Blogs as a measure of quality

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 answer is not knowledge management

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.

Why authority is suspect

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.

Versions and histories in e-learning

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.

Collaborating online is so much richer

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?