Technology

information & communication technology

A Learning + Web Unworkshop

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Interested in how to use blogs, wikis and other web tools for specific learning applications? Then join Jay Cross, Judy Brown and me for an informl learning unworkshop.

The format of the unworkshop is different from a typical online course or webinar and is focused on the working professional. First of all, it’s based on informal learning, the glue that keeps you learning before and especially after the formal training and education periods in your life. The unworkshop is all about responding to the specific context of your needs. The group is small, coaching is provided and you get to learn from your peers as well. It’s also a great way to expand your network and community membership continues after the unworkshop.

If you want to try some new web technologies for learning, then check out the unworkshop and join this growing community of practice.

Akismet fights comment spam

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My akismet comment spam plug-in for WordPress is working overtime today. I had received about 1,000 comment spam since I installed it in late March, but today I’ve got over 500 more (so far). Akismet works well, and learns from any false positives that I mark as “Not Spam”, but with 500 in one day, I’m just block-deleting them. If you have made a comment and it hasn’t been posted in 12 hours, that means that I’ve accidentally deleted it – sorry.

Laptops improve learning in school

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Jacques Cool summarizes (in French) the results of an 18 month laptop in the classroom initiative in northern New Brunswick, as told by the project director, Roberto Gauvin. [Here is my translation – any errors are mine alone]

The project brings people together (students, teachers, parents community).
Roberto’s approach changed over the past year from a focus on the technology to the pedagogy.
There were specific effects on learning, even if these were sometimes difficult to measure.
Even with access to some incredible resources, it was the teaching staff who made a difference, such as:

  • The discovery of individual talents (not just technology related)
  • The ability to surpass the constraints of the existing education system
  • The ability to seek out the timid students as well as the boys [read more about Smart Boys, Bad Grades]

The teachers moved from an initial phase of fear and apprehension to management of the tools and then to reflection on their teaching practices

I think that we’re starting to get beyond, “you don’t need any computers in school ’cause we didn’t have any”, to an understanding that portable computers open up a variety of pedagogical options not available in the industrial-age classroom.

Other posts on this site referring to laptops in school.

Learning Content & Standards

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In response to Elliott Masie’s recent Learning Trends newsletter, Albert Ip asks a similar question to what came to my mind when I first read it:

Can anyone show me some concrete proof that any learning technology standard has made a difference in learning?

Elliott is a great champion for advancing good technology-based learning and he has the ability to simplify a complex field. He showed me the potential of the Internet for learning in early 1997 and I haven’t looked back since. That said, I disagree with his analogy of the shipping container as learning object:

As I celebrate my birthday and look out the window of our New York apartment I see stacks of shipping containers on the edge of the Hudson. I see the connection between the work that is underway in content packaging for the learning space. As we adopt XLM, core learning standards and systems, it is possible for us to achieve some of the same benefits as the shipping container brought to transportation …

In a recent project where I reviewed the business case for SCORM implementation, I found no evidence of a market for digital learning objects. There were several vendors offering SCORM conversion or SCORM implementation assistance, but no one was actually buying and selling objects. The bet seems to be that standards will create the market, as shipping containers enabled the free flow of goods over various forms of transportation. Here I disagree, because learning cannot be “containerised”.

In theory, reusable digital learning objects make sense, but in practice they don’t work. The problem is that learning objects cannot be separated from their context.

In the drive to make money in the learning business, too many people are trying to find a way to codify pieces of the messy, personal process known as learning. The learning content market is based on the premise that these pieces can be quantified and therefore owned by someone. So far, all we are seeing is the devaluation of learning content.

The popular belief used to be that 12 years in a standardised classroom created a learned individual, even though many workers called this “book learning” and knew that it didn’t equate to competence. Today we have the belief that standardised content packaging will equate to better learning. As Albert asks, where’s the evidence?

I’ve said before that you need content and context in order to foster learning, and content is just a minor player.

U de Moncton receives $2.9M for elearning development

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The Université de Moncton’s technology-based learning group has received $2.9M from the Atlantic Innovation Fund to further develop its Synergic3 technology. Synergic3 is designed to reduce large-scale elearning production and development costs [disclosure: I was involved in the initial business and marketing analysis for this product].

The university has partnered with Desire2Learn and the National Research Council for this project which is estimated to cost $5.5M.

