Wikipedia (a free online encyclopedia)is a tremendous example of collaborative content creation. This Slashdot interview with Wikipedia's founder gives insight into the project, its motivations, meaning, and reasons for success. It's a refreshing read in "successfully implemented idealism".
Comment: Like social network analysis and communities, collaborative content creation has been untapped by education providers. Our course-based focus of learning continues to be at odds with how many people learn today. This is not to say that courses aren't valuable...just that they need to be properly positioned in a wider array of learning methods - not centric, but complimentary to the entire learning/knowledge acquisition experience.
Liz Lian (at KM in Education) provides a helpful series of links on handhelds in education.
Information snowflake...a simple overview of how we handle and use information. The model is quite similar to Bloom's Taxonomy.
Information Sharing: "There are two ways to look at information sharing in business. One is that increasing information sharing is a good thing, arming more people with more information to make better decisions. Another way to look at it is that information can get in the way of someone doing his or her job." (via Jack - an excellent blog worth following)
Comment: Information sharing (as a subset of knowledge management) is all about context. Sharing without the ability to dialogue and place the information in a framework for understanding and meaning is largely useless.
Social network analysis (SNA): An interesting collection of links, articles, and resources on SNA. This link provides a listing of various enterprise/group applications.
Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to E-learning and Why: " The Thwarted Innovation report suggests that educational technology and e-learning have not delivered on the promise of revolutionizing the classroom and making higher education more profitable. It suggests that, despite the rapid growth in the US of online education, many teaching staff at colleges do not use innovative technology on their courses, and that not much benefit has been gained from the investment in educational technology."
Comment: Elearning didn't go bust...the hype about elearning did. The main conclusion of this report is a bit off: "elearning will be pervasive only when faculty change how they teach". Elearning's adoption is not driven by how people teach...it's adoption derives from people's need to stay current in a rapidly evolving information society.
People use elearning because of: 1) accessiblity to learning opportunities 2) increased effectiveness of learning (and costs). I've taken many online courses that were poorly taught...but they were accessible due to my schedule. Corporations often adopt elearning to increase the effectiveness of training several thousand employees quickly. I think that faculty will change how they teach once elearning is pervasive.
Seb Schmoller links to an interesting resources site on semantic web applications. Great resource.
You can sign up to receive Seb's regular newsletter. It's a particularly valuable resource in providing links about European developments.
The Next Best Thing to Being There: "Groove is one of a powerful new generation of software tools designed to help businesses collaborate. Computers, of course, have long helped people work together. But previous versions of collaboration software have tended to assume that all users were in a single location and generally required all the information to be stored on a central server. These latest products distribute data across the Web, allowing colleagues thousands of miles apart to work together on projects as if they were in the same room. Such tools have the intuitiveness of e-mail but add new features, like instant messaging and voice over Internet capabilities, as well as better ways to organize messages, documents, and calendars..."
One of the most significant trends (which receives limited focus) is the very rapid shift of content ownership in education. Instructors/trainers who previously "owned" content, are now only partial contributors in the process of developing online resources. Creating content online requires a diverse set of skills - instructional design, graphics, programming, media, subject matter expert. This largely ignored trend could be seen as a significant "intellectual land grab" or the starting point of truly collaborative sharing.
Organizations obviously invest heavily in the creation of content for delivery online...and as a result, institutions have a much stronger claim for ownership. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the organization believes in freely sharing resources created with public funds, content can be used as catalyst for innovation and collaboration. If, on the other hand, the organization prefers to position their digital content as a strategic competitive advantage (instead of services offered), it could lead to more rigid copyright rules that we have experienced over the last few decades.
What are your experiences with this? Any thoughts on why this concept is largely ignored? What are the implications? Is it a "good" or a "bad" trend? Comments are open.
Why I teach Online Courses: "So why do I teach online courses? I understand the crucial role played by information technology in business and in society. I want my students to learn the skills, concepts, and importance of information technology. I want my students to do more than compete, I want them to succeed."
