A short article on the role of wikis in corporations: Something Wiki This Way Comes.
Basic, useful, introduction toEducational Wikis (via Weblogs in Higher Education)
I really like this idea: Small Pieces Loosely Joined "What we are trying to demonstrate is the power of using a discrete series of "small" often free/open source technologies in a loosely coupled fashioned, for use in education."
Comment: This view of educational technology is much more palatable (to me at least!) than locked down "do-it-our-way" LMS'. If innovation is a function of variety and diversity, loosely connected tools will afford the greatest benefit to educators and learners.
Educational Semantic Web (via MADLaT listserv)...I enjoyed this issue of Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JiME). Articles range from Resource Profiles, to Semantic Learning Webs, to Semantic web's impact on education, and more. While the articles are worth reading, the format needs work. The journal is setup with frames...and it's not possible to directly link to an article. The above link will also be obsolete once a new issue is published. Why do they do that?
Update: Scott Leslie sent a link to the permanent URL for this issue of JiME.
Exploring e-learning Myths: "e-Learning came to forefront for taking the traditional classroom training model and applying technology advancements to create new ways to learn. However, each advancement in e-Learning has also resulted in new obstacles. This continual struggle has helped spawn some popular e-Learning myths that deserve exploration."
Comment: This article explores myths about elearning standards, analystics, and implementation. Fairly standard stuff. The real challenge of elearning (and an area that is usually overlooked) still centers around getting it used. Right now, there is a small segment of society that sees the value of elearning (typically professionals who are looking at advancing/changing their career). Most people don't see elearning as an option. Often, organizations that implement elearning assume that the creation of a relevant, well-designed, integrated program will convince people to use it. Not so. Getting people to learn online (or use any new technology) requires a shift in thinking that needs to be fostered much like a well-organized advertising campaign. "Build it and they will use it" is probably the biggest myth surrounding elearning.
Wikis in the Classroom: "I had a brilliant failure using wiki in the classroom...To really use a wiki, the participants need to be in control of the content- you have to give it over fully."
Gathering knowledge: "In my experience structured questionnaires and surveys are the least effective may to gather knowledge, which is emergent and very context dependent. I strongly favor communities of practice and knowledge networking where emergent insights and shared meaning are evaluated, continuous learning happens, and participants are kept aware of developments by their peers."
I've blogged about Skype before...it's a simple tool that uses the Internet to make phone calls (no long distance charges...and the software is free). Over the last year, Skype has made steady improvements in call quality, ease of finding other users, and recently, incorporating small conference call capabilities. Skype Beyond the Hype is a useful article introducing the program and the revenue model being pursued by the owners.
D'Arcy Norman links to (and comments on) Guidelines for Learning Objects: "It's the first document I've seen that focusses more on the educational side of things, rather than the technical. This approach is much needed, since the real implications of this stuff are not technical at all..."
Making Sense of Online Learning has a great resource page of links and sites. Seems like elearnspace is missing...:).
Jeremy Hiebert offers valuable comments on an article I linked yesterday to on portfios: "The basic assumption here is that the goal of any portfolio initiative should be to have portfolios eventually replace high-stakes testing. That sounds admirable enough, but their top couple of levels of maturity look a lot like high-stakes assessment to me: linking everything to pre-defined standards, departmental goals and taxonomies."
Jack links to a short article on Getting Full Value from KM (knowledge management). The article tries to break KM down into nice, simple boxes: one for HR (learning knowledge) and the other for IT (storing knowledge). This type of approach is why KM disappoints so often. Learning and storing knowledge are (should) both be functions of use and context (which in itself is almost impossible to achieve). Information without context has limited value (I linked to an article on this last week). Due to the difficulty of attaching context to the piece of information, the process of capturing needs to closely mimic the work tasks occuring at the time the knowledge is captured (i.e. a person should not have to do anything different to share knowledge - it should be a function of the process of working/dialoguing/conversing). Our era of knowledge abundance is making the evaluation of information more important than accessing information. We have the information...we just don't know what it means or what we should do with it (hence the critical need for some type of context).
The extraction of knowledge is equally challenging. Even by attaching a context of use to information, there is no assurance that it will actually be found and interpreted as valuable. We often don't know that we don't know. This is why communities are so important...they provide better digestion of the value of information...and offer insightful dialogue about intended use.
A very complete exploration of differnt levels of portfolio use: Portfolios to Webfolios and Beyond: Levels of Maturation (via weblogg-ed): "Webfolios may have the most significant effect on education since the introduction of formal schooling."
I'm encountering Furl more and more frequently. Finally decided to check it out. Furl is a simple tool that allows people to store links (much like a favorites folder), rate them, and assign keywords. After adding a "Furl It" button to the tool bar, users can store pages of interest. Accounts can be shared with others and RSS feeds are available. The whole account setup took less than 5 minutes.
A short exploration of media characteristics and impact on learning Managing the Matrix: Using Multimedia in Distance Learning Projects . It's applicable beyond distance learning...
