Technology

information & communication technology

Architecture for a better future

by

Dave Pollard produces more thought-provoking articles than almost anyone else on the Web. I have used his Natural Enterprise model to inform my own work in developing better business models for small businesses, and now Dave has started to put many of his ideas together in his latest post, Creating a Post-Civilization Culture. His framework consists of four components – Principles, Learning, Enablers & Infrastructure. The premise is that,

With the right principles that can guide our decisions, the learnings to build the new culture properly, and the enabling building blocks, we can create the infrastructure that embodies the new culture.


This framework, coupled with Robert Paterson‘s narrative on the next Reformation, could sow the seeds for some grassroots action. It may be just what we need at the local level to address our own community’s sustainabilty issues.

Provinent Acquires LearnStream

by

Provinent, headquartered in Toronto, with its development shop in Fredericton has just purchased LearnStream, another Fredericton company. From the press release:

Provinent Corporation, Canada’s leader in e-learning consulting and custom e-learning content development, announced today that it has acquired New Brunswick based LearnStream, a pioneer in e-learning courseware development.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing any more mergers and acquisitions this year?

“A Learning Blogosphere”

by

A recurring theme here and elsewhere is that decentralized Web 2.0 technologies are better than older, centralized technologies (e.g. LMS & LCMS) in enabling learning on the Web. Here is an interesting story about a University of Michigan class that implemented blogs for learning, beginning about a year ago. The first installment from the Community Engine Blog is now posted:

Milestone 4 – Why blog instead of using technology X?

This question came mainly from academics who had invested in some previous computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) system. Nonetheless, it also came from students and is a reasonable question. Should we adopt new technologies because they are new? As I hope this tale illustrates, adopting new technologies is costly.

My answer is this. By design, blogging allows individuals to raise topics of interest and create threads of conversation without having to ask anyone’s permission. That was an explicit design consideration for this course; I wanted to know what was going on with students. Bulletin boards tend to be top-down and are owned by one person. Wikis force you to go through a social filter. Others can edit your pages or even delete them.

Second, because blogging also produces XML-based feeds, it is very easy to aggregate all of the individual contributions in one place while still maintaining individual attribution. Third, the XML-based feeds in blogs allow me to join people and resources to my group vs. having to get them to join me. Note, I did ask permission of everyone whose feed I aggregated into our site, but they did not have to go through a sign-on process and explicitly produce content for the site. By localizing content creation, blogs make it possible to ask permission and get a coherent stream of content.

The lessons learnt in this case provide some guidance to anyone implementing blogs for education today. Some of the obstacles were due to the fact that this class was just slightly ahead of the technology adoption curve, but their experiences can now inform many others embarking on similar trips. The numerous trackbacks & comments attest to the value of these experiences being posted.

In the space of a year, blogs for learning have moved from the bleeding edge to the leading edge.

Tagback

Mrs Blash’s Home and School Communicator

by

I have frequently mentioned how a blog would make home and school communication very simple. Well Debbie Blash, a school Principal, has started a blog:

Welcome to Mrs Blash’s home and school communicator. It is hoped that through this blogger that we will be able to improve home and school communication. Please feel free to contact me through this site.

It’s on Blogger, so it’s free and it seems so obvious that I wonder why more schools (like ours) have not adopted the medium. Mrs Blash is obviously new to blogging, but she has taken the plunge in order to further communication – bravo! In our town we have "Talk Mail" using the telephone system, but not much on the Internet. Maybe soon …

Guidelines for Effective Corporate eLearning

by

Anol Bhattacharya, author of SoulSoup, has posted some good guidelines on elearning for the corporate world. I can really relate to guideline #1:

1. The business world is not about learning, it’s about doing business.

So before doing training needs analysis – please, do go through a business needs analysis. It may not be the same as the strategic direction or vision statement of the company; it’s more complex. We are dealing with different goals and perspectives. What needs to be learnt varies from the point of view of the CXO, training manager, product manager/department head and the learner. Catering to all viewpoints is a daunting task, but, believe me, it’s the first and foremost task to do. Any shortcut is a pathway to doom’s loop.

This is similar to the principal of The Problem, The Balloon and the Four Bedroom House; namely that an inadequate analysis may rise up and bite you during a subsequent part of the project.

