e-victor-ee

A keynote to start things off

2011-12-01T11:49:00.008+01:00

The start of another round of hopefully interesting talks about e-learning. I'm going to try to post a bit more about each talk as we go along.

The first talk saw a power broker and a politician but frankly, she couldn't keep me alert until my first dose of coffee. Neelie Kroes undoubtedly is a very powerful person. She will control a lot of money in the IT field, and that is good. The talk, however, wasn't all that engaging. And of course I got up at 4:35 this morning, so it takes a bit of entertaining to keep my attention.

This was very well done by the second speaker, Peter Nowak. It wasn't always clear what his talk had to do with e-learning, but it certainly had to do with learning and teaching. We don't always realize what prosperity does for the opportunities to learn, but he got that point across.

By this time, I was getting ready for a bit of caffeine, but the third speaker made up for my lack of stimulants with his talk about access to on-line knowledge. Especially the part about the increase of a finding-based learning experience as opposed to a push-style learning, is very convincing. Apparently even the globally measured IQ is rising as a consequence of this. We may know less trivia, but we know much better where to find them.

After these provoking thoughts, I was ready for coffee and as it was already 11:15, I rushed for the door and caffeine-induced salvation.

Testing complexity

2011-10-12T12:12:00.010+02:00

With eighteen months since going live on our new electronic testing platform, integration is still key.

Our organization has got over 10 years experience with electronic testing. We've spent many tens of thousands of Euros on our platform and content. Out of necessity rather than choice, we looked for and found a new platform to serve our network more effectively. The first project scope was limited, partly because of time restraints, but also due to the need for a quick turn around.

The project start was successful, we delivered within deadline and most of the quirks were solved upon going live, which is a feat in itself. With use and time, new needs became apparent and the project got a follow-up which is going to go live in a couple of weeks.

Most of the new features will be about integration with existing software. The old platform had none of this, requiring a lot of person hours setting up tests and handling results. The new platform is much more seamless but made it much more apparent what we lacked.

Due to the complexity of our training centre network, in the past we never reached agreement on mutual standards for exchanging testing information. Now, however, was the first time this was actually experienced as a problem. So the second generation of the project was used to tackle exactly this drawback.

One of the major elements in this phase, was the choice to appoint a specific project co-ordinator within the agency. When I was made project leader for phase one, this was on top of my already full agenda as advisor. This time, there was the chance to get a part time FTE (full time equivalent) on the project scope. This made the communication with all the partners a lot easier.

Compared with the total project budget, the communications still take up a quite small part. This, combined with the aforementioned complexity of the training network, will make it vital to spend enough time for coaching after going live with phase two. But this is true for every project I've ever been a part of.

In an integration effort, communications are a necessity. Good feedback procedures will determine the success of a project, not only real but also perceived.

Blogs as a measure of quality

2009-02-25T11:54:00.005+01:00

An interesting talk I attended treated the use of blogs as an instrument of determining the quality of a public service. This is particularly significant where quality assessment is habitually performed as part of a learning process.

As a public agency, we are not only interested in what the assessment forms tell us. Most of the information is quantitative and does tell us something about the general level of our training. We do not, however, know what we might do more than we do. For this purpose, qualitative analysis may be a good alternative. And to do this with limited resources, blog analysis could be a good tool.

In blog analysis, (semi-)automatic tools are used to check blogs about educational activities. We can determine what exactly they can contribute to continuous improvement of the course quality.

Ideally this could be an automatic process. Among the thousands of blog entries about the Syntra Network, many are probably not useful for this purpose. But equally likely, many are. We can learn from the many blog and comment entries about school teachers to improve our quality, not on the individual level (eg. of the teacher) but on the course level. In general, any shortcomings of teachers are pretty quickly signaled to co-ordinators and remedied.

For the government level, course quality could be better monitored with the blog analysis method to enhance the existing quality monitoring systems. It is a suggestion for any education provider to take to heart.

The age of content

2009-01-02T07:53:00.006+01:00

When the century of plenty was announced, people that understood its meaning thought it applied to everything. Plenty of consumer things. Plenty of money. Plenty of choices.

But the only novelty showing through at the beginning of the tenth year of the century isn't that. It's not about tangible things. The only really new and lasting innovation is content. It doesn't matter whether youtube or facebook has the most users or rakes in revenue or investors. The thing they have in common is not the technology, but what it facilitates.

In the first ten years of the twenty-first century by Western reckoning, more content will have been created by the human race than in all the thousands of years before.

And I'm not talking about written content versus the spoken traditions of old, I'm talking content as a whole. All six Billion of us will have created more content in ten years than all of our ancestors joined together. I'll even bet that before the end of the year, someone will have proven this statistically.

The one thing that has made this possible is, by the way, not the internet, but the free market. This is very meaningful for the age of content because in a world where markets could become less free, content creation could dwindle.

I'll try to elaborate a bit on the last two points, and then conclude as to what it all means.

Many people will observe that without the internet, none of the content that is so freely available would be in our homes and offices. This I won't dispute. But the internet has been around for fifty years, and in the present form since the beginning of the 1990's. But we didn't have computers in the fifties. Many don't today, but with a Billion computers in use in 2007, most humans could get access to one.

But internet access and computers isn't all it takes. It's not about text, anyway. We've been producing written words for centuries, although never on a scale as today. About a hundred million people are creating material in text, video or audio form. Never before in human history has this happened. It relies on digital cameras and mp3 recording devices, available software for editing all that's created and so much more. But none of these techological means by themselves explain the current content revolution.

Foremost, the age of content relies on free markets. It doesn't need democracy although free markets don't work as well without it. It doesn't need actual freedom but people in undemocratic countries find themselves continually in peril of censorship. Most cope pretty well with this, though, usually by remaining unseen by authorities and a form of self-sensorship.

