Podcasting (audio blogging) has a new face: Odeo: "Somewhere in an apartment in San Francisco, we're making it easy for you to discover, create, and subscribe to fresh, independent audio content for your iPod (or whatever MP3-player-type-deal you prefer)." The founder of Blogger is behind the initiative.
Corporately, educating sales staff and customers is a continual challenge. Many advocate large complex initiatives, but a simpler solution is sometimes more effective (the same holds true within the education market). The best solution today is the one that offers the greatest flexibility tomorrow - because we don't know how the market itself will change and evolve. Connecting People with Content: "Organisations are still jumping to the conclusion that they absolutely need a ‘knowledge repository' to successfully harness employee know-how. While a database (let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s just a database) can be an important part of a knowledge solution, by itself, it’s typically an expensive waste of time. This white paper provides an alternative approach where content generated by subject matter experts (SME) creates new social networks, which in turn can provide useful pointers to content held in the ‘knowledge repository.’"
The 18 commandments of Knowledge-conscious managers: "I like the idea that Knowledge Management is really about Knowledge Conscious Management, or to put it differently, Managing in the Knowledge Age as Professor Klaus North puts it. Incidentally, this explains why it is so difficult to introduce in 20th century organizations, which do not recognize mastery of knowledge flows as a source of competitive advantage."
Higher Education: "Higher education is now international in a way it has not been since the heyday of Europe's great medieval universities—and on a vastly greater scale...Private, profit-seeking institutions are still a minority, but almost all universities are beginning to compete for talent and money. That is breeding independence of government, both financially and psychologically; inexorably, the state's role is shrinking. The two big trends, of internationalisation and competition, feed each other. The more that universities tailor their offers to foreign students, the more attractive they become. And the more that students hop between countries, the more their choices count rather than the wishes of a particular government."
Tags (see del.icio.us and technorati) and folksonomies have launched an entire new mode of creating, aggregating and evaluating information. Digg is a fairly logical extension: "Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most technology websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do."
Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Simply stated - our learners are changing. So must our manner of teaching and the way in which we organize our learning institutions.
I've received great response to my article on connectivism. I've been working with Talking Communities software for hosting online presentations. To facilitate some discussion (as well as present a new website and blog on connectivism), I'll be hosting an online session for a limited number of participants.
Date: Wednesday, March 2
Time: 4:00 pm CST
If you are interested in attending, please email me.
Can Interest in Distance Training be Sustained in Corporate Organizations?: "The implementation of distance training is an effective tool for reducing training cost, saving time, and creating a more knowledgeable and productive workforce. Even so, implementation of distance training in corporate organizations is moving at a relatively slow pace...The purpose of this article is to analyze various obstacles that stifle interest in sustaining distance training in corporate organizations."
10 Rules for Media Survival...with concepts like "Realize that consumers' desires of control, choice, convenience, and simplicity have not been altered by the recent changes in technology" and "The industry cannot ignore the fragmentation that is going on around the world", this list provides ideas educators should be exploring.
Creating a personal knowledge network, and nurturing important relationships is an important knowledge-era skill (that's a lot of buzzwords). As some are noticing, at some point, reducing the network provides more value than continuing to add. I've noticed this same concern in my own information sources. I typically follow around 250 blogs, 20+ mailing lists, and email. Sometimes, the quantity of information obliterates the quality - i.e. reading a few quality articles is often more valuable than reading many short blurbs (unless the intent is to determine the zeitgeist of a field).
A really useful resource: Knowledge Management Systems (via scale|free). It's a link-rich course outline covering topics of technology, social networks, personal information management, etc. When an instructor puts a course like this online (as compared to a password-protected LMS), many people benefit (and the institution doesn't really lose anything by sharing).
The Value of Relationships: "Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, in The Hidden Power of Social Networks, researched the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of the most successful executives, and discovered a consistent trait: successful executives not only had very large networks, which we might have supposed was a given, but more importantly, those networks were extremely diverse, involving people in many disciplines."
Simplicity is one of the greatest approaches to learning design. As course designers/educators, saying something eloquently is often less effective than saying it simply. Incorporating visual elements like mind maps or diagrams can simplify even the most complex concepts. Too Many Words: "A picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when you're trying to get information or knowledge to go from your head into someone else's."
Games and Learning: "Three University of Wisconsin-Madison professors, among the top researchers in learning through game-playing, explained the advantages of games over traditional teaching tools..."
Two things are currently hampering games in learning - lack of tools, lack of experience for learning designers. Games have much potential, but the startup is high in time and expertise requirements.
Improving Learning Through Understanding of Brain Science Research (via elearnbuzz): "What do we know about the biophysiology of learning? We know that the brain changes structure and function in response to experience. We know that it's all about connections and that it is not a product, but a dynamic process that occurs when new neuronal connections are made, when one neuron (or a group of neurons) literally connects with another."
Good starting point of features for ideal collaboration toolset. Of all the tools I've used, Groove is still the best combination of ease of use and advanced functionality.
Manual Tagging: "Ian Black of Autonomy says that the Auutonomy project head at Ford's training department says "Metadata is for the birds" because his department generates 5 million new objects per month, too much for manual tagging. Autonomy wants to provide systems that push info to users without requiring them to interact with it beforehand.
Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem says that we tend to believe that the future is present in the mass of data and we just need to find it. But we use existing patterns to search the data, which can't turn up new patterns. Humans are amazing pattern-detecting machines but we're terrible at exploring alternatives."
I've been exploring the work of Peter Senge recently. He heavily emphasizes "systems thinking". Systems theory is the notion that "A system is an entity which maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts". Systems theory is usually applied to organizations...but strongly focuses on the individuals role in the process. Systems thinking is another useful overview site.