Anol has a number of other principals that would be worthwhile for anyone developing “learning solutions” for the business world. I got a déja vu chuckle from #5, stating that big LMS rollouts are out:

Then the fun begins. People sit together in meeting rooms, munching donuts and sipping coffee, to interview LMS vendors. The process made them feel important. After that hoola-hoop, when the LMS was finally implemented (e Learning rollout – drum roll please!), there was nothing inside it. So they filled it up with off-the-shelf courseware and uploaded all the junk PowerPoint presentations, PDF and Word documents. Finally when they realized nothing is going according to their expectations (god only knows what those were!) – they jumped to the conclusion – e Learning doesn’t work!

Via James at IncSub.

Yahoo uses Drupal

by

Sebastien Paquet is blogging the Information Architecture Summit [what’s the difference between a summit and a conference?] in Montreal this week (thanks Seb). The presentation on Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study, shows how Drupal meets the needs of the expanding company:

I used to work with an internal group to build an intranet. We didn’t want to go around begging for money, so it needed to be cheap. [php, movable type, drupal, other logos pop up] We wanted it scalable [some logos go away], customizable and extensible, easy to use (unlike coders, designers are a fickle bunch) [some other logos vanish], and conducive to collaboration. A bottom-up feel to it. Categorization. The answer was Drupal. It has broad functionality, blogs, calendar, strong taxonomy system. Active developer community – I want to do as little work as possible. There’s a new version about every four months. It has a very abstracted engine. It’s not the greatest at everything, but the taxonomy part is very strong.

The strength of the Drupal community just keeps growing :-)

Seb has blogged a number of other sesssions, well worth the read if you’re interested in IA.

 

The Drupal Alternative to Proprietary Courseware

by

Charlie Lowe at Cyberdash has a presentation available on Teaching Writing, Collaboration, and Engagement in Global Contexts, using the Drupal CMS. According to the presentation (which I reviewed in OOo Impress 2.0 beta), a traditional LMS "Privileges course administration and content management over class community interaction, configuration flexibility, and usability", whereas students and educators need systems that integrate with the Internet and allow more collaborative learning that reflects life outside of academia.

Two slides on user needs provide an excellent synthesis of why proprietary LMS’s do not meet the needs of higher education.

Students & Educators Need:

  • Online platforms that better enable social constructionist principles of collaborative learning.
  • Students need an early opportunity to learn professional communication using real world software systems.
  • Better integration of current and cutting edge Internet communication technologies such as weblogs and RSS.
  • Increased flexibilty through more extensive customization and configuration options.
  • The choice of whether to make the class space private or public.

Institutions Need:

  • Web application platforms that can be used for a wider variety of purposes.
  • Increased opportunity to adapt the online course component to the institutions’ needs.
  • Reduced total cost of ownership would be nice.
  • No vendor lock-in.
  • Reallocation of funds from site licensing fees into learning opportunities for students. [I like this one!]

This presentation is a good review for anyone in education looking at their technology options. It is more a review of proprietary versus open source, with specific Drupal examples. The argument is clear, and there are a lot of screenshots from sample sites.

Update: Charlie follows up with some suggestions on how to use the money that is saved on license fees.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta Review

by

I recently downloaded the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office productivity suite, version 2.0 Beta. The suite includes Writer (word processor), Impress (presentation), calculator (spreadsheet) or other parts that I don’t use yet. Given that it’s a Beta, there are still some minor issues – e.g. the application gets hung-up sometimes, but not often, and you have to close it from the Windows Task Manager [All of my comments are for the Windows version].

Overall I would say the OOo is ready for prime time, especially once release Version 2.0 becomes available in the next few weeks. The interface is much more intuitive, especially for those used to applications like MS Word or WordPerfect. This recent version continues from previous ones with its ability to open, edit and save in Microsoft formats, or in the less bulky OOo formats. Saving docs as PDF’s is even easier, and you now have more compression options. If you have documents in an older version of OOo you will have to save them in the new format in order to use all of the newer functions, something I learned in OOo Impress with its newer and better slide sorter.

A great new feature with Writer includes the ability to open WordPerfect documents. I noted that Writer 2.0 also handles MS Word tables much better now, which was my primary complaint with OOo 1.x.

Those used to MS PowerPoint’s multiple layout options and clip art galleries may not like OOo Impress, but there are always open source image galleries like Wiki Commons available. You should also note that the new format (.odt, .odp, etc) is not backwards compatible, so if you save a document as "xxx.odt", someone with OOo Version 1.x will not be able to open it.

I have previously recommended OOo to my more computer-literate friends but now can wholeheartedly endorse it for the average home or business user. Remember that it’s free; you can install it on as many computers as you want; and there is no Microsoft End User License Agreement requiring you to give up "quiet enjoyment" and various other rights. If you think that saving a lot of money and having greater flexibility with your office applications is a good thing, then get OOo 2.0.