Technology

information & communication technology

Moodle now in the major league

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I received a mass mailing from HorizonWimba today about their Genie “course authoring tool” which imports content from Word. Usually I dump this stuff from vendors, as I prefer customer reviews, not marketing information; but this caught my interest:

This new version most notably features the ability for instructors to create Flashcards, insert code such as HTML and Java, and export their course content to new Blackboard, WebCT, and SCORM formats (ideal for Moodle users). Course Genie allows faculty to quickly and easily convert their Microsoft Word documents into content for their Blackboard, WebCT, Moodle, and other online courses.

This is the first time that I’ve seen proprietary elearning companies selling to those who use open source. It shows that Moodle users are now in the same league as WebCT & Blackboard users, at least from a third-party vendor’s perspective.

Learning Technology Consulting

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In the learning business there are plenty of enabling technologies. First, we had a few learning management systems, like WebCT, which were developed at academic institutions. There wasn’t much choice then, and most in the field were cheering these advances. Then we had the elearning bubble with hundreds of LMS, LCMS, CMS & VLE. Now we have personal learning environments (PLE) and eportfolios vying for the spotlight.

When I worked for a technology vendor I soon learned that it was more important to sell licenses than to enhance performance & learning. Licenses paid the bills. That’s why I still urge my clients to separate their technology provider from their learning services. You cannot serve two masters.

Is it the same situation with open source learning applications? If I develop a platform, will I offer independent advice, such as switching to another system? Once we get attached to our favourite system, or one that we helped to develop, then it may be hard to pack up and leave. However, being open to adopt new systems is in the client’s best interest. On one recent project we went through three major content management systems before settling on Elgg Learning Landscape, which didn’t even exist at the beginning of the project.

As much as I like Elgg, I have to keep on the lookout for other products that may meet my clients’ needs. I believe that in this constantly changing web environment, there is a need for third-party service providers who are technology neutral. There may be a temptation to affiliate with only a few select technologies, and perhaps earn a little extra cash, but that doesn’t serve the client. For instance, a new system can come along and give your client a quantum leap in performance. You have to stay current in your research in order to give the right advice for the current situation. Being technology neutral is the difference between a vendor and a consultant.

Rx for NB Learning

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One of New Brunswick’s only learning technology development companies is in the process of being sold. Not sure if this is good or bad for the local industry. Ensemble Collaboration started up a few years ago and developed a collaboration platform for learning. The website is currently down, pending the sale.

I came to this province in 1995 and really became part of the industry in 1998. Since then we have had a few technology companies come and go. These are some of the ghosts of LMS past – Crescent Studio, IP Global, e-com and BKM. Today, the largest companies in the sector provide custom content development – Vitesse, PulseLearning and Innovatia. I think that there is a more sustainable business model on the services side of the industry, however I see these companies competing in a marketplace that is starting to view their services as commodities. I see more learning content companies competing by offering the lowest price per courseware development hour, or whatever other measure you wish to use. Because of this market tendency, companies need to grow their higher-end services in order to stay competitive. These are not evident in New Brunswick at this time.

As someone who has worked with many of the companies, academic institutions and government departments in the province, I’ll give my prognosis for this industry. First of all, there are only 740,000 people in New Brunswick and due to our size we will never grow any industry that is sustainable on its own. We definitely cannot do this without serious partnering or strategic alliances. However, we can capitalise on our small size by encouraging start-ups and sowing many seeds that will grow and survive, or even wither and die. It is through the act of creating new companies that we will improve our ability to create more. We need to develop a way to fail early and fail often. Failure in new business cannot be generally viewed as failure in business. Few entrepreneurs succeed on their first attempt. This Province has the resources, and connections, to create an environment that is friendly for start-ups, especially those that don’t require huge sums of money (e.g. Flickr before it sold to Yahoo).

This flies in the face of efforts to attract larger companies that can offer more jobs to local people. I believe that using the “job” as an economic indicator is a crucial flaw in our economic development policy. Instead, we should be helping to create many small, innovative companies. This will foster a more diverse economic foundation, where one failure will not bring down the entire industry. We have some learning expertise and we used to have some technology development capabilities. What we need now is a way to allow a thousand flowers to blossom. Some of these start-ups may even get purchased by larger corporations and move away, but their creation will be our secret sauce. I am suggesting moving from an indentured servitude model (the salaried employee) to an entrepreneurial model. This has its risks but it puts the means of production into the hands of more people (sounds socialist, doesn’t it?).

To enable this entrepreneurial renewal, without the need for huge amounts of venture capital, we must leverage open source software. Individuals and companies must get involved in the global communities created by open source. That is why I am concerned about the lack of technology companies. A viable learning industry also needs to be in control of its enabling technologies.

