Technology

information & communication technology

Ontario Department of Education Signs with Star Office

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As a follow-up from a previous post on open source in government, it’s good to see the Ontario Department of Education has signed an agreement with Sun Microsystems to use Star Office. Star Office and its open source (free) version Open Office provide Microsoft compatible desktop applications for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDF export. Star Office retails for $(CA)79.95 but, according to the IT Business report:

Financial details of the arrangement were not disclosed, but Sun Canada’s director for education and research Lynne Zucker said that the fee was minimal.

I had suggested a similar solution to the Government of New Brunswick as well as the Department of Education, and received a nice e-mail for my suggestion. Perhaps Ontario’s example will lead to our province examining the use of open source software in government. It might even keep my taxes down. Via Seb.

Ensemble Collaboration gets Rave Reviews in Washington

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Ensemble Collaboration launched this week and is getting some very good press. The local Atlantic Canadian press of course reported this, but so did the national Globe & Mail. From Canada East:

The degree of acceptance for the product surprised Mr. Watson. One potential customer said he would fly to Fredericton next week to visit with company representatives.
“Honestly, the most frequent question was, ‘How soon can I get it?’ Mr. Watson said. “The opportunities seem to be much greater than we anticipated and the market seems to want to get this sooner rather than later. And that was only the first day.”

It’s good to see some excitement in the business again. Congratulations Ben!

Students in Favour of Laptops in Schools

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Via Seb is this discussion (in French) about laptops in schools. The students at this northern New Brunswick school were asked on the Haut-Madawaska Learning Centre blog – what do you think of the Education Minister’s request for schools to participtae in a laptops in schools project and should we participate? The responses, which seem to be all from students, range from "computers will enrich our IT skills and increase communication in class" to "access to more computers would help us to access our existing class blogs" and "it would make research a lot easier" and "Wow, what a good idea".

Even the 2nd Grade class thinks that laptops in 7th and 8th Grade are a good idea. Of the estimated 100 comments, only one was slightly negative. So there it is. The students (learners) are resoundingly in favour of laptops in school.

I have always believed that the key to learning is motivation, having been influenced early on by Gagne’s events of instruction – where the first instructional event is "activating motivation". These students are already motivated!

More on ASTD 2004

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The best coverage so far on ASTD 2004 is from e-Clippings. These posts include an overview of Harold Stolovitch’s session, quoting Harold on the definition of "technology":

Technology is the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.

This is the correct definition of technology when applied to Human Performance Technology [my field] – which is NOT about information technology, but solving problems in an applied way.

Technical Frustrations

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Many thanks to Stephen Downes for pointing out that my web pages were taking forever to load. You may have noticed a sidebar on the left called "En Passant" that previously held my recent Furl items of note. Each time a page was loaded it had to check the Furl server, which is not working well today. My apologies to all for my technical incompetence, but a lesson has been learned.

New (and Improved) LearnNB Website

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The new LearnNB website was launched today. There’s much more content, and we will be using this as a portal for many other initiatives, such as our R&D community of practice. Learn NB’s aims are:

Promote the export of New Brunswick’s experience, knowledge, expertise, products and services in e-learning and related fields.
Facilitate partnerships between the private sector, governments, universities, and non-governmental organizations in pursuit of the above.
Assist the Province of New Brunswick and the Atlantic Region through the ongoing development of our human capital and, in so doing, to be able to more effectively export our collective competence in e-learning capacity building.

The site is brand new today, and I’m sure that there will be a lot more information soon. Once we get some blogs, wikis, trackbacks and RSS feeds on this site we’ll know that we’re getting somewhere ;-)

Ensemble Collaboration Launches

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Ensemble Collaboration, an elearning company in Fredericton, New Brunswick, has formally launched this afternoon, and is no longer in "stealth mode". The product launch is happening at the ASTD conference.

Ensemble’s offerings are collaboration and mentoring tools. The collaboration application suite is based on Search, Live Help, FAQ’s, Discussion and E-Mail functions. None of these are new, but they are all wrapped together, with access to a larger network than you would normally have in a single course. There is a demo module on collaboration available, featuring Jay Cross.

Jay Cross on Workflow Learning

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Jay Cross has written an article for ACM’s eLearning Magazine on workflow learning, which is, in a nutshell “how workers improve performance in a business ecosystem.”

The concept and realisation is a bit more than this though. Workflow learning combines technological advances like web services and XML, with business process improvement (BPR, Six Sigma, HPT, etc.) and puts it all into a knowledge management/performance support framework. What’s exciting about workflow learning is that the technology has caught up to some of the theory, and the globalized economy is making workflow learning (or something resembling it) a necessity.

These are interesting times for learning professionals focused on business performance.

Who reads Blogs?

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From Rick Bruner is this reference to a survey about blog readers. Rick’s summary analysis of the data:

Average age: 39
Percent of all respondents who are male: 79%
Average household income: $98,000
Average number of blogs respondents read daily: 8
Percent of blog readers who do NOT write blogs: 79%
Percent who have clicked on an ad on a blog: 67%

Read the entire survey results [scroll down] for your own evaluation.

Open Source CMS

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A very good overview by James Robertson on the pros and cons of using an open source content management system.

Community-based CMS: these systems are best suited for organisations that have strong internal development resources, as customisation will need to be conducted in-house (in the absence of commercial support). This makes them unsuitable for any project requiring ‘out of the box’ deployment.
Commercially-supported CMS: these systems should be evaluated like any other commercial product. While the licensing cost is zero, the system must match business needs.