Comment: I have no idea why I teach online. In an idealistic state, I say it's because I can extend learning to people who would otherwise not have access...or to improve the quality of learning. In a more practical state, I say I teach online simply because I can - it's a different, refreshing way of connecting with others (often at a deeper level than face to face courses).
Lilia posts a useful list of Knowledge Management Journals and Magazines. Most offer email updates, but not RSS.
Arranging Ideas: Knowledge Management in Human Terms: "However, I personally loathe the buzzword "knowledge management" because it has become hopelessly corrupted, convoluted, and devalued by companies hawking huge expensive systems or consulting services that border on organizational voodoo.
In my book, knowledge management boils down to arranging ideas. In other words, I prefer to view this as a real human process, not a technological or abstract one..."
Comment: Most talk of knowledge management has a corporate slant - i.e. corporations will benefit by adopting KM principles. It's interesting to note that many of the tools with rapid adoption rates (blogs, wikis, Furl) are of greater personal benefit. I think corporate KM will only be effective to the degree that it is personally effective (i.e. I'll adopt KM practices if it helps me to do my own work better...which in turn will help the corporation). Most talk of KM places corporate needs/benefits ahead of personal - a cart before the horse scenario.
The Connected Campus
"The need for increased wireless connectivity is growing rapidly on campus, as university IT administrators, CIOs and technology VPs are well aware. Expanding the wireless network is driven by the need to compete effectively for students by offering up-to-date technology. But the challenge schools face in a time of fiscal constraints is often this: How to meet a growing demand for wireless while staying within budget constraints. It’s a difficult challenge, but one that some schools are meeting creatively—and it may not be as costly as you think."
Training Dictionary - a wiki listing training terms.
Communities of Practice: "Communities of practice are known as social entities within which members exchange experience and views, spinning each other’s tacit knowledge into conversations and knowledge objects that allow its transmission.
This paper will briefly argue that such “entities” are not homogenous blocs, but complete ecosystems in which different types of resource serve different roles, and relate to each other either in symbiosis or in competition for the limited resources of practitioner time, work and opinion. Such ecosystem feeds and is fed by the conversations of the community."
Comment: Communities are the future of learning (or more accurately - they have always been the most effective means of learning, we're starting to give them the proper role in our current model of information sharing/learning). This article is worth reading...but I think the author misses two important points:
1. When talking communities, wikis, not blogs, should be the tools of choice. Blogs are personal and can be linked. Wikis are community conversations. Blogs are generally more about individual/personal conversations.Wikipedia is a great example of community content creation.
2. Learning communities are only partially about knowledge sharing. The other (more important) component is knowledge creation. What we know today may well be outdated in a few years. The capacity to continue to know (knowledge creation) is of greater value than sharing what we know now.
Tutorials on open source tools in education:
Sakai project is another collaborative, open source collaboration/learning management system (version 1 was released July 15): "The products of this project will include an Enterprise Services-based Portal, a complete Course Management System with sophisticated assessment tools, a Research Support Collaboration System, a Workflow Engine, and a Technology Portability Profile as a clear standard for writing future tools that can extend this core set of educational applications."
Instructional Design Workbook is a great resource on (and overview of) the discipline. It's designed in Authorware, so it has some "dynamic" features...but navigation is a bit cumbersome. Well worth exploring.
Network Closure "The power of reputation rests on the idea of network closure, which is the degree to which everyone knows everyone else in a network. In a subgroup or "clique" where everybody knows everybody else, reputation can have currency much more powerful than money. Promises within the group can be trusted because the consequences of breaking a promise would be catastrophic. Anyone who mistreated a fellow member in such a group would quickly find himself ostracized by the entire group, his reputation ruined."
Into the Blogosphere (via elearningpost)...a series of essays exploring blogging from a variety of perspectives. Strong academic slant (as a quick read of the essay titles will confirm!).
