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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Archives for 2010

Some accumulated thoughts…

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I have had my head down cranking out the manuscript for my mobile learning book. The deadline for the first draft is breathing down my neck, and I’ve been quite busy with some client work as well.   The proverbial one-armed paper hanger comes to mind.

However, that does not mean my mind has been idle.   Far from, actually.   It’s just not been possible   to find the time to do the thoughts justice.   I’m not really going to here, either, but I do want to toss out some recent thoughts and see what resonates with you, so these are mini-blogs (not microblogging):

A level above

I have long argued that we don’t use mental models enough in our learning, and also that we focus too much on knowledge and not enough on skills.   As I   think about developing learning, I want to equip learners to be able to regenerate the approach they should be using if they forget some part of it, and can if they have been given a conceptual model as relationships that guide the application to a problem.

I realize I want to go further, however.   Given the rate of change of things these days, and the need to empower learners to go beyond just what is presented (moving from training to education, in a sense), I think we need to go further to facilitate the transition from ‘dependent’ learning to independent and interdependent learning, as my colleague Harold Jarche so nicely puts it.

To do that, I think we need to take our presentation of the model a little bit further.   I think we need to look at, as a goal, having presented the learning in such a way that our learners understand the concept not only to regenerate, but maintain, extend, and self-improve.   Yes, it is some extra work, but I think that is going to be critical. It will not only be the role of the university (despite Father Guido), but also the workplace. It’s not quite clear what that means practically, but I definitely want to put this stake into the ground to start thinking about it.   What are your thoughts?

More on the iPad and the Publishing marketplace

I’ve already posted on the iPad, but I want to go on a little longer.   First, the good news: OmniGroup has announced that they’ll be porting OmniGraffle (and their other apps) to the iPad.   Yay!   I *really* like their diagramming tool (where do you think I come up with all those graphics?).

On the other hand, I had lunch the other day with Joe Miller, who is the VP of Tech for Linden Labs.   He recently was talking about the iPad and really sees it as a game changer in ways that are subtle and insightful.   As we talked, he really feels that the whole Flash thing is a big mistake: that one of the things you would use the iPad for is surfing the web, and that more than 75% of the web runs Flash.   It does seem like a relatively small thing to let hang up a major play.

Further, as I said earlier, I think interactivity is the   major opportunity for publishers to go beyond the textbook on eReaders, and the iPad could lead the way.   But right now, Flash is the lingua franca of interactivity on the web, and without it, there’s not an obvious fallback that won’t require rewriting across platforms instead of write-once, run anywhere.

Joe did point me to an interesting new eReader proposal, by Ray Kurzweil of all people.   Oddly, it’s Windows-only, so not quite sure the relevance to the Mac (tho’ you’d think they’d port it over with alacrity), but a free, more powerful eReader platform could have a big impact.

Lots of more interesting things on the way, after I get this draft off to the publisher and get back into the regular blogging swing. ‘Til then, take care,   and keep up the dialog!

eLearning Learning

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Just to note that Learnlets is now part of the blogs recorded in Tony Karrer’s eLearning Learning.   Tony’s made an architecture that allows blogs and articles on a particular topic to be aggregated and searched.

As part of a Personal Learning Network for those in elearning, such a searchable repository is quite useful. I used it as a recommended resource for the upcoming Foundations Intensive elearning introduction event as part of the Learning Solutions conference.

You can search on a topic, or just use the keywords on the left.   You can see what’s new in the center, and the blogs trolled on the right.

Tony’s been quite active in looking out for new ways technology can serve the elearning community, and it’s nice to be a part of one of his solutions.

Proliferating Portals

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After my last blog post, a commenter asked a pertinent question:

Many organizations/companies have multiple intranets, wiki sites, and so forth, often making it difficult for employees to know where to go when they want an answer or more information. Let‘s say you are the Director of a company‘s Education/Training department and you want to move more toward information learning. While your department creates online and classroom courses on how to use the company‘s main products, you see the need for more advanced-level training. As the Director, you want to harness the knowledge within and have the experts bring their conversations to a wiki site. You want to provide a platform for this knowledge to be shared, discussed, and build upon. Your vision is that once the wiki site is up for awhile, your instructional designers can take some of the knowledge that‘s posted and create a job aid, reference document, and so forth that could be distributed more formally.

Do you move forward with yet another wiki site and not worry about all of the other internal wiki sites, intranet, and so forth?

