Work is learning. Learning is the work.
information & communication technology
If mobile learning interests you (you know, cell phones and the lot), then check out the new and improved mLearnopedia.
I was also introduced to Coventi this week, which is similar to Google Documents, but 1) it’s not owned by Google and therefore is not connected to all that other information about your Web life and 2) it features a chat bar. Think of it as a user-friendly wiki with integrated text chat. Conventi offers 3 roles – reviewer, author & owner.
Scott Leslie is concerned that someone has taken his entire feed and used it in a way that contravenes his Creative Commons license, which happens to be the same one I use for this site.
A quick aside – if you don’t understand CC licensing, you should review the license explanations before you start using other people’s work on the Web, and if you are a teacher, you should ensure that students understand copyright and copyleft.
In my comment to Scott, I noted that there is another organisation, The Human Capital Institute, that uses many RSS feeds (including mine) but makes you register for their “service” before you can read a complete post. Some might think that this too would contravene the copyright license that I use. Here are two other CC-licensed sites I noticed from the same website:
I also noted that many blogs do not have clear copyright statements, like The Learning Circuits Blog, which means that they are fully copyrighted, so that taking an entire feed would likely infringe copyright. If you have a blog or website and want to share, then you should use something as simple and easy as a Creative Commons license. However, it obviously doesn’t mean that everyone will play by the rules.
Update: Following my notification of copyright infringement to the Human Capital Institute, they promptly deleted my feed from their resource list.
Three years ago, Seth Godin wrote about what the future might hold in 2009 and I wondered how this would change anyone’s business plan. We’re more than half way there, so are these assumptions coming true?
There is no doubt that hard drive space is getting cheaper, and Gmail’s 2.8 GB of free space is a good indication. It sure is getting harder to sell storage space.
Wi-fi connections are not everywhere but many of us wish they were. Some cities are more advanced than others, but my recent travels to the US and larger Canadian cities found it to be expensive, whereas I can get free wi-fi down the street in our small town.
Yes, it seems that everyone has a digital camera or at least one on their cell phone.
Connection speeds have improved (mine have doubled) but it will be a great leap to be 10 to 100 times faster.
I’m not sure about Wal*Mart’s sales but at least the company is going to opt for compact fluorescent lightbulbs.
Compulsory retirement ages seem to be a thing of the past and I think that they will be gone in a few years,. When I was in the military, the compulsory retirement age was 55 and in 2004 it was raised to 60. There is little doubt that this trend will continue.
As for the assumption that our current professions will be gone or totally different, I believe that change will be uneven. In my own area of experience, I think that Instructional Design as a field will all but disappear.
So what does this mean for business plans?
It’s Friday, and if you have some time you may want to watch the keynote speech by Jennifer James, at the BCEd Online Conference. It’s a streamed presentation and is over an hour long but I found it fascinating. James is a cultural anthropologist and discusses how technology and people have been interacting for thousands of years and links this to the role of educational technologists.
Near the end of her presentation, James talks about the stages of human adaptation to major new technologies, such as the Internet.
First the technology concentrates energy and changes our definition of intelligence. For instance, emotional intelligence is becoming more important in an environment of limitless data and information.
Second, the economic system adapts to the technology. This results in population and demographic shifts.
Third, the demographics adapt to the economics. James – “If you have an international market; you have an international labour pool; you have an international gene pool. And wait and see who your kids and grandkids bring home for dinner.”
… and then there is a long time lag … (this is where we are in relation to the Internet economy/society)
Finally, the culture changes when the old mythologies break.
Take some time, put your feet up and have a listen. Please comment, if you have the urge.
Emerald Publishing has started an online community based on the open source Elgg platform. The news release compares the community with MySpace and Facebook:
Amanda Briggs, Head of Research and Development at Emerald, says, “InTouch was developed with our research and contributor communities in mind. Online technologies have had a dramatic effect on the educational and learning environment and students regularly use informal social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to communicate with their classmates. Now, Emerald authors and editors can take advantage of these technologies in a space that is designed specifically for the academic and business community – InTouch. Users can create online communities based around journals or research interests, share ideas and expertise with (and learn from) their peers. This service supports our commitment to building and facilitating communities around key management research areas.”
This is great to see, but most of that functionality comes from Elgg, which only gets a quick mention. You would think that they could have at least put a hyperlink to Elgg in their news release, n’est-ce pas?
Via Stephen Downes and Dave Warlick is a previous report I filed away in January. It seems that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) doesn’t see much value in adopting MS Office 2007 for schools:
A Becta review of Office 2007 identified more than 170 new features, but considered many of them to be of more use in a business environment than an educational one.
A detailed analysis of the new functionality again found that none of the new features was a “must have†for schools and colleges.
Becta said, “As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007.â€
I’ve already said why I won’t use Vista and I don’t feel any pressure to start with Office 2007 either.