Permalink Woes

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As all bloggers know, permalinks are the permanent universal resource identifiers used as addresses for blog posts. One post, one permalink. The permalink doesn’t change so that people can link and refer to it over time and it can easily be found.

Well, I guess I’ve commited permalink sacrilege because I changed the settings of my permalinks from the default in WordPress to one with the name of the post attached to the domain name (e.g. jarche.com/permalink-woes/). Unfortunately that created a whole bunch of routing errors, on top of the redirects from previous Drupal (my last content management system) permalinks such as – jarche.com/node/123. I am now back to the default permalink style for WordPress (jarche.com/?p=123) and will not change it again.

I also discovered that all older links were renamed as well, so that what should be jarche.com/?p=123 was for a short period renamed jarche.com/OLD123 , and that style of naming no longer works.

My apologies to anyone who has unsuccessfully tried to follow an old permalink. My stats show that there are many of these each day. All that I can suggest is that you search, in the search box on the top right, for the title or some keyword. Sorry :-(

The Search Epoch

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Few people would argue that the Internet has changed the way we work and live, even though there are some who may not realize how much life has changed and how great the business implications. If you follow Nine Shift, you’ll know that they predict this epochal change to be complete around 2020, when 75% of our discretionary time is different from pre-2005.

Just as significant a change has happened on the Internet during the past five years. That is the advent of Search. Seth Godin highlights how serach has levelled the playing field, making industry leaders less important:

If there’s no search engine and you need a recipe or a pot, you visit cooking.com and they find you the best match on their site. And it goes beyond web companies. If there’s no search engine and you need to buy coffee, you go to Starbucks.com, right? Leaders in every field had no reason to invent for search… it’s not good for them.

In John Batelle’s book, The Search [a recommended read], he notes that:

Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.

Search has levelled the playing field but it has also increased our dependence on it. This makes the issue of who owns and controls the pipes & nodes on the Internet exceptionally important. If large telcos and ISP’s can provide faster speeds for preferred clients or influence search engines in any way, then our access to the knowledge that we need will suffer.

Now that everyone recognizes the power of search, this is becoming a battleground for control by multinational corporations. Keep an eye on this field and please get involved where you can, as this will affect how our children work, learn and create.

Some resources:

Michael Geist’s Internet Law Blog (Canadian)

The Cooperation Commons (a venue for discussions)

Oligopoly Watch (keeping watch on all those mergers & acquisitions)

Open Business (open source business models as an alternative to the above link)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (working to protect your digital rights)

Creative Commons (flexible copyright, so that you can use what you find when you search)

Webcast Academy

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Following up on my last post on becoming a Net radio host; perhaps I should go with a lower cost option and join Jeff’s Webcast Academy:

Welcome to The Webcast Academy Open House. The Academy is a hands on, collaborative training center for people interested in learning how to produce and host live, interactive webcasts.

The goals of the Webcast Academy include

  • increasing the number of people who are capable of producing live, interactive webcasts
  • applying the open source community approach to skill development
  • creating a place that formally recognizes proficiency, excellence, and innovation in these new media skills

Sounds like fun :-)

Or, I could turn my blog into a podcast, using Feedburner.

Changing Platforms – Reality Check

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Just about a month ago I changed from Drupal to WordPress; partially at the request of my service provider and partially as a result of all of the spam that was getting through. So far I like WordPress but it doesn’t give me all of the extras on formatting and presentation that Drupal did. The move has greatly reduced what I thought was my readership though.

I used to think that all of those lists of subscribers in Bloglines and other aggregators were people who actually read my blog. It seems that most readers haven’t noticed that there have been no new posts on the old RSS feed since I announced the move to WP. The old RSS feeds do not work, but almost nobody noticed. Oh well, I’ll just keep posting for myself and using my blog as a personal knowledge management system – its main purpose. I do appreciate the comments from the few who do read my “new & improved blog” though – thanks.

BTW – the new feeds for this blog are: https://jarche.com/?feed=rss2 and https://jarche.com/?feed=atom

The Restrictions of Print

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I’m currently developing an article for inclusion in a newsletter. As I go through the editing and re-write process, I have realised how limiting the print medium is, especially when transferring what was originally a series of blog posts to create the basis of the article. Added hyperlinks are now more natural to me than using the APA format, which I have used for many years, but I now view as a relic of a bygone era. What originally changed and flowed is now just a piece of static content. As a blog post, this article built on previous posts and was open to comments and additions. With this print article, it seems as if my learning process has been frozen in time.