But the one force driving all this content creation is the free market. Most people need the confirmation that somewhere, there is a customer for their product. A reader or listener to what they've created. And this is only possible in a free market form. It is the reason why openly accessible platforms are so popular. If this blog article could only be read by people willing to pay for it, I probably wouldn't be writing it. I'm not implying I wouldn't want to see it published commercially, but it's not the main reason for me writing it.

There has to exist a very large incentive to create for closed platforms and it's usually money or another form of monetary reward. This has existed for a long time and it's still - and rightly so - a very important force in society. Many people would love to be professional writers, but will never make a living from that. And in the age of content, that is absolutely all right.

So my concept of the free content market doesn't rely on money and that is also an important observation. It implies the astonishing height of human development and prosperity. There have always been people who were freely creative, in any community. But never before have they been able to share what they create with so many. It's even become a paradigm in its own right, where teachers encourage their students to create their own interpretation of what they learn and then label it e-learning. The debate on the use of web 2.0 within the educational world has never been more fierce.

So if we accept the fact that we are at a peak; how do we preserve this magnificent human creation abundance? This is a question with many possible answers. The first answer is basic: the infrastructure has to remain freely accessible. Already there are some who deem it desirable to split the different forms of creation. A separate scientific internet, for instance. A secure internet. They are the wrong answers to important questions. I'll not try to answer the questions (How to decide what's scientific debate? and How to make our commercial and societal infrastructure less prone to tampering?) here, but creating closed environments is not the answer, as I've hinted at earlier.

The second answer is one where many fights are fought: what's the boundary between free and protected? The old copyrights debate will go on for a while and it's hard to say how it will turn out, if it ever leads anywhere at all. But because so much is at stake, a solution must aventually be found. I just hope it will not be an exclusive one, but will include us all.

The third answer goes right to the core of the matter, and to the nature of creation. What is human creation and can any value be attributed to it? To the latter the answer of course is yes, but it is related to the former and there is much debate on this. Many blogs are reported to be just comments on very minute bits of information, and these bits of information may have had a limited possible audience to begin with. Many Youtube videos are of questionable value so why would we want to preserve this kind of creation? Why should we even allow it to use bandwidth? Because when I answered affirmatively I never implied what the value of creation should exactly be. Nor who should measure it. Everyone knows the example of artists who became famous after their deaths: how long do we have to preserve everything to make sure we're not casting aside an artwork with future worth potential?

This brings me to the last answer to my question. When the economy turns sour, a lot of content could be lost when companies fail. Do we try to preserve this? Do we let people continue their creation? Will not the free market solve this?

Perhaps, instead of spending so much money on banks and car factories, governments could have set aside a little for the true novelty of our time. If Youtube were to fail, who would save our legacy? How can we be remembered for the future, when there might perhaps not be so many fortunate people creating new things and when they want to read or experience some of the things we've left behind? If anything, we should be thinking about how we'll deal with that legacy. It is a role for librarians, for politicians, for scientists, to acquire new and active ways of indexing and preserving, not by fossilization, but by nurturing the creative processes and outcomes of this age of content.

Educa Online 2008 is over

2008-12-05T19:08:00.002+01:00

The bar offered some interesting conversation to conclude another very interesting Educa. I will try to post some more about the things I've seen and learned in the next days and on monday, my teacher meeting will no doubt be very interesting indeed.

Our teachers deserve our support

2008-12-05T16:50:00.007+01:00

I saw a good Dutch example of multimedia usage for future teachers. It was a Dutch presentation by Petra Fischer & Els Scheringa from the University of Amsterdam, who did a couple of projects. All of the projects involved collaboration and were quite interesting as well as successful.

The teachers were obiously the right participants for the experiment, as they quickly adopted the methods and techniques. The future projects will also involve measuring if the things they have learnt were actually put to use in the teachers practice.

It is an experience which spurs quite nicely with the one I had in the Toll-shop (a workshop organized by Toll-Net, Techonology enhanced (Ondersteund) Lifelong Learning) about the tools available to e-teachers. I talked to some of the participants quite extensively, and she experienced she would use online tools quite easily once she had gained some experience with e-learning. The usage in actual formal learning, however, depended on her receiving some support from a school facilitator.

So learning the techniques is a very necessary step, but receiving support within the organization is equally important. It is a lesson for all promotors of e-learning, and one which the success stories certainly make clear.

Training teachers: a possible answer

2008-12-05T15:31:00.004+01:00

Motivating teachers into technology supported learning is one of the bottlenecks for successful teaching. So how can we as facilitators get our teachers on top of the technology, instead of avalanched by it?

During the different discussions I have had about this topic, it occured to me that everyone had a specific, usually slightly different approach. So I stepped outside for a while and with the snow falling on my face, I came to the conclusion that this must be the way it must be.

There is no uniform to approach teachers to engage in this activity. Just as there never was a fit-for-all solution in the past, there isn't one now. This was a bit of a bummer because I was looking for easily applicable techniques. Our teachers are in general very professional but in high demand. So a completely customized approach, requiring a lot of time from both facilitator and teacher, will not be easily accepted.

It is, nonetheless, the only possible answer. Clearly, this has always been the case. Every individual prefers one-to-one education. We have been taught in schools that safety is in mass, because you can blend into the crowd. But as individuals, we always prefer as small a group as possible. The teacher only needs to focus on my individual needs, no other disturbances are present. Ask any music student what they prefer, they'll all go for the individual approach.

A way around this impossible - since the approach is not economical for teachers or facilitators - answer is diversity. We can provide tools for teachers so they can pick from the menu the ones they prefer and use those. This can make the experience more personal and rewarding. So the answer to a multitude of possibilities is, in my opinion, a large enough choice to allow each person's preference.

Training teachers will have to leave the classroom, just like teachers themselves will have to get out more. A different challenge, but a more feasible one.

The digital divide revisited

2008-12-05T10:04:00.005+01:00

One of the questions after the talk on generation Y took on the digital divide. Ton Zijlstra made a good point with which I agree fully. The divide which is now between people connected and those not connected through a computer, will probably shift.