In general, I don’t like site proliferation, at least of one sort. I hear it all the time: I ask “are you using portals?” and the reply is “oh, yeah, we’ve got hundreds”.   Hundreds? How does anyone know where to go for what? And BTW, I’m treating wikis and portals somewhat interchangably here, as wikis can be portals, but portals are another way of users providing resources to each other, and I see technology support for communities of practice to include both the capabilities of collaborative editing of resources (wikis) and storing other relevant materials (portals). I use portal as the overarching term as well (also including discussion forums, blogs, profiles…).

The problem isn’t really the number, however, it’s how they’re being organized.   Typically, each business unit is providing a portal of their information for others to use. The problem with this is, it’s organized by the producer’s way of viewing the world, not the consumer’s. Bad usability. Which is usually confounded by only one way of organizing, a lack of ways of reorganizing, and sometimes not even a search capability! (Though fortunately that’s now being baked into most tools.)

So people wonder where to go, different units create different mythologies about what portals are useful, some sites aren’t used, others are misused, it’s a mess.

On the other hand, I do want users to seize control and create their own sites, and there are reasons for groups to create sites.   If you have hundreds of user communities, you should have hundreds of portals.   The real organizational principle, however, should be how the users think about it.   There are two ways to handle that: you can do good usability, with ethnographic and participatory methods of finding out how the users think about the world, or better yet, let the inmates run the asylum (and provide support, back to the facilitation message).

For formal information – HR, product sheets, pricing, all the stuff that’s created – it should be organized into portals by role: who needs this different information. You can use web services to pull together custom, user-centered portals on top of all this information.   And, then, you should also empower communities of practice to create their own portals as well.

So, to answer the question, I think it’s fabulous to create a site where experts can put up information, and the learning unit can mine that for things they can add value to. However, do it in conjunction with the experts and users.   Let their self-organization rule who plays and how the playground is structured, don’t dictate it from above.

I saw an example of that in a recent engagement, where a group offering software training couldn’t keep up with the changes in the software, so they started putting it up on a wiki, and now they’re devolving control to the user experts.   It’s just coping, but it’s also strategic.   Tap into the knowledge of your groups.

I laud the questioner for the desire to find a way to broaden responsibility and empower the users.   Do it anyway, do it right, but then also start evangelizing the benefits of ensuring that the other proliferation of wikis, portals, etc, are also user-focused, not department or silo focused, and suggesting portal integration as well as proliferation.

Now, does that make sense?   Is your answer to the question different?

Formalizing informal learning?

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The Entreprise Collaborative has a new question, asking whether we can formalize informal learning.   I have to say, I don’t get the question.   That is, I understand what they’re asking, and like the response they give, but I really think it’s the wrong question.

To me, it’s not about formalizing informal learning so much as explicitly supporting it versus ignoring it.   Like the proverbial ‘stuff’, informal learning happens.   Period.   To me, it is more a matter of providing infrastructure to support informal learning, and facilitating informal learning as well.

When I talk about providing infrastructure, I’m talking about putting in place tools that can be used for informal learning.   That means ways to share media (whether text, audio, or video), to comment, to edit and improve, to collaborate, etc.   Part of that supporting is looking at new tools, and seeing if they provide new ways to work.   Wikis are a major advance on top of emailing documents around in many ways, and similarly microblogs have provided new capabilities.

Then there is the facilitation of that informal learning.   I see two roles. One is optimizing the tool use, and the other is facilitating the associated skills.   For the former, tools can be used poorly or well. For example, it’s no good having portals if they’re multiple, organized around institutional silos instead of tasks, roles, or interests.   There’s a role for integrating tools into a coherent user experience.

The second role is to develop individual ability to use the tools for learning, both independently and socially.   To repeat a regular refrain, don’t assume the ability of learners to be effective self- and social-learners.   There are specific meta-cognitive skills that should be made explicit, promoted, and supported.

This, to me, is how you optimize an organization’s ability to learn: by making the environment conducive to informal learning.   In the process of facilitating, you may find opportunities to add value by taking some information and formalizing it, e.g. building a job aid around some information generated by users, or providing some guidelines about capturing videos, but I don’t think of that as wrapping structure around informal learning so much as transferring information.   Are you formalizing informal learning?   I don’t really care what you want to call it, to be honest. What I care about is empowering organizations to change in productive ways.   And that’s an important goal no matter what you want to call it.

Writing and the 4C’s of Mobile

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a book on mobile learning.   My only previous experience was writing Engaging Learning, where the prose practically exploded from my fingers. This time is different.