As I said, our advantage is our size. It’s easy to contact someone in government here. For instance, the Province has a unique regulation for the creation of online universities. To be a fertile ground for innovation, we need more of this type of unique legislation; not more subsidies or government sponsored trade missions.

So here are some concrete recommendations for my colleagues in this industry. First, get involved in the global community. Personally, I champion Elgg Learning Landscape, Moodle and ATutor. I am involved with the Education Bridges project, initiated by Dave Cormier on PEI. Through blogging, I am also speaking with others around the world. This can yield some interesting connections. For example, Indian companies may be looking for partnerships or involvement in other communities, as mentioned recently on the Learned Man blog. I would be keen to see a webcast of our LearnNB activities done in cooperation with some Indian companies. I’m sure that we have much to learn from each other.

Basically, we can’t focus on this Province alone and we need to use our small size to our advantage. If we stay small, we remain nimble. In a flat world, that may be the right prescription.

Curverider – open source learning company

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David Tosh, Ben Werdmuller & Misja Hoebe have launched Curverider today. This is a services company built around the Elgg Learning Landscape open source learning platform. I have been a proponent of this business model for a couple of years and it’s good to see that others view it as viable. What’s great about Curverider is that the developers are supporting their own code but have also involved a growing community so that it’s more than just three guys in a garage (not that they work in a garage). For instance, look at how Mancomm, a private company,  paid for the development of a calendar function that is now in the latest version of Elgg.
For the end-user, this business model is a dream. You can get the developers to support you, but if your needs change or you want to work with someone else you are free to leave with your source code.
Customers are not handcuffed to their technology providers. I believe that this industry model will encourage more innovation and that companies like Curverider will prosper based on the value of their services.
Dave and his team have also created a resource site for Elgg learning landscape that shows what’s happening in terms of development.

Learners as contributors – the end of the industrial model

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I’ve just read one of the best posts that shows how the Internet changes everything in education; many just don’t realise it yet. Christian Long at Think: Lab has a long post on the connection between blogging and formal education. Christian starts by describing a new billboard from AT&T that has only one word on it – Blogging – and then talks about a major difference in life for a 15 year old today and ten years ago. This is the ability to connect with anybody in the world on any subject, no matter how narrowly defined:

We’ve discussed a basic definition of blogging (web-based journaling).  We’ve accepted that anyone can immediately create a website now called a blog.  And if you think about being a 15 year old and wanting to share your ideas about music or sports or whatever comes to mind in a creative and individual way, a social and collaborative way, you can see why someone would create one.  Even see the potential for a teacher and a class full of students to create ‘class blogs’ for a project or portfolio.  But is there more?


Yes, and it all comes down to something so fundamental to the very existence of schools and even education itself that it’s actually pretty easy to overlook:  information and who owns/creates it. 

This final point, the question about information and who owns/creates it – is shaking our concept of education to the core. The ability to be the co-creators of worldwide knowledge now lies within the means of a large percentage of the world. For example, anyone can contribute their individual area of expertise to the wikipedia knowledge repository.

The discussion at Education Bridges echoes a similar vein. In the creation of wikibooks as online textbooks for the world, should only the experts build and distribute the accepted official curriculum or should learners be involved in the co-creation of knowledge? Personally, I feel that this is no longer a valid question because of the nature of digital networks. If you don’t allow for the co-creation of information (construct, deconstruct, reconstruct) then your information will gather electronic dust in its uselessness.
Albert Ip states it another way with this picture, which asks how anyone could limit peer interaction to "just" the classroom.
Teachers and educational organisations can longer hide behind the classroom firewall. As Christian says, just imagine:

Now, go back to that original 15 year old. Imagine you as a 15 year old with a blog of your own.

Imagine that student able to create a blog in seconds and within days or weeks or months have an audience spread out around the world that is genuinely interested in the ideas and stories and links and images that are on the blog, beginning to be taken seriously as a writer or an expert or a legitimate voice, and beginning to use the blog as a way to further explore ideas and develop a far-reaching network of thinkers and beginning to be seen on a level playing field as any adult.  And now imagine that student going back to school the next day and being asked to sit still, read books or notes that expect no interaction, being forever being seen as inexperienced and incapable, and not being able to contribute any ideas or questions to the larger body of research or ideas.

Both of my boys are in middle school and have their own blogs. One of them writes a lot, including the creation of a fantasy religion, while the other builds animations and shares them online. The eldest is learning Java on his own, via tutorials he finds online. At school they can use Google as an online library (find, access, use) during their limited time available during "computer lab". The physical library does not have any information for a report on the Avian Flu, and there is only one computer available. Access to Blogger is forbidden.
Teachers cannot teach the students how to get involved in the co-creation of knowledge because they don’t have a clue. The kids live in a completely different world than school. School is fast becoming irrelevant.
Next year, our eldest son will be 15. What will he think of school then? [I think I know the answer]

Effective communication for learning

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Dave Pollard has a post on what communication methods are most effective. He has created a table that compares several media as to their cost, impact, value and cost/benefit. This is a good table for instructional designers to consider before creating educational media, and as Dave says, it’s open to revision.