With more devices connecting to the web, people left behind might not be the same as those without internet today. Some people in the middle strata (lower middle and middle middle class) may lose out due to ill-advised scepticism. In many families, connection to the internet is regulated by the parents on time grounds and not necessarily content grounds. In a time when teachers are (re-)learning the value of play in formal education, parents should not limit the access to the net by restricting the time and activities carried out by their children. As a lot of these rules are imposed out of fear for the unknown, educating the parents in these groups could aid the children.

Of course, the lower strata in society will be facing similar challenges. Something they have going for them is the facility with which they adopt mobile technologies. In a mobile network world, this is an advantage these groups may be able to use to their advantage, thereby diminishing the current (but increasingly past) digital divide.

In government, it's obviously important to aid those that run the greatest risk. In future, bridging the digital divide will not become obsolete. Our current - and perhaps not very effective - tactics may be even more misplaced for the future.

The answer is not knowledge management

2008-12-04T13:56:00.004+01:00

The Norbert Bolz talk was quite enlightening. One of the key concepts I take from it is the knowledge management paradigm. If you think the idea of attention management through to its extremes, the answer to our questions is not knowledge management.

The reason I would like to elaborate on this conceptual problem, is the nature of knowledge itself. If you look at the way knowledge is created, this used to go through a overseeable body of information distribution, mainly governed through, though not by, university staff and its affiliates. This meant that to become knowledgeable about a subject, one had to read through a published aggregate of texts.

To become a true expert in a field, reading wasn't enough, obviously. Discussion, teaching and writing are also useful. But these are activities typically performed within the university context. So to become a scholar was to become an expert. In some fields of expertise, it still is. But these are diminishing in number and the level of expertise to be gained is also dropping.

If we look at knowledge now, this is quite a different beast. The speed with which it is created, is up considerably. The nature is becoming more diverse. How do you grab, fossilize, or control a forum discussion? If there are 15 replies, reading still does the trick. But what if there are 275 replies to a forum topic? Or 275 thousand? What about a chat session where the value of the Q&A can be limited or universally profound? How can we value the knowledge available in our online and offline universe?

So knowledge management, a typical controlled activity, is in a conundrum.

I would love to be able to say or write encouraging remarks such as "technology will save us" or "we'll figure out a way such as we always have" but I think this is the wrong answer to the wrong question.

The question no longer is "How can we manage the available knowledge" but rather "How can we distribute the knowledge to use it collectively?".

The problem we're faced with is no longer management but availability. How do we make knowledge into something that is available to those of us who are looking for insight? And how do we share those insights to make them applicable to others?

I have no answers to these questions, but I'm hoping others will contribute to refine the questions to aid looking for answers.

How can we integrate our self into the network?

2008-12-04T10:22:00.007+01:00

The interesting talk I heard from professor Norbert Bolz leaves me with a couple of questions. If our economy is increasingly determined by our networked self, then how can we carry out the rest of our lives?

After all, people are born in families and the first thing they learn is how families work. Of course, some families don't work and perhaps the adults from these fragmented relationship childhoods are the best positioned to cope with new social networks. If they manage to create their own social skills, that is.

Our traditional image of a family is very much influenced by the nuclear family, parents and children in a house. The reality today is very different, and perhaps more the way African families work (if you take away the typical isolated context). Divorce and separation are common, so children often have more complex relations with adults. The moment we stop seeing this as detrimental to kids, perhaps we can work out a new ethics of the networked individual.

So am I saying this is good or bad? Far from making moral statements, I am trying to understand and share what the future demands from us. What I am convinced of, is the divide which will become deeper. Between rich and poor, obviously, but also between successful and mainstraem.

People who manage to create a working social network will be the most proficient. But they will also have to live a life. Enjoy things, not necessarily the supposedly wonderful simple things a lot of people grew up with. Many of the fine things in life will be more complicated. All of us will have to learn how to enjoy this, not fear it.

I am hoping to get an answer to this question in one of the later sessions on simplexity, so stay posted.

Educa Online 2008

2008-12-04T09:03:00.000+01:00

Continuing my effort of last year, I'll try to share some insights gained while attending Educa Online 2008. Since the online method is a complex one, I will post mindmaps to go with the written posts.

As courtesy to some of my colleagues and friends - who specifically asked me to do this - I'll try to finalize the mindmaps a bit faster than normal. Your thanks is much aeppreciated.

I'll try to post on as many topics as possible. And they're off!

The tools are in. Are teachers?

2008-12-03T10:31:00.000+01:00

In adult education, online tools are a great benefit to the teaching process. They provide many new possibilities. These have in common that they detach the physical presence from the continuing learning experience.

Unlike daytime education, many continuing learners have their classes in the evening. This makes for a difficult marriage of spare time - or daily chores - and class attendance.

When we started a project to engage more women in evening courses in informatics, one of the ideas was to start the course after 8 p.m., since women then had the opportunity to put the children to bed.

Some might think this as anti-feminist, but most women in the committee agreed it was a good idea. The reality is, after all, that women spend much more time working for the household. To take this into account is a good strategy to gain women's attendance to traditionally more difficult subjects, such as informatics.

Of course, many men also have difficulties coping with modern agenda management, so the idea was to allow everybody to start later, not just the women. Training analyst-programmers in continuing education is a challenge to anyone.

Why didn't we go through with the project?

First of all, there was a lot of resistance from teachers. The thing is, we wanted to start classes later and end sooner. But the time not spent in class would be spent online. We'd set up a platform with assignments and a forum so that the classes would only take place every two weeks. When there wasn't a physical class, an online exercise session would take place. The week of the class, an assignment as a follow-up to the online exercises would be posted, the result then submitted to be discussed in class.

This way, the course takers gained time for their assignments - which are traditionally done solitary or in pairs in class - since they could work from home. The forum would allow interaction with teachers and other students and the physical classes could remedy any deficiencies in knowledge, as well as provide the knowledge transfer. This last aspect is quite limited for analyst-programmers, since most is learnt by practising.

