Defining an E-Learning Strategy : "The major cause of fatalities among online learning operations, internal and commercial, is not technical failure or pedagogical failure, it is process failure flowing from a failure in vision."
Comment: This short article makes an important point: the starting point of elearning is not technology, it's a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished in keeping with an organization's focus/strategy. I guess the statement of "if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there" certainly applies here. Designing effective elearning is not a mystical art that's focused on complex implementations. A lack of understanding of goals is the main reason why elearning is so confusing in some organizations.
Attention Economy: "The world is entering an attention economy.
In many ways this is not news. What's news is how we're bifurcating our attention -- splitting it into parts -- and how media must now compete for slices of it."
What will be the usability needs of the future?: "It’s becoming pretty obvious that the major dilemma of our decade is not having access to enough information, but being able to handle all of the information available."
Some Principles of Effective E-Learning: "What makes e-learning effective is, of course, typically in the eye of the beholder...Good e-learning practice, indeed, may not even flow from the principles of pedagogy at all...Probably the best indicator of what works in informal e-learning is what works on the web in general." The article goes on to explore three aspects of elearning: interaction, usability and relevance.
'What, Me Worry?': "Let me translate Mr. Gates's words: "If we don't fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.""
Comment: The article takes a more political slant than I usually l link to...but the central notion of the article is worth pondering. Is our education system preparing people for the workforce? Or, perhaps a bigger question - is it the function of our education system to prepare learners for the workforce? Or is education's highest calling to prepare learners to embrace and function in a dynamic world? Should education make better people? Or should education make better employees?
Short, simple overview of managing tacit knowledge via communities of practice: Want to Manage Tacit Knowledge? (.pdf). The author appropriately explores the need to leverage existing collaborative efforts already in place organizations (as compared to initiating a pilot from scratch). In my experience with CoPs, I've found that adoption is largely a process of relevance. People will participate in CoPs if it supports their existing work. If it doesn't, it's a hard sell.
Youth Adandoning Old Media: "A new US report reveals that less that a fifth of 18-34 year olds rank newspapers as their primary source of news, while 44% check out internet portals such as Google and Yahoo for updated information."
The Year of Living Wirelessly: "Right now, we flip the switch and our computers go out onto the Internet. But soon the tables will turn. We'll flip the switch and the Internet will find us."
Comment: More and more articles (see also Optimizing Your Sales Workforce through Mobile Learning) are proclaiming the coming era of mobile internet access. I remember the sense of freedom I experienced with my first large, bulky cellphone. The novelty of being constantly in touch with others quickly became a requirement. The adoption of cell phones was incredible - I can't think of many tools that developed as rapidly and became such a solid aspect of our daily lives. Wireless internet access will follow the same process - rapid adoption and transformative in interaction.
Social Bookmarking Tools (via Stephen): "Traditional means of organizing information elements have generally relied on well-defined and pre-declared schemas ranging from simple controlled vocabularies to taxonomies to thesauri to full-blown ontologies...By contrast, the new link managers tend to use dynamic categorization systems whereby the user annotates links with whatever terms seem most relevant."
Can video games stimulate academic learning? "Yet, perhaps because of the perceived negative impact, there has been surprisingly little research on how to use games for teaching...The children who played video games were more motivated, more likely to pay attention in class, and substantially less likely to be disruptive."
Comment: In our department, we've been using games for a variety of learning activities. The results have been largely positive. The most significant response from learners is an increased sense of attention. Learners seem much more alert/responsive to gaming content than text/traditional learning. This may not necessarily be a function of the medium, but more with the originality of the approach (i.e. any new approach to content presentation or learning heightens a learner's sense of awareness).
Social Network Analysis - great collection including introduction, theories, software applications, and journals and portals. See also bibliography of SNA
Creativity—How Can I Get Some?: "Creativity is the lifeblood of innovation and marketing, but where does it come from and how should a company nurture this elusive trait?"
'Infomania': "The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence."
Your Company's Leaking Knowledge: "Your company leaks knowledge. Employees leave and even die. Little by little, your ability to continue doing what you're doing walks out the door. Even worse, in many case, only a few people really understand the product and they, as the saying goes, "better not get hit by a bus.""
Kids and Multimedia: "Heavy video game use does not mean less reading - in fact heavy game players seemed to read more and spend more time with their parents..."
Elements of Effective e-Learning Design: "Preparing and developing e-learning materials is a costly and time consuming enterprise. This paper highlights the elements of effective design that we consider assist in the development of high quality materials in a cost efficient way. We introduce six elements of design and discuss each in some detail."