RSS: A Learning Technology: "But it’s not the acronym that’s important, it’s the result: a means of driving content directly from its producer to its recipient automatically, almost instantaneously, and without interference from viruses, spam, or other modern day electronic pests." Article relies heavily on the work of Stephen Downes. RSS as a means of sharing learning objects is discussed. While the article takes an approach of sharing content via RSS, I've generally seen RSS provide more value as a means of tethering conversations and sharing knowledge.
Social Capital: "The degree to which a community or society collaborates and cooperates (through such mechanisms as networks, shared trust, norms and values) to achieve mutual benefits."
Here's a sign of the times: Information Environmentalist: "The newest polluters are not chemical manufacturers leaking toxins into the air. Neither are they logging conglomerates clearing ancient forests nor avaricious developers turning wetlands into strip malls. The newest polluters are in your pocket, atop your desk, or clogging your telephone lines with streams of digital effluent.
The information age, it seems, is data-contaminated. And it's not just the volume of information that's worrisome; it's the lack of context in which it's delivered."
BEST ONLINE INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICES (via Ray) revisits/builds on Chickering and Gamson's Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education, presents the principles in light of online instruction. Nice article for instructors/trainers making the transition to online.
Karen Hunt just left an excellent link in the comments section of my post on the Art of Blogging: A Webquest: Blogs and RSS...worth bookmarking!
Stephen Downes is pulling together a wide range of resources and work over the last several years. He has previously posted articles, etc. (resource profiles, edu_rss, dlorn, etc.). I attended a session at MADLaT today where he presented on the topic of “Projecting Quality” – based largely on his work in resource profiles. The challenge is complex: trying to determine the quality of unrated learning object by evaluating the nature of other similar objects and other similar users. Think of a dating.com meets the educational world.
Here’s a summary of his notes (I’ll post an updated link once he posts his own files).
Selection of learning objects – based on metadata
Filtering/sorting according to rated quality
Problem: “takes too long to create customer learning”…want to reduce development time for learning to zero. Want to find learning objects with search results of one.
Sifter Organizing Project
Learning resources (formerly known as learning objects) – want to make metadata available for harvesting. LO metadata is descriptive of resource…evaluation of LO is descriptive of resource.
MERLOT
Match.com – dating site, create user profile, adds personality tests
Our methodology:
Content is filtered based on content similarities. Collaborative filtering – used when ratings of LO’s are available, no metadata (projections into the “future” derived from user, object)
LO prediction:
Question: nature of user profile – are they static, can they be updated?
Answer: FOAF – an xml file maintained by the person in question, which is made available for questioning. Individual (self evaluation) is not complete. Other evaluations are needed to improve accuracy of evaluation. As a person uses a system, the sorts of things they do should be captured and made available for systems by harvesting (though this does raise issues of privacy). Multi-dimensional descriptions and their interests as determined by their actions are developing. We should treat personal information in the same way we treat copyright information. A similar principle is needed for description of use of individual profiles. Ownership and control of this information has to reside with the individual in question.
Question: How do we keep a record of where we’ve been in LOs?
Answer: Search should not be an explicit task. It should occur in the background while we are completing our tasks. The system should go to resource libraries and begin searching for and presenting resources to the end user. This is a long term vision. It’ll take another 20 years. The design of what constitutes a class becomes less and less content based, but more task/activity (doing something). The information should be delivered automatically…and resource evaluation is an important part of this. Wide spread evaluation with many points of view need to be dynamic.
I just finished a presentation at MADLaT on The Art of Blogging.
Interesting perspective: Is a degree still worth having?: "Should students, school-leavers and their parents be having second thoughts about going to university?
Two reports published this week may provoke some doubts over the financial and career benefits of getting a degree." Degrees as a measure of competence are important. Degrees achieved through four plus years of dedicated school time aren't important. It's not the degree itself that is in question. It's the process.
Jay Cross on a variety of learning, video, collaboration: "Learning and working meet and melt into each other, to a point where learning is an integral and ongoing part of work. It is work in fact that will need to be changed the most to be able to accept without unneeded restrain those open-ended collaboration traits so essential to the growth of an effective learning culture."
Comment: I completely agree with this. Learning work integration and higher education/corporate collaboration are two of the most interesting opportunities/trends beginning to form in the learning marketplace. Trouble is, it's suffering from "learning object syndrome" (much promise, little action).
Wikis Described in Plain English: "Normal web sites are usually developed offline and then presented to users as a finished product. By comparison, wikis are first presented to users as a blank slate- an empty page. A new wiki is an empty wiki, no pages, no links. Instead of a team of designers developing a web site in private, a wiki is developed in public by the users of the wiki over the life of the wiki."
I recently read an article stating that declining ethics is the number one concern for most people (ahead of things such as environment, economy, etc.). With that as a backdrop, Teaching and Development Online offers a link to this useful resource: Applied Ethics Resource
This blurb is from a conference proposal by Sebastian Fiedler...thought for the day: "Traditional instructional models within higher education are evidently insufficient to meet challenges of learning and working within the new information economy, mainly due to the primacy of the teacher in micro-managing learning goals and processes. The advent of the Web has leveled information access and status, and in the past few years, numerous informal communities of practice have emerged that sustain and develop within different frameworks of learning and facilitation."