It is still a model I fully support. We couldn't get the necessary backing for the experiment, but I hope it will happen in the future, for there is much to be gained from such a blended approach.

E-learning policy is (also) company policy

2008-01-08T09:31:00.000+01:00

Why do we train? Because people have a need for training. To keep up with the evolution in a sector, to learn new techniques necessary to gain a competitive edge, or just because we are curious about what's new.

The key thing here is, it's an ongoing thing. It's continuous and essentially never ends. This has always been the case. Perhaps some time ago education was divided into formal (before work) and informal (on the job), but this is long ago. All forms of training and education are now constantly happening.

If we take this for fact, then why is it that so few organizations consider one of the forms of learning as existing only as projects? All too often, e-learning is merely a project. The disadvantage of this is the lack of knowledge built in the organization of how to manage the learning process. After the project has been delivered, only rarely any evolution is observed in the course material and the former project team usually has often duties to attend to.

I've been working on e-learning policy for a while now and this always strikes me as a waste of resources. The policy is too often dependent on the work of the few, instead of the commitment of many. E-learning has grown up. It's time to leave the project status behind.

As I look around me, some have already made this transition, others have not. It of course also depends on the size and objectives of the organization. But policy choices are easy. The real work is done afterwards.

E-learning materials acquisition requires more than money.

2007-12-18T09:33:00.000+01:00

I've been reviewing some demos that explain and train for diversity. The really good quality and the nuanced message they give was a pleasure to watch. They were sent to me by Shamima from the Grimsby Institue in the UK.

Even though the discs were just demos, they showed really well the possibilities of the medium. Surprising as well is the depth one can attain with a well balanced mix of graphical, textual and video elements.

But far from this post being nothing more than a positive review of the demos - which of course it is as well - I want to share something I thought while watching.

As this is -or rather, was, because the project is almost through- a really good example of a shareable e-learning material, I doubt I would be able to convince our policy staff to have it translated and used in our network. Probably not because of the cost. Money is something usually available for good projects. Rather, I would imagine it to be hard to get the diversity issue so much on top of a usually crowded policy agenda that it would seem worth spending the money for it.

So the choice for e-learning in our environment (multi-culture, multi-language) becomes difficult because of what is made is not necessarily what is felt as needed. It's a challenge I certainly want to tackle.

Are we good at change?

2007-11-30T15:44:00.001+01:00

Well, no of course. We resent it. I resent it. I'm not saying we don't see the advantages of it. We're even eager to change, but we don't like transitions. This is what makes change hard.

When we see e-learning take off in our institutions, we often have success in a first phase. The trouble starts in the second phase, when people are used to good content with good support and active coaching. Then they suddenly discover that the distance to teachers is almost gone. And guess what happens next? The learner realizes he or she is in control of the experience. So then the learning institutions find themselves in the position of being transparent in the learning experience and entirely oblique in the management and curriculum processes.

To conclude for now, can we change our structures to accommodate the new expectations of learners? I really can't say, but it will probably be inevitable and the best adapted organizations will be the ones that are most open to change to follow this movement. Change management will have to evolve into an ongoing process, as it already is in commercial organizations.

Mobile learning objects and subjects

2007-11-29T16:47:00.001+01:00

Mobile learning is hot and will only become steamier. But lest we burn ourselves, perhaps one or two comments from m-learning speeches and conversations at Educa.

On the job training and especially on the spot training is perhaps the most interesting form of training. It doesn't require the worker to leave her or his workplace and can be organized in the most versatile way.

First of all, m-learning is mostly m-training. This means it's mainly about small objects being ported to mobile devices. Not only device characteristics cause this, but also the learning itself. With the new portable devices such as Playstation Portable, the first constraint is partly lifted. This means that true m-learning will become more feasible. What's still needed is a good educational approach to the m-objects.

Second, it means teachers will become coaches even faster, because training and learning is out of the controlled environments.

The first remark will get solved through technology. The question I'd like answered is, will the teachers like coaching?

And the answer of course is: they must.

In some conversations during the Special Interest Group lunch, I was told that coaches/teachers are welcoming the new tools as they are so much faster and easier to use. The trouble lies more with the institution management which is concerned its teachers will not want to adapt to the new model. So my question is valid, even though the barriers are not with the coaches but more in the social organizations and the management.

Why authority is suspect

2007-11-29T09:39:00.000+01:00

Authority is no more. And let's be thankful it is. I just attended the speech from Andrew Keen and his frightening message of internet killing our wisdom. I think it's a load of soft smelly street ornament.

I won't go into the exact contents of his speech. It can easily be found in his book, on the web and perhaps he'll try shoving it down your throat as well.

What I will focus on, is the underlying message of elitism. Unpopular though hippies may be nowadays, they did one important thing and that is do away with authority. I don't mean there are no longer people who are experts in a subject. It does imply that expertise in one field no longer leads to authority beyond that. Or even of authority in the field itself.

Is this necessarily bad? It is if you like authority. It is not if you prefer genuine experiences. In general, authority inhibits true delving into the other as a person. It requires formal obligations to be observed which are generally counterproductive in achieving true interaction. And in learning, true interaction - both live and virtual - is the prime objective (apart from the others, such as don't disturb foreign worlds with a lower level of development).

So authority is not bad just because it's not democratic. Democracy is a lofty goal, not a label you can stick on something, though that's a different discussion. Authority is bad because it keeps us from being our true selves. If I am put in the role of expert and others expect me to be an authority, it prevents me from expressing my doubts which are inherent and necessary in any learning environment. If I can be just a contributor, my expertise can be judged objectively.

We don't need another generation of power hungry authority figures. And especially not male ones.

Recognize the model? Male, ageing, expert: the professor. Yesterday's authority.

Web 2.0 liberates us from him. Let's keep it this way. Collaboration does that.