Dave goes on at the end of this post to list his principles of human learning preferences:

  1. People like information conveyed through conversations and stories because the interactivity and detail gives them context, not just content, and does so economically.
  2. People hate talking heads, and are increasingly intolerant of them.
  3. People no longer have the opportunity for serendipitous learning and discovery — everything they read and learn is narrow, focused, bounded, and the tools they are given in their reading and research reinforce this blinkered approach to learning. The consequence is the intellectual equivalent of not eating a balanced diet — a malnourished mind.
  4. People do not know how to do research, or even search, effectively. They think these two things are the same, which they are not, and they have never been trained to do either properly. It’s a good thing the search engines are so smart, because our use of them is mostly dumb.
  5. People search as a last resort. They prefer to ask a real person for what they want to learn or discover, because it’s faster and the answer is more context-specific. And if there is a single good browsable resource on their subject of interest, readily at hand, and they have the time, they will usually prefer to browse that resource rather than looking at a bunch of disconnected, often irrelevant, search engine matches.

Continuing from my last post on Controlling Chaos?, I would suggest that these preferences show that learner behaviour indicates that better tools, like tag clouds, are needed to enable serendipitous learning (Point #3) and that better built-in search is critical for finding good learning resources (Points #4 & 5).

Dave’s principles also support the idea that we should put more effort into contextualising online learning and less on cataloguing information/learning objects (Point #1). This is similar to the  concept of Stock & Flow, because having meticulously catalogued & tagged Stock (learning objects) is of little value without the contextual Flow (conversations & stories).

Controlling Chaos?

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Scott Leslie comments on the recent release of the CETIS Vocabulary Project, which includes two reports and a series of recommendations [my emphasis added]:

But the 121 pages that comprise the first two survey reports, the Pedagogical Vocabularies Review and the Vocabulary Management Technologies Review, seem hardly to justify the tepid 7 page ‘Recommendations’ document that follows. Study study study, disseminate, more study, pilot a bit, repeat. Sorry guys, I wish I could be more enthusiastic about this; I want to take succour in the belief we can control the growing chaos, find sense through old patterns and methods, but you know what, I can’t do it anymore, I have seen the light, and this is not it.

I’m not an expert on ontologies, the semantic web, metadata or controlled vocabularies, but I’ve had enough conversations with enough experts to know that more control will not address our information management needs. Recent conversations with people smarter than me have me concluding that Smart Search is (will be) an excellent tool and that the RDF standard seems to be quite useful with its minimalist approach. From the CETIS Report (MS Word Doc, page 23):

What really sets RDF apart from XML and other things is that RDF is designed to represent knowledge in a distributed world. This means RDF is particularly concerned with meaning. Everything at all mentioned in RDF means something, whether a reference to something concrete in the world, an abstract concept, or a fact. Standards built on RDF describe logical inferences between facts and how to search for facts in a large database of RDF knowledge.”

I recently asked if metadata was dead and received some good advice:

  • From Anol: "Problems with folders and metadata – that’s a closed system, somebody else define the taxonomy. Theory of entropy proves itself when the closed system of folders and metadata goes into a complete chaotic mode."
  • and from Keith, "Maybe metadata structures are dying, but there’s a distinct difference between metadata and metadata structures. If you’re going to ask, "Is metadata dead?" why not also ask, "Is tagging [with METADATA!] dead?"

After perusing the 121 pages of the two CETIS reports [I didn’t read every item], I came away with the feeling that trying to control chaos is a losing game. Instead of asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s time for the learning industry as a whole to shift its effort to more pragmatic solutions, because the answers from CETIS et al are not very clear. Having watched the enormous efforts ($$$) that the military, academia and corporations have put into metadata and controlled learning structures, without any measurable improvements in learning or performance outcomes, I have to ask if this is worth the time and money. My suggestions:

  • like Lego, use the simplest of basic structures (RDF?)
  • build better search into online learning applications
  • only build taxonomies, ontologies & controlled vocabularies based on a specific user need, not "just-in-case"
  • give learners and facilitators more tools to manage their information (tags, tagclouds, smart search, etc)
  • focus on tools to surf the chaos, not control it