Comment: I enjoyed this paper. Good overview of learning design, and as the authors note, these six elements are important in "assisting in the navigation of the complexities and the often contradictory pressures that influence the development of an effective e-learning design". One criticism - most elearning design theories ignore a substantial component: informal learning. How do we design for learning that is spontaneous and complex? How do we design for learning that starts with networks and connections, not content? These are important concepts that have yet to be theorized.
The Five Essentials of Technology Facilitators (via Ray): "Many school administrators ask themselves the question, "What can I do to help my teachers integrate technology into their daily lesson plans?" Hiring the right person to assist and support the teachers is a step in the right direction."
Comment: While there is a growing interest in teaching online, many instructors still enter the field blindly. This article attempts to articulate the characteristics needed by effective online facilitators (from the perspective of an employer). Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be an abundance of trained online instructors. The five points listed ((1) Experienced educators, (2) Enthusiastic technophiles, (3) Effective trainers, (4) Eager mentors, and (5) Exemplary administrators) could be best seen as a potential training agenda.
From the department of "interesting, but not sure in what manner" - The Second Brain: "This second brain is where our "gut instinct" comes from. It's an emotional, feeling brain - an old brain like the one under our relatively new brain (the corpus callosum) which does the logical thinking. We sometimes follow our gut reactions (because the emotions and feelings come first) and only later discover the logical thinking behind our decisions."
Comment: I'm growing in my understaning of the non-cognitive functions of learning. Cognition is a central process to learning, but it's not the sole process. Our emotions, as driving motivators of which concepts to cognitively evaluate, play a substantial role in learning. As brain-based research continues to develop, I'm confident we'll see increased emphasis on emotions/instinct in learning.
Just in case you've mastered blogging and podcasting, video blogging will allow you to continue the romance with "new stuff".
Education goes global: "Collaboration among institutions and a shift to student-centred learning using the internet are the future of tertiary education... "The real challenge for universities is to change their mindset from "chalk and talk" to embrace the different ways of learning we are now experiencing."
Comment: I link to this article simply to complain about the lack of awareness of the challenges facing higher education. I've heard the same old, cliched phrases for years (and, I confess, have used them as well). These statements are tiresome. The challenges facing education are far larger than "collaborating and becoming student centered". That's band-aid. While defining what ails academic institutions requires far more than a simple blog post, the key challenge centers on relevance. Creating a "student-centered" version of an irrelevant model won't solve any problems. We need to revisit what learning means in our era (i.e. observe younger learners interacting with each other and content, and find a way to keep learners current in their work while knowledge is exploding).
Information Gumbo: (via Emergic) "The world of data has entered a notably rich period of evolution. Search technologists at a variety of startups and deep-pocketed incumbents are engaged in an arms race, with new tools and capabilities appearing almost weekly. (Examples include A9's Open Search, Ziggs, Picasa, Browster, Oodle, and EVDB.) RSS is expanding beyond news and blog feeds. Tagging and other bottom-up classification methods, including wikis, are growing at a phenomenal rate.
Why do these matter? Taken in the aggregate, they reflect a new set of assumptions about people and what they do with information."
I'm encountering frequent proclamations of traditional media's death. It is a time of significant change for media (TV, newspapers, magazines). Barriers to broadcasting are diminishing. A central control point (i.e. a particular studio or network) for publishing content is not as substantial a challenge as a few years ago. As goes media, so goes education.
All Together Now: "The trend, in other words, is toward what Henry Chesbrough, a business professor at Berkeley, has dubbed “open innovation.” With so many companies investing so much money and energy in innovation, it’s hard for any one of them to consistently outsmart the rest. And technologies are so complex that it’s impractical for a company to gather all the resources it needs under one roof."
Comment: While this article focuses on businesses trends relating to innovation, it's very applicable to learning. Most industries and knowledge fields are so complex that it's impossible for one person (i.e. the instructor) to stay on top of everything. Relying on creating connections with communities, forums, blogs, as well as the existing knowledge base and learning of each learner, helps to create an aggregated vision of developments in a field. Going it alone is difficult in rapidly developing environments.
Small World Networks - a simple "nonscientest" overview of networks, small worlds, hubs, etc.
Stephen Downes provides a great review of Computers and Student Learning (reported by BBC). The initial report essentially stated ""Students who use computers a lot at school have worse maths and reading performance."
After exploring the process and presumptions of the research, Stephen concludes: "So what can we conclude from the study?
Probably this: that a computer, all by itself, considered independently of any parental or teacher support, considered without reference to the software running on it, considered without reference to student attitudes and interests, does not positively impact an education." He also succeeds in creating the only known educational technology reference to include both Wayne Gretzky and Paris Hilton!