In-company e-learning for theoretical backgrounds

2007-11-28T10:21:00.001+01:00

There seems to be a quite radical fissure between the models of pricing for e-learning in academia and business. While in business the main focus is on measured progression of skills, University students are more attracted to the advantages in term of experience. Skills are perhaps still not measured as much in university as in businesses.

The question one might have, and certainly the one I continually contemplate, is what exactly is measured.

In traditional business training, often procedures are taught. An acquired skill can be measured on the job or at the end of the training. Much less attention is given to the underlying views and principles as this would require a more theoretical exam. Perhaps what the business context might use e-learning for is exactly this. Training is often quite fast in a class environment, but conceptual knowledge is sometimes considered too boring or even unnecessary for in-company training.

If we accept this to be normal practice, we could also enhance the learning experience for company training by providing interesting background materials for the in-class training through e-learning.

Off to Berlin

2007-11-27T10:17:00.000+01:00

Tonight I'll be in Berlin, at the Online Educa Conference. It'll be intense and hopefully also . We're a slightly bigger delegation, two from last year's one. I hope to find enough inspiration to blog live from some of the talks.

I brought my camera to make it slightly less boring so I'm all set to go. Weather's typical for this time of year, cloudy with some drizzle. Last year it was sunny but cold. Taking pictures would have been easier then, but I didn't bring a camera as I was there only two days. Well, you can't always get what you want.

I visited the Copendia site yesterday and it seems interesting enough. Though they seem mostly to work commercially, I wonder if other ways of exchanging materials would also be possible. I'll be sure to get a demo of their software and the technical underpinnings.

Time to empty my desk and hit the road - or rather, the sky.

Computers are not machines

2007-11-20T09:18:00.000+01:00

Interesting times indeed. I attended an interesting session on networking yesterday and I want to tell about one of its ideas I took home with me.

Teaching kids computers is a bad idea. Of course, I mean something entirely different from what you just read. But, nevertheless, it remains a bad idea to teach kids about computers in the way we teach them anything else.

Hello kids.
This is a computer. It's a machine and you can turn it on.
Now switch it on, the button is like this.
When the computer has started, which usually takes a while (unless it's an Apple or the latest processor), type this: student_usr123 and then take the mouse.

The mouse is the little oval thing on a wire next to the keyboard. You can use it to point at things.

Now we will learn how to point at things.

Meanwhile, 80% of class has already typed in user name and password, and has just discovered that some websites are blocked, but they can still download their favorite Messenger software. They can't install it, though. That's been disabled.

Now the 20% of pupils who have taken a little longer to log in, are exploring the desktop environment. Meanwhile, one has already crashed Explorer and is now asking attention from the teacher.

Sounds vaguely familiar? It's the way we teach computers. We show how to type, point and click. We show Word and you can type in it, too. Excel can be used as a calculator, but we'd never allow it. For calculus you have pocket calculators. the computer is a tool for more important things.

Never mind the fact that 95% of my use of Excel in the last five years was for adding or other simple calculations. Excel is a serious application. No playing here, kids.

I hope my point has already been made, otherwise I'm quite prepared to spell it out: computers are boring.

Not because they are, but we make them to be so.

But luckily, most kids already know computers are much more fun. You can play with them in ways most adults have never known. The trouble is, not all of our kids get the opportunity to use computers outside school. It's an important observation, into which I will not go now.

What's more disturbing, is the fact that kids learn that adults can even make something as exiting as computers dull. So when they grow up, they know they don't want to do the thing adults do.

So now I'll hint to what to do.
A pupil is interested in something not many other kids are into, something to do with painting, for instance. As a teacher , you might encourage this by letting her or him paint, read about painting etcetera.

But you could also treat the computer that is standing around the way it should be, and let that kid visit newsgroups, chat rooms, anything about painting. You might want to keep an eye on this or make sure the connection is with other pupils of the same age.

Imagine that learning curve! Think of the awe the others might have for someone in such a special social network. And this way, I come to my main point: the computer is social. All interactivity is learning. Even bad experiences provide useful learning possibilities.

Children will learn computers if they realize there is someone on the other end that can teach them something they want to know. Maybe they'll even learn how to type. But they don't want to learn about computers. Perhaps some do and we know quite well how to teach them that. Perhaps some have difficulties using the machine, and we have to make sure they get opportunities, too. But other than that, computers are not machines. They are long distance voices.

Distribute and delegate

2007-11-13T15:36:00.000+01:00

I've come across several people trying to find a solution to collaboration on e-learning projects. What often happens, is local security concerns prohibit thorough co-operation. This is due to genuine concerns. No administrator wants to allow anyone on their company e-learning workspace.

So how can we solve the availability paradox? One way to solve it, is organize our e-learning in a distributed way. This would mean e.g. not charging per person, but per use. So if I got access to an e-learning object, I would be charged not for merely seeing it, but every time I accessed it. This allows fast access for a small fee.

This is a model which encourages fast learning. Of course, it might also conflict with, for instance, a social policy of a company or institution. Slow learners would be punished for something they've no control of. And since speed of learning is generally distributed along class lines, lower class people with fewer available funds might have it harder to acquire knowledge online than higher-class people.

By this I am not saying lower class people are dumb. I am saying - and this has been proven - that lower income generally (statistically) coincides with slower pace of learning. Add to that an often lower adaptation of use of computers, and it will be clear that a pay-per-view in online learning is a flawed concept.

Unless you could distribute it, of course. If you could distribute access to learning systems, you could charge per view with a correction to the amount you charge to each participant. So for instance, I distribute my user accounts to a social organization to make e-learning content available to their public, and they pay a smaller amount per view of an object than I would normally charge, they can fulfill their social mission and I can gain customers for my e-learning.

The alternative is that I take care of the user registration for them, which means burdening my processes and business with a lot of the things I would rather not be doing, as well as having to devise systems to replicate that which they are already doing; which is to identify their clientele.