Individual and Company Blogs

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I recently received an invite from Ankush Gupta, who has the Learned Man! blog, to look at the company blog of Tata Interactive Systems. I’ve read Ankush’s blog on and off for a while and found that he provides some solid commentary on elearning, so I checked out the Tata Blog. It’s a multi-user effort with posts so far from the CEO and various instructional design consultants. The review of Allison Rossett’s First Things Fast is worth a read, as this is an excellent handbook for performance improvement.
It will be interesting to see how this corporate, multi-user blog evolves over time. One successful multi-user blog, though not from a single company, is the Learning Circuits Blog. Whether a company blog can have the same depth of conversation remains to be seen. So far, I like the initial posts on the Tata Systems blog, especially on their work for learning disabilities and participation in the Mumbai marathon.
A different approach to company blogging is SilverOrange, a web-systems company on Prince Edward Island. There are no direct links from the company website, but the individual bloggers proudly link back to their company. SilverOrange bloggers include Dan James, Daniel Burka and Steven Garrity.
Here are two approaches to blogging and work. In one the blogger is part of a corporate blog while in another the blogger is an individual who happens to work (or own) a company. The use of blogs is evolving over time and there may be a day when a company blog is identified (by the majority) as a separate entity from an individual blog. Does it matter? I think that the level of comments and interaction, especially when controversial subjects arise, will show if there is a difference. Dan James has even stated that "Companies don’t blog, people do".
My interest in all of this is how this medium is being used and what its effects will be. Will blogs become the equivalent of the e-mail scourge of the next decade? Will employees be forced to blog on the company site? These are the early days of blogging for the mainstream and it’s still fun to watch the field change and read new blogs.

Hot & Cool Election Campaigns

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While I was in Montreal this week I received a call from a newspaper journalist, looking for some comments about the use of blogs in the current election. I was engaged in meetings and the deadline was only a few hours away, so I wasn’t able to to add an insights (not that I had any pithy comments ready anyway).
Instead, the journalist should have contacted Mark Federman who has some excellent comments on the election, especially around McLuhan’s work on Hot versus Cool media. For instance:

You cannot "label" a medium as hot or cool by looking at the medium, but rather by observing its effects. A hot medium is one that is hypnotic, decreasing awareness by providing explicit, often simplistic, information. It is intense, and tends to separate and fragment. There is little active, cognitive participation because of the explicitness; rather we take it in and nod in agreement, eyes glazing over. If you find yourself mindlessly echoing tropes and memes without really thinking them through (to discover a hidden context, for instance) you have likely been exposed to a hot media environment.

Mark goes on to show how a party could use the Internet as a cool medium:

One of the effects of UCaPP is for "consumers to become producers." In the context of the current campaign, this might mean that ordinary people could be given a venue on the campaign sites to upload their own podcasts. Consider the Liberal Party dilemma of lack of trust. Now imagine if the archetypal "ordinary Canadian" was given an open and free opportunity to upload a "why I’m planning to vote Liberal" podcast directly to the Liberal party site. At the very least, all the ideas that the central campaign can’t think of would immediately become available to them. What’s more, (as we learned from the Howard Dean Experience) even anti-Liberal trolls (a troll, of course is relative to the venue; one person’s troll is another person’s freedom fighter, so to speak) would be contributing to the passion, fervor and motivation of the Liberal team and their supporters (Dean raised a huge amount of money through people pledging donations for every troll post to Deanspace). Most important, allowing such a forum for democratic participation and conversation is the move that would help to create the trust, openness and welcoming that a cool campaign requires.

Wikibooks

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Dave Cormier is proposing more work be done on the concept of textbook wikis, or wikibooks. According to Dave:

I would see a well funded wikibook project as a viable alternative to the current publisher textbook hegemony. With the work done at wikimedia as a backbone, the right input, enthusiasm and knowhow, a full wikibook science program could be up within a year. The key to the success of such a project would be getting ‘everyone’ involved. Not just science people and curriculum designers, but teachers, science institutions and students as well. A solid organizational structure, a place for debate and disagreement, as well as areas for student input. It has all the potential for being a real turning point for education.

Most of us have used wikipedia, or at least heard of it in the popular press, and the wikibook is another open source model for education using the power of community built web pages. Dave goes through some of the pros and cons including the question of validity, or  "How do we know that the information in the textbook is ‘true’?". In this world of information abundance I don’t believe that it’s necesssary to prove that something is true. Once posted, facts can easily be cross-checked, and a strong community will make sure that the information is fact-based. Learners and educators have to be media savvy and understand how they can check the verity of an information source. Truth is what we believe and we need to understand why we believe something.
I remember a course in third year on Canadian historiography (the wikipedia definition is number one on Google) that covered three textbooks, one English Canadian, one French Canadian and one American. Which one of these university textbooks contained the "truth"? In many courses, only one of these texts would have been required reading or required to purchase. A more open wikibook, transparent to all and open to debate, is a much better system, and cheaper, than an unchanging textbook.