Virtual learning is here already

After three days in Northern Ireland to visit South West College, one of the conclusions is that blended learning works very well. Never mind the elegant ways ILT is integrated into their classrooms, in 2012 they held their Virtual Week which was the real eye opener.

The idea was to tutor for five days without any student coming in to class. I wouldn't say that this is the only way to promote blended learning, but it shows to teachers and students alike that any course lends itself to the blended approach.

Teachers in vocational teaching and training often say that electronically enhanced learning cannot be achieved in their field. The SWC example shows just how easily it can be done. In most cases, it will support the learning but it's possible to hold distance learning classes in VET. The thing is, it will demand some extra preparation work of teachers and students alike. this demands a specific motivation.

The most important lesson I take away from this experiment is that if there are enough determined staff, an experience such as this is very rewarding and can be highly succesful. You don't have to wait for heavy snow and disrupted transport systems to find an incentive to use blended learning in vocational training.

And as most people have already experienced, we're seeing ever more severe climate effects from snow to flooding and in Western Europe, we're just not used to the consequences. Yet.

Budget times two

Updating an e-course is always part of the project. I have been working on an on-line course about our new ERP-software. I took parts of the manual and converted them to course pages using Courselab and Moodle. I recorded short videos to demonstrate some of the less obvious workings of the software and built exercises around them to create an interactive course - the way I've done it in courses I collaborated on in the past.

And when I got a nice set of comprehensive topics covering most of the tasks my colleagues had ahead of them - it was an internal course- somebody decided to change the software lay-out. And not just colors, but the position of buttons as well as drop-down fields. So overnight, eighty percent of my work became obsolete.

Because it's one thing to alter a manual - basically a Word-file - and a different thing altogether to change an on-line course. They're just not the same thing. So the team decided to pull the on-line content and remake most of it to the new lay-out. As the live date was approaching fast, there were more urgent jobs that needed to be done.

It will be clear that updating wasn't part of the project scope and as I have now moved to other tasks, it remains to be seen if the on-line course will ever be revived. This is a lesson well learned when working with e-learning projects: planning ahead and making sure any updates are part of the scope of a project are an absolute must. It sounds obvious but unfortunately, it isn't to a lot of people involved in project work.

One last note about budgeting for these kinds of updates: where a typical on-line course will require updating every now and then, a software course is different. For a typical course, 15-25% of the available budget needs to be foreseen for updates. For a software course (which necessarily needs to be produced under a bigger time constraint) this may rise to 40 or 50 percent.

It's a valuable number to take into consideration when devising this sort of course. Development budget times two might keep your project out of trouble in the long run.

The age of content

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

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

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

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.

Educa Online 2008

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?

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

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.

Are we good at change?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?