So my suggestion would be to take a solution which exists today in the management of portal sites. If I work with trusted partners, and I let them handle their user management on my system, I don't have to worry about the user access and can still diversify my marketing policies. It might take some training and some good agreements, but after that, distribution will take the bottlenecks from many systems.

It only takes some trust.

In todays world, this is sometimes hard to get, but priceless once obtained.

Versions and histories in e-learning

2007-11-08T16:21:00.000+01:00

What is a learning object? When we build repositories of them, can we fase old objects out while installing new ones? The problem with collaboration is maintaining the validity of all the material that is present. A learning object could be very useful but when it becomes obsolete, all the links to it have to be updated.

Since many objects come from projects, this requires not only the managers to know what is in their own databases, but also if the originator of the object has since decided to replace an object.

It makes public repositories of learning objects necessary, unless we want to have different versions of objects active at the same time.

I have no idea how to manage the version problem. How can a backtrack of learning objects be established that never loses each object's origin? This is an interesting question to which I don't have the answer. Perhaps it is a new form of metadata, perhaps it calls for repositories with histories.

Learning leads to... more learning

2007-10-29T15:58:00.000+01:00

I've been in Turkey on an extremely intensive five day study visit of Ankara Vocational Education and Training projects and institutions. It was enlightening to spend some time in the field among the young and not so young that are the object of many learning initiatives.

Especially since in Turkey there's so much investment of new education products going on, I had the opportunity to see the many stages of education development. During the different insights I gathered in numerous meetings, one was this: it takes a lot of learning to enhance the learning experience. And it usually starts with languages.

Perhaps in the past learning could be straightforward. There would be some subject you could be taught about in a certain time frame.

No longer is this the case. Acquiring knowledge is a much more incremental process, where the process is often part of the objective. So when I want to learn about a political structure of a country, I can do this by reading books about that country. This is learning old style.

I can also visit Wiki pages in the country's language(s), and count on the fact that some of the key concepts will be in a language I can comprehend. Which they will often be. I can try translating certain parts through one of the excellent translation sites. But all this means that I will first have to learn the language of Wiki, the way it works, the value of the contribution system.

In this case, my seeking of knowledge will make me acquire other knowledge first.

In the same vein, as a teacher teaching about the political structure of a country will it no longer be the teacher's job to write or provide books about the subject, but to teach how to access the available sources. The way Wiki works, the value of blogs or the relativity of them, the journalistic principles.

And of course how a library works, but perhaps this will also be available in accessible form so a teacher won't have to make it up all over again.

It's the teacher as coach idea, but it is of course broader than that. It's also the value of teaching respect for other ways, other languages, and an insight in the particularities of learning another than one's own language.

The net is multi-language and instead of being a drawback, this can be an aid to understanding.

When I was in China, it was obvious many Chinese are pragmatic about this; they use English when speaking to foreigners. Of course they are well aware of the fact that Chinese will get them very far in a large part of their world, but they know that by learning the lingua franca, more information and opportunities become available.

It is a message I can't stress enough: languages are a good way to speed up learning. If I want to learn something about the latest technology, do I have to confine myself to my own language to look for sources? Or can I use more to get to understanding faster? If I want to ask a question to an engineer, will it not help if I understood her or his language?

There is so much language learning material readily available, it would be short-sighted not to use it. I've been learning Portuguese both formally and online and in the twelve years since I started being interested in it, so much has become available. And this for the fifth language in the world. Just imagine what you could find in English!

Links:
http://languagecenter.cla.umn.edu/lc/Citlali/Portugues.html
http://www.graudez.com.br/portugues/exerc.htm
or
http://www.google.be/search?hl=nl&as_qdr=all&q=exercicios+de+portugues&meta=

The Killer App for Iphone

2007-10-22T22:39:00.000+02:00

During a discussion about the possibilities of the Iphone this weekend I came up with the ultimate killer application.

The problem is, it already exists. The good thing about this is that it will not take long to develop.

It's not a software application but a hardware addition for the Iphone. And why is it important for e-learning? Because it would make the ubiquitous computer a reality. Ubiquitous computing already exists since quite some time. But to make it the most used tool around, it lacks something. It lacks vision.

You can take that quite literally. The tiny computers of today are exactly that, tiny. Screens between 3 and 5 inch, making it difficult to read on them for any longer period of time. I'm not talking about space technology like projection into glasses or goggles or something as 70's as that. I'm talking the perfect hardware tool to go with your Iphone. It's so cool everybody will want it and of course, will want the phone as well. You can take online courses anywhere, read and write blogs and all this with a device that fits in the palm of your hand.

Suppose you could put your Iphone into a small cradle on your desk, in your car, in the subway. Suppose this cradle contains a high definition beamer which works up to 6 feet or 2 metres with power cord and cooling, or 1 foot / 30 cm without. Bingo. You've got your new desktop computer. Of course, the cradle would have to be almost as small as the Iphone itself. Otherwise it would just sit on your desk. But for some people, this would do. A cradle at work, one at home, all with the same, OSX powered computer. You could produce them with a folding keyboard or with that old MIT invention, the handheld keyboard.

Now wouldn't that be the killer app? One Iphone for all your computer needs. I can envision shopping malls with cradles for friends enjoying their favorite you-tube clips, or computer learning centres without computers.

White spaces on walls would be used intensely for projection. People would share their experiences much more than they do now. We can discuss what's on the wall and feel good about meeting others we can discuss things with.

So, who'll build this wonderful device? I'll be the first to buy one.

Collaborating online is so much richer

2007-10-19T09:35:00.000+02:00

This is a wonderful collaboration project by 200 students. Their message is short but not so simple. I consider it more of a state of affairs for youngsters today.

I wonder what their ideals are and their ideas of their future? They can do so much but will they do it?

I'm hoping everyone will get convinced of the value of peer learning such as in Facebook/ Myspace/ Addyourfavoritetoolhere. Unfortunately, a lot of young people are told that what they consider learning is a waste of time. Let's all stop doing that. But can we?

Wiki's about mass and me being part of it.