Is Phoenix the future? "Central components of the for-profit model such as increased use of part-time faculty, intensive formats, standardization, distributed and distance learning formats, an emphasis on assessment are all increasingly used in traditional universities. For-profits have come to symbolize the great transformation that is occurring in higher education, but are not the sole cause."
Comment: University of Phoenix enjoys an interesting position - rapid growth, strong revenue, and better branding than many traditional universities. Its model of delivering learning is praised and innovative and responsive...and criticized for lower standards and functioning without academic leaders/stars. For many traditional academics, U of Phoenix is everything that is wrong with education - an image that Phoenix appears to enjoy (the article highlights their combative spirit and self-perception as "anti-establishment").
Gadgets rule on Campus: "This is college life today, where students are electronically linked to each other, to professors and to their class work 24/7 in an ever-flowing river of information and communication."
Video games and learning: "Despite the relatively long history of educational games, they are largely unused in traditional school curriculums..." (via Eide Neurolearning)
The April/May edition of Innovate is available. Sample articles: web conferencing, porfolios, planning online learning in higher education, and New York Library digital gallery.
Perfection vs. Learning: "Perfection and learning simply are incompatible goals...Mistakes can be the most instructive, most impactful teachers."
Comment: Most of my learning (both intellectual and emotional) comes from what is commonly define as mistakes or errors. Our philosophy in education should focus on encouraging students to demonstrate effort...not ability. Ability is the by-product of effort, so I'm not suggesting that we ignore targeted competencies. I'm suggesting that we encourage learners to view themselves as "in-transition". A learner can easily lose motivation when seeing him/herself through lack of ability. A learner that clearly sees effort as the pathway to ability can begin to activate the cycle of reward in incremental improvements in competence/ability. With my children, I find the greatest deterrent to learning is the assumption that competence is more important than effort. "I can't do it" leads to "I won't try". On the other side, "Let's try it" leads to "I can do it!". It's an obvious concept. Unfortunately, it's not reflected in the design of many online learning initiatives.
Crowned at Last: “For the first time the consumer is boss, which is fascinatingly frightening, scary and terrifying, because everything we used to do, everything we used to know, will no longer work,”
Communication Theories (via Stephen Downes) -Recent explorations media, communication, design, and learning theories, have really opened my eyes to how poorly each field stands on its own. Understanding learning and learning processes is greatly enhanced when seen though other theories/fields. Connections enlarge the whole. The pursuit of what we know is enhanced when we consider subjects that rest on the exterior of our knowledge base.
I've been spending time playing with Keyhole (a company recently acquired by Google). I'm astonished at the potential of this tool to enable virtual travel - tremendous for teaching. Most people I talk to react with concern - "That's too wierd". On many technology fronts (i.e. RFID), we are moving toward an inevitable clash of "what's possible" and "what we'll accept".
Nancy White has compiled a list of definitions/descriptions of "community". Many of the definitions center on the notion of shared interest, connections, communication, and collaboration. I agree with the general tone presented. It's difficult, however, to precisely detail the concept of "community". The tools we use shape ideas and contexts in which we use them. For example - due to technology, collaboration used to mean something quite different from what it does today. Different inputs (decentralized, distributed across cultures) and different processes (asynchronous for reflective thought, synchronous for real-time connections of geographically dispersed team members) have reframed what it means to collaborate. The concept of community is experiencing a similar transformation (see Wellman's exploration (.pdf) of the redefinition of community as a result of technological influences).
Next-Generation Educational Software: "So, what is the appropriate role for IT in education, in the broadest sense? As always, IT’s role is to augment (not to replace) the teacher, to provide human-centered tools that encourage and support adaptability and flexibility, and to enable appropriate modes of learning (e.g., small team interaction and not just individual task performance)."
If the dialogue in this graphic makes sense to you, then you're suffering from "newism" - the perpetual pursuit of new and complex sounding terms (great for gurus of a field, the death knell for new comers entering a field).
The Invisibility of Knowledge Work : "For all the productivity gains that accrue to the digitization of knowledge work, one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. Attacking that invisibility opens an important path to making knowledge work manageable and improvable."
The Role of Wisdom In Intelligence: "As our lifespan increases, it will become increasingly important to enhance our cognitive as well as our physical well-being."
Christopher's list of future topics is a useful exploration/synthesis of technology, collaboration, and social trends.
Depressing, disturbing, raw, and probably a larger reality than most academics admit or know about - Academic Prostitute: "Welcome to the world of professional paper-writing, the dirty secret of the tutoring business. It's facilitated by avaricious agencies, perpetuated by accountability-free parents and made possible by self-loathing nerds like me."