Google is a consistently innovative company - creating products that are rapidly adopted by its customers. In this article, Google offers it's 70-20-10 innovation formula: 70% of effort is devoted to core product development, 20% to adjacent products, and 10% for pure experiementation. Too many companies ignore the value of outright play and experimentation in achieving future innovations. Many organizations don't even commit resources to this serendipitous process.
Recording Online Audio Interactions: "But recording online audio interactions can be a bit of a complex black art and so, in this article, I introduce a promising new easy-to-use solution."
Conferencing on the Web...not sure if I've linked to this site before, but if you're an educator looking to find ways of enhancing the real-time component of your courses, here's a great place to start.
Mind/Brain Learning Principles (via elearningpost) is a quick overview of basic principles of brain-based learning. Brain-based learning: Where's the Proof? is also worth exploring. The concept of how our brain works should greatly impact learning design. Yet it seems like brain-based learning is not on the horizon for most instructors (and I haven't encountered any new "popularized" research lately). I wonder why...
Where do your great ideas come from? People obviously vary in how they encounter great ideas, but a few on this list are worth considering: collaborating with others, when people are happy, walking, reading a book, and analyzing a problem. I find my best ideas "come" when I'm driving and when I'm talking to people outside of my field.
tacit vs. explicit theories: the impact on our thinking and 'theorizing': "Sooner or later many of us are guided by set of theories, frameworks and paradigms in our research work, some of them tacit and some explicit. They direct our research within the appropriate and relevant scholarly community, thus increasing the chances for scholarly collaboration and communication with like-minded folks.
However, the same theories, paradigms and frameworks also limit our imagination and innovative thinking, they create the box within which we think and operate. Thus, they can have potentially negative effect by filtering away problems and issues that merit scholarly scrutiny but are not scrutinized because our mode of thinking does not allow them to reach us."
Comment: In my own thinking, I've found a strong interplay of emotion and logic. Once a theory moves to the status of "belief", it becomes increasingly resilient to change. In fact, attempts to change often result in stronger declaration of its truth. Learning theories ignore this unusual phenomenon of utilizing logic to guard emotional views. By the same account, I'm uniquely susceptible to logical inconsistencies within domains of knowledge I already possess (to see this in action, consider how tolerant we are of the "failings" of our own political party).
Economics of Sharing: "Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources. Their understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago: co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun."
Comment: The two biggest complaints directed at the open source movement are 1) it's anti-capitalism 2) it's not democratic. While I can see fanatical implementation of open source as fitting those categories, I think both assertions are generally false. Open source is a manner of openness and sharing. People are generating profits from open source software - the difference is that the value of the product has shifted. It's not about locking it...but positioning it for maximum creativity. Secondly, it terms of democracy, the very notion of open source is that everyone has a say, but, as with Linux, someone still has the final voice. While some may object, I think open source can be defined as a capitalistic, democratic process. Its key definition, however, is that it distributes power to many nodes, rather than limiting it to a central node.
I've used a variety of synchronous/web conferencing tools over the last few years - Elluminate, Horizon, Centra, etc. While the technology and potential is great, the price generally isn't (I've requested access to their tools in the past as a means of running online presentations for elearnspace readers - they provide the tools, I provide exposure of their products to a fairly large number of potential clients - my emails have been ignored). Recently I've started using a simple tool from Talking Communities (they provide an education community for educators to connect and explore the tool). While TC isn't as feature-rich as other tools, it works and it's very affordable. I will offer a series of online workshops over the next month with this tool. Let me know if there are any topics in particular you would like presented.
Folksonomies are the current hot topic among bloggers. I'm still curious to see if it has the staying power to exceed "fad" status. The challenge of folksonomies (end-user classification and meta-data) will become evident as they are applied on a larger scale. I think they can be a very effective means of personal knowledge organization...but not for large scale content organization. Here's a few articles: Folksonomies tap People Power and A Very, Very Simple Introduction to Folksonomies
Social network analysis for managers is still in development, but it promises to be a valuable resources for managers seeking an understanding of information flow within an organization. Discussions on selecting leaders and team members are the types of implementations needed in order for SNA to move from the playground of scientists into the practicalities of real life (see facilitating knowledge flow as another illustration).
Making the Case for a Wiki (via Stephen). The author doesn't really "make the case" for wikis (by making a case, I would assume providing compelling reasons for use, explaining organizational impact, etc.). Instead, some potential uses of wikis is provided and an overview of several wiki systems. Wikis, however, are still "new enough" for many people that it's a useful (thought introductory) article to review.
This is the same lessons that elearning designers have to learn: Content Management Mistake: "The biggest mistake in content management is writing for the organization and not for the reader."
In fairness, I can only type the word blog so often before my fingers revolt. Academics give lessons on Blogs reminds me that blogging is still a new concept for many...and its educational application is still being explored.
If knowledge management is a new domain for you, Self-Guided KM Tours is a good place to start.
Can web service technology really help enable ’coherent diversity’ in e-learning?:
A really interesting article - insightful analysis of where elearning is going. Here's a few key quotes:
The success of Skype has brought new competitors: Babble and now Google (Google is all over the place lately - including rumours of a browser and domain name registrations).
Revenge of the Right Brain: "But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads."
Comment: This article sees an extreme pendulum swing (which is often an incorrect view) from sequential to conceptual thinking. I certainly agree that computers continue to "calculate" more effectively than people can, I'm not convinced that we should abandon that side of our thinking. After all, even creativity requires critical thinking. Logic and emotion in harmony seems like a more appropriate view.