2007-10-18T17:55:00.000+02:00

A couple of days ago, I was talking about wikis and we all agreed that they are wonderful. And so they are. I use wiki a lot, find much on it in different languages and I find the quality generally excellent.

So I contribute regularly to wikis, don't I? Well, no. It seems I haven't yet found the wiki that arouses my curiosity enough to want to contribute to it. I've been thinking about organizing a wiki for our extranet, but I find it hard to think of things to write about.

I realized that everything I want to find already exists. Of course, I am a regular contributor to several knowledge databases. Some of the subjects I write about are boats and sailing , general politics etc. But I rarely add knowledge to wiki-style environments. So why don't I? Not because I have nothing to tell, surely. It's due to me not having an interest in contributing to a knowledge base available to the outside world.

I'm not saying I'm not interested in sharing. It's just that I haven't found that one topic in which I am specialized enough to write about. Often we need an external incentive to persuade us to invest time in something. So if someone can provide me with an external stimulus to share what I know, I'd be happy to comply to this and tell you what I know.

Now only to find those interested in my knowledge to convince me. And then I still have to find the time to do this on top of all my other activities. Isn't everybody constantly weighing time and interests?

This is why web 2.0 will only keep working when enough of us often enough decide in favor of spending time on this mutual project to keep it going. This mass of people can never be wrong - in the long run.

Towards a model of knowledge transfer with e-tools

2007-10-17T10:02:00.000+02:00

An important issue with e-learning projects and projects in general is follow-up. Many good projects stop after a short cycle and its results are rarely used for follow-up projects.

After a walkthrough meeting I attended last year, a very good presentation was made by Maria Kochanska, who hosted the meeting. Her mindmaps are here: http://www.le.ac.uk/beyonddistance/Files/Mind%20map.ppt#256,1,Dia 1 1

One of the conclusions is exactly the same as the topic I address here: We don't try hard enough letting others benefit from our experience. When I suggested yesterday in yet another workshop we use the available knowledge more efficiently by providing a database of people with certain experiences, the replies I got weren't all positive.

Often people are afraid they will become a commodity for too many others. My response to this: it's a market, baby. How are we going to make the results of projects known if the people that were involved in them are afraid to show themselves? And if enough others are interested, what you know becomes valuable and you can price it. And if you really want only to disseminate to very few, price it high.

In e-learning this model has been adopted from the start. Since the folks involved in e-learning are aware of their price, they routinely charge for what they have to offer. This is not all bad, as long as you adopt a balanced strategy. If some of what you learned was publicly funded, it's only fair to charge less to public bodies. Who knows how you'll benefit from what you've shown to others?

An even better model would be to transfer your knowledge to organizations, as they are generally more capable to retain knowledge. But the scale is also important here. Large organizations tend to protect their embedded knowledge stronger so perhaps it's advisable to transfer what you know to people in medium-sized companies or institutions.

Working out a model to distribute costs for knowledge transfer is one of the more poignant tasks, which I feel is certainly worth pursuing. Certainly e-tools are very helpful for this. I'll try to elaborate on this later.

Back to school

2007-10-16T09:46:00.000+02:00

As I was preparing my talk on portals, one of the messages I wanted to bring across turned out to be this: All the above 30's had to learn how to write. All over again. My first writing experience was over thirty years ago. My second round of learning to write was about ten years ago, when I started writing articles.

And now, it's the third time. I've resisted long and hard. My website (all four versions of it) is still written old style. I still work a lot of my time on documents that I write alone and then distribute for discussion.

So I have to start writing 2.0 style. Short bursts, open documents with room for input. Collaboration is key, and I'm still learning how to do it in my own workspace.

So how do others make this transition? Now that's what I want to know.

Who are we?

2007-10-11T10:07:00.000+02:00

This is a very funny cartoon. Will our children be named after computer characters in the future? Or is this already happening? With all of our aliases and user-ID's, it can get hard to maintain ones identity.
http://xkcd.com/327/

But seriously, with all the identity management related problems, how can we keep ourselves from developing split personalities? I am sure many of us have already developed interesting sides of ourselves in parallel universes. I am aware of at least four or five identities of mine which may share traits but don't match entirely.

I am several people. Everyone is. But once we start roaming the electronic seas, we develop prolifically. In an online game I may be a really obnoxious person which in real life I generally ain't. Gaming is a very good example. How many of us are an entirely different being while gaming? You can be a clumsy shy real life person with an entirely cool avatar and who can tell what you really are? People often get trapped in their bodies - even though I never believed in the head-body divide. This works similarly with computers and communicating through them.

One of the truly new ways in which the human race is developing, gives us the ability to become part of communities which value us in an entirely different way from the perceived normal ways. You can be a highly valued scholar in a certain subject, even though you never acquired any formal degree for it.
But as always, the proof is in the eating, and sometimes the personalities have to meet. So it's perhaps a good idea to smuggle some personal traits into your avatars. Otherwise you get what I observed several years ago in a real life meeting with a group of chatters. One of the coolest people in the room turned out to be a very shy, quiet young man who never spoke during the entire evening. And afterwards, he was still very popular but in private some of his remarks were commented in the light of his appearance. Should he not have shown himself? Au contraire, he should have shown more of his personality in his online musings so the contrast would have been more understandable. After all, chatting is always also about showing those parts of yourself you rarely get to show IRL.

Similarly, the online teacher benefits from using her or his life as material for an e-learning presence. The chance of actually meeting students always exists and don't all of us want to be valued for who we are? Our personal story is full of interesting details that may not be of much interest to the people around us, but become much more interesting to those we know from afar. And students always want to know about their teachers, from high school classes and its iconic figures which everyone remembers to the public speakers we sometimes go to lectures from, who say things we hadn't heard before. So let them know who you are and who knows what the result might be?

From competency to portfolio

2007-10-09T16:31:00.000+02:00

Very interesting speech I saw. How to start with competency-based learning and end with a personal portfolio. Pdf of the presentation with Dutch captions here. Any e-learning concept should entrail portfolios.