 
Izimi is a program that allows you to share unlimited files without uploading them to a third-party site:
izimi places the power right in your hands, where it should be – it’s a truly democratic web. With izimi there’s no need to upload your content to any server: you decide what you’ll publish, there are no limits on quantity or quality (we won’t degrade your videos, photos or music), and you retain ownership and control.
In my case, it should make my website host happy that I’m using less bandwidth [right, Chris?]. According to some people, Izimi will make YouTube obsolete. Though I’m not sure about this, I’ve downloaded the application and have set up my Izimi site.
There’s only one file available available on my site so far, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible. It’s a Creative Commons licensed PDF that I used to have available for download from this site.
Izimi requires M$ .NET framework, so it may take a while to install. Izimi only works on Windows XP or Vista, so I may not be using it for long, unless they make it cross-platform compatible in the future.
Patents and copyrights were conceived as individual rights, not corporate goods. And open source proves that inventions can be even grander than before if rights to the work are held in common.To some people this still sounds like revolution, like a peasant’s revolt. It’s not. It’s just a new market reality, one which has no use for Kings.
Dana Blakenhorn on ZDNet.
The difference between revolution and evolution is a matter of perspective.
Update: On second thought, perhaps this decision from the Supreme Court of Canada (2002) would be a better quote:
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.
Last week, I said that I thought that there should be an open source alternative to Facebook (and there is at least one) . A few days later I came across this video overview of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I wasn’t sure of its veracity. Today, I saw this note from Lorne Novolker on Facebook:
Apparently Facebook has started SELLING user information (surprise, surprise!) to third parties. They call it the “Facebook Development Platform.”
To restrict use of your information, do the following:
Click “Privacy” on top right.
Under the “Facebook Platform” section click”Edit Settings”.
Scroll down to the bottom and UNCHECK ALL of the items under facebook platform.Most creepy is the inclusion of photographs!
(Do your friends a favor and repost this as your own note.)
Unless a platform is truly open source, it seems that when we participate, someone else always profits.
As we become more interconnected and use the Web for problem solving, finding love and sharing our sorrow, we should seriously consider public infrastructure as the backbone for social networking. Just as we have funded roads and airports, we need to provide safe and open platforms for online community forming. As private systems proliferate, it’s time for our publicly-funded institutions to jump on the Web 2.0 cluetrain and offer an alternative.
Following the recent mass murder at Virginia Tech, over 200 Facebook communities were created as “a gathering place for those affected by this event, both for people who lived through it and those moved to express their condolances”. At Library 2.0, [dead link] Laura Cohen also noted that there was no equivalent social networking system (SNS) provided by Virginia Tech, so people, mostly students, had to use a commercial platform.
When I advise clients on Web 2.0 applications I discuss the pros and cons of free systems. These are excellent “use as is” systems, as long as you don’t intend to move your data or think you will need it in the event of new rules or a system shut-down. Some platforms, like social bookmarks, let you export your data in an open format which can be used by other systems. However, you cannot do this with most SNS, nor can you export your posts from the ubiquitous Blogger. That is a critical distinction between “free” and “open source”. With the latter, you can access the source code, export your data and move to another host. The more data you create, the more important it will be to control it.
Our public institutions may be missing the boat on SNS. Currently there are over 15 million Facebook users and the growth curve is steep. Universities could easily adopt open source SNS, like Elgg,[dead link] to provide a similar free service. The advantage would be ownership by a publicly-funded institution or perhaps even the alumni association. Laura Cohen [dead link]sees the loss of this information as a cultural issue:
I’m concerned about this because many academic libraries are charged with preserving the cultural memory of their institutions. In the age of Web 2.0, a great deal of this culture is being played out in networked communities unaffiliated with these institutions. If campus constituencies are gathering in external spaces, how will their activities be preserved? The third party gathering places – Facebook and many others – may or may not survive over the years. In fact, they surely won’t outlive most of the institutions with which their members are affiliated. When these services fold, their content will fold with them. Issues of privacy aside – and these are major issues – a great opportunity for preservation will be lost.
I noticed that our local university is highlighting student bloggers [dead link]. Unfortunately, all of these blogs are hosted on Google’s Blogger. Why not provide a Mount Allison University blog for life to all students? Hosting it on an open source platform would also give students the ability to export their data if they so wish. Furthermore, a free blog and/or SNS would be an excellent way to stay in touch with alumni. An easy first step for educational institutions would be to test out Elgg’s Eduspaces [dead link]. It’s free AND open source.
Open data protocols and open source systems have become more important for me as I realize that I have almost one thousand posts on this website and many more comments. This is an important professional archive for me now, but this was not an issue initially. You don’t realize the importance of the open source model until after you’ve passed the point of no return.
Update: You may want to watch this video overview [dead link]of the money and politics behind Facebook, though I haven’t researched it to verify that it’s accurate.