’s time for our regulatory dinosaurs to wake up before it’s too late for us to compete in the Internet age.

Are you open for business?

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OpenBusiness is a website dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship based on open principles and is not just about open source software. These folks have developed an Open Business Guide, in the form of a wiki, to discuss the specifics of operating an open business:

Open Source [software] was the first sector in which peer-based production led to quality products. However, innovative business models have started to appear in other economic sectors experimenting with open approaches. Now there are online record labels using Creative Commons licenses, Open Source film projects, peer funded music labels, p2p finance services and the list of innovations regarding information management in the widest sense almost endless.

The wiki gives a lot of practical advice on how to profit by being more open. It is in many ways a simpler and synthesiszed version of Yochai Benkler’s work, The Wealth of Networks, which I would recommend as THE major reference on the digital networked economy.

On a related note, Matt Asay reports the COO of Fotango quitting when he found out that his company was abandoning its open source business model; stating, “Open source is not a tactic. It is not a strategy. It is the only practical way of competing in this marketplace.”

Closed companies are still making money, and profits, in much the same way that buggy makers continued to sell their products after the internal combustion engine was produced – for now.

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The old, closed model is doomed and openness is something that every company and non-profit organisation had better understand – soon.

Top ten tools

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My top ten tools for work and learning have been added to Jane Hart’s Favourite Tool Index. There are lots of recommendations here, and Jane will be compiling a Top 100 list.

Many of the tools that I’ve noted are open source, which in most cases means free as well. Source Forge, home of open source software, has just launched the Community Choice Awards, so check out which applications and utilities have been nominated.