E-learning: from hard to easy to hard

2007-10-08T09:52:00.000+02:00

Learning used to be very hard. In a lot of places in this world it still is. After you made it to school, which could well take several hours, you have to stay awake even though you already were since 4 a.m. Teaching often occurs in a language quite unlike your own. Different accents, pronunciation or a different language altogether, it's all very common.
Even in my own country, up until 50 years ago the majority had to take its education in the language of one of the minorities. It should come as no wonder this kind of stifled development of this majority and led to numerous problems, one of which is a still existing feeling of inadequacy among its members. And I should warn you that this group has since long become the major economic as well as cultural reference point in the country. Only in recent years has the suppressing minority woken up to the fact that it is wise to learn some of the language of the majority in my country.
But, as this shows, I digress. After going to the classroom and learning all this very valuable and interesting knowledge, all was not well. The learned had to be put to work. And by this I mean both the knowledge and the person. And as educated people tend to get better jobs where they can use the acquired wisdom, this has always been a sure way of socially upward movement - up to a certain point, on which I will elaborate later.
In the 1960's a small elite of citizens climbed the social ladder for the first time in recent Western history. Since I am not a historian and also don't know about other periods when this type of event occured, I guess it was unique. It was a very revolutionary activity which was the result of years of social struggle achieved by the social-democratic and communist tendencies in the West.
They had to overcome the European language barriers, the corporatism of the higher classes and their own cultural background. Those who achieved this hard ordeal, were convinced that for their struggle to succeed, the education system had to become more democratic. This means very specifically that access to education had to become guaranteed and progress through the school had to be detached from cultural and hereditary background. the first was done by heightening the compulsory schooling age to first 16, then 18. The latter was never reached. Steps were made in the right direction but the corporative organizations were and are very reluctant to give up their natural born power in society. And, of course, men were unwilling to yield to women.
So those with better educations now started working and moving up the social ladder. Two systems held them back. One is the glass ceiling, the other is fear. These are well known phenomena and I will not talk about them here. Just ask any Muslim if they know about fear and they will tell you about it. Don't use the word racism as this is just fear-induced behavior. Ask any woman about the glass ceiling and she will say what she experienced. Don't use sexism as this is also about fear of becoming irrelevant.

Thern, all of a sudden, there was so much learning going on in the 1980's and 1990's that learning had become easy. There have never been more books, experts and public information about learning as there have been in the last twenty years. The yuppies came and they were convinced learning, just like everything else, was easy, though still not much fun. What they figured out is that even though learning wasn't necessarily fun, the same tools could be used for fun things. I'm talking about computers and learning via computers or e-learning.
As a life-long learner I have worked with computers since age 14. I owned my first at 16, second at 20 and third, fourth etc. up till now, when I use my 4 computers alternatively. I lost count of all the computers I've used and they go well into the hundreds. And I'm not exaggerating, I tried to count them and lost track at 700.

And guess what? Every single one of them was useful and has been used for learning, by me. Not all were fun, though. Let me try to give some examples. The first one, an Apple II (in secondary school) taught me how to draw in colour by mixing coloured planes. The second one, clone IBM PC, showed me how it would not keep anything in memory when switched off. I learned a valuable lesson about electronics. After several others in school, at friends places, I used an Amiga which has learned me probably 10% of what I know today. I got hold of the Internet when it was still Usenet. Then there are hundreds and hundreds of computers, each teaching me something about themselves and the world. In China, I learned to use the Internet in Chinese in several internetcafés. I learned some Chinese words on my computer before going there.

So after this personal biographical history class (What have you learned?) I know that learning has never been easier.

I'll repeat it: learning is easy. By this I mean using the tools for learning has become easy. Most people can click a mouse, while pointing the thing may still be a challenge to some. The combination of internet and computing has brought a wealth of information to our homes, this is certainly not new. To acquire knowledge, we only have to use the available information. Grab it, digest it, arrange it.

So how come I've managed to go back to hard in my title? Well, that's because of the role of the teacher. When I grew up, the teacher claimed he or she knew everything we could learn. It was a very comforting world, especially with the Russians on our doorstep (but not inside the house because our intelligence forces kept them out).
Now we know the truth is not as simple. We know from our plentiful sources that a supply of information is not enough to assure us knowledge. From all of the available information, I know that the communists were harmless, murdering bastards, who failed economically while shooting capsules into space with technology that has until today never been bettered, all the while reading the most refined philosophical treatises and sitting on the most advanced designs in cars everybody in the Western world is now regarding as the most sought for object that doesn't drive and was never owned by any of the people that built them in terrible conditions and inhospitable factories which now leave behind wastelands which will remain deadly for decades to come.
You think I'm exaggerating? It's all checked and verified on the Net. The key word here is obviously complexity.

When information is written into knowledge, people transmogrify it. They transform it while adding some of their own insight, history, opinion. And if you already knew what I meant by transmogrify, this means I have not been telling much news. The information after transformation becomes more interesting to me while apparently losing none of its verity. It still seems to contain the same informational truths as before I started editing it. I could add some of my new knowledge to a wiki and as long as others don't call me a liar, my version of what I gathered is verifiably truthful.

While we lose the authorities (the authors until the early sixties) we gain a multitude in which everyone is looking for a personal aspect to internalize the mass of information while still maintaining the belief that any truth is first and foremost personal. Personal as in attributable to me or somebody else as a person. And so we make our own unique truth while we look for others to tell us our truth is a more interesting one than the one next door. As Wired wrote in "Capturing Eyeballs", getting others to regard you as someone worth looking for becomes the highest value.

But when you're 14, and are used to computers as being all around you since age 2, parents lose focus as primary eyeball catchers and information agents. Then you are faced with the biggest challenge in your life: Where shall I look for my knowledge? What shall I learn and how high will I value it? And how volatile will I allow it to be?

And that, undoubtedly, is hard.