Rapid elearning and workflow learning are two concepts that have been getting enough attention over the last year to be classified as "trends". I'm not entirely sure what to think about either. We have a unique problem in the learning/technology field of giving every small nuance in a concept a new name. Then we declare the old name/concept "dead" (almost as if we are constantly struggling to stay with the "in crowd"). Rapid elearning simply means "we have limited resources and time, how can we get this stuff done faster"...and workflow learning simply means "learning integrated (an abused word that can cause a rash to break out in some tech workers) as a vital business process...while still focusing on the needs of each individual worker".
Q & A - Stephen Downes: "E-learning is an extension of ourselves in the sense that it greatly increases our capacities. With appropriate incentive and a little bit of work, it is possible today to become well educated in just about any academic field (professions, of course, with a significant practical component, resist this trend). This means that the imbalance between the formally educated and the uneducated in a discipline has shifted."
Blogger Burnout: "Blogging for some is an obvious labor of love, and having a forum that belongs to them and enables them to write whatever they want, and have it seen by throngs of readers, is a very attractive proposition. This is especially true because blogging is a timeless endeavor and one that allows authors to vent about whatever's on their minds."
Comment: This article highlights the rigorous blogging schedule of popular blogs. For myself, I find my use for blogging has evolved over the four years. It started out as a thrill to be able tool publish personal thoughts and have people read and respond. Then it became a forum to synthesize trends in varying fields. Then it became a forum for personal knowledge management. Currently, it is less a broadcast tool (though I do send out weekly blog summaries to a mailing list of several thousand), and more of a personal space. Periodically, my posts will result in discussion via email (due to comment spam, I usually have the comment feature turned off)...at other times, other ed-tech bloggers will share comments and reactions in their forums. What started off as an end in itself, has now become a comfortable, fairly regular, habit of idea exploration and expression.
Full stream ahead: "The combination of these three developments - universal wireless connectivity based on the IP standard that's connected in a worldwide broadband network - will allow us to treat IP access like water or electricity. Once this happens, the progress that we have made in the past 10 years will seem at best like an enticing prologue."
The Power of Informal Learning: "Although more formal forms of instruction such as the classroom and e-learning will be around for years, it’s becoming more and more important to watch and harness the more informal methodologies that our students are utilizing."
Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management (via Denham Grey): "This volume will provide a broad basis for understanding the issues, technologies, theories, applications, opportunities and challenges being faced by organizations today in their quest for knowledge management."
Will Richardson: "The more I think about it, the more I wonder if collaborative construction of content won't be the rule instead of the exception in the future." He also links to this list of wiki engines.
Prediction (more of an extrapolation, actually): Of all the trends and activities in learning and technology fields, the exploration of networks and knowledge flow will pay the greatest dividends in improving individual and organizational learning. I'm surprised more effort isn't being expended in this area. Managing the Connected Organization: "The knowledge economy operates on the complexities of connections. All individuals, communities, systems, and other business assets are massively interconnected in an evolving economic web. In the connected economy, each network actor (individual, team, or organization) is embedded in a larger economic system that affects each participant and, in return, is influenced by that participant. In such a connected system we can no longer focus on individual or single team performance. We must manage connected assets, not unconnected individuals."
Network Analysis of Knowledge Construction in Asynchronous Learning Networks: "It seems that Social Network Analysis can be a useful research tool for revealing network structures of cooperative learning groups."
The journalism/news field seems to be a bit ahead of online education in grappling with two-way flow of content (news provider to end user...and end user to news provider). I've previously described learning as a content creation process (not only content consumption). Thinking About Interaction Design for Online News Delivery is still more concerned with improved ways of exploring content...but it's still a good read: "I propose a system of design I call "productive interaction," which views interaction as a medium that enables the user as producer of his or her own outcomes and meanings. Productive interaction aligns the design of non-linear content, context and affordance in an open, collaborative fashion, enabling the direct manipulation of the work's material. Users can create custom, personally significant meaning spaces of their own."