The prose actually does flow quite easily from my fingers,   but I find myself restructuring more often than last time.   This is a bigger topic, and I keep uncovering new ways to think about mobile and new facets to try to include.   As a consequence, as the deadline nears (!), I find myself more and more compelled to put all free time into the text.

There’s a consequence, and that is a decreasing frequency of blogging.   I’m coming up with some great ideas, but I’ve got to get them into the book, and I’m not finding time to rewrite them.

When I do have ideas in other areas (and I always do), I’m finding that they disappear under the pressure to meet my deadline. And there are ancillary details still to be taken care of (photos of devices, coordinating a few case studies).

Further, as neither blogging or the book (directly) pay the bills, I’ve still got to meet my client needs.   Also, I’m speaking at the Learning Solutions conference and involved in various ways with several others, and some deliverables are due soon. I’m feeling a tad stretched!

So, in many ways, this is an apology for the lack of blog posts, and the fact that it will likely to be sparse for another month and some.

As a brief recompense, I did want to communicate one framework that I’m finding helpful.   I’ll confess that it’s very similar to Low and O’Connell’s 4 R’s (for which I can’t find a link!?!; from my notes: Record, Recall, Reinterpret , Relate), but I can never remember them, which means they need a new alliteration.   Mine’s a bit simpler:

  • Content: the provision of media (e.g. documents, audio, video, etc) to the learner/performer
  • Compute: taking in data from the learner and processing it
  • Communicate: connecting learners/performers with others
  • Capture: taking in data from sensors including camera, GPS, etc, and saving for sharing or reflection

I find this one of several frameworks that support ‘thinking different’ about mobile capabilities.   I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.

Down on the iPad?

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At the Upside Learning Blog, this post (which I found through the CLO group on LinkedIn) proclaims that the elearning industry is down on the iPad.   I saw several flaws in the argument and had to write this response:

I have to say I think this is partly or completely wrong. Depending on what you mean by the eLearning industry (corporate? Gov’t? Higher Ed? K12? other?), I see emotions running the gamut, but largely positive. I haven’t seen the universal bashing that your title implies.

It’s not about supporting the mobile worker; that’s what a smartphone is for. This is not a real-time communication tool. It is, instead, largely a media consumption tool and a PIM (personal information management) device. Is that good for learning?

First, learners can interact with content in a much richer way than they can with a textbook or the other ereaders (ok, so Kindle’s opened up their SDK, but it’s still monochrome). Not just passive consumption, but interaction. Simulations and learning games. It’s supports interactive content either through the SDK but also through web standards (many Flash folks are already thinking HTML 5 as a standard is going to trump their proprietary environment).

As I blogged, it’s huge for publishers, providing both a channel for richer media and interactivity, and a new unified market channel. That’s a whole new opportunity for an industry in serious strife.

Second, it supports learners capturing their reflections. It supports math modeling/notetaking/presentation creation. And there’ll be diagramming and drawing as well. Basically, learners can track their understandings, and share them.

So, it’s a great platform for formal learning, and I reckon, a reasonably powerful one for informal learning, at least independently (web browser, email). It’s missing some real time dialog (though should support VoIP), but should support text chat and webpage mediated interaction.

So, a) I haven’t seen the eLearning Industry as a whole being negative towards the iPad, b) your examples are very personal, not focused on learners, and c) on principle I think it’s got great upside. So, um, where do you come off with that title?

Ok, probably not my most diplomatic response, but I really feel that while I may have some doubts about the iPad, this argument didn’t articulate the problem very well.   What do you think?

iLust? Changing the game

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Yesterday, in case you’ve been living under a rock, Apple released their take on the tablet computer, the iPad.   Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying it’s “the most important thing I’ve ever done.”   And that’s saying a lot.   Like him or not, he’s changed the face of our digital lives several times: popularizing the GUI interface with the Macintosh, changing the music market with the iPod, and upending the mobile market with the iPhone.

Briefly, it’s a network-enabled thin touchscreen midway in size between the iPhone and a laptop (e.g. netbook in size).   It’s been equipped with a bookstore to complement the iPhone Store (media and apps), will play movies, music, and apps.   It’s got a moderate suite of PIM, including contacts, calendar, and notes (no ToDos, ahem), and a microphone. No camera, no phone, but does have a soft keyboard and an optional hard keyboard (would that the iPhone had one!).   It’s really just a big iTouch.   The device itself isn’t a game-changer.   Which isn’t to say it isn’t quite cool in it’s way with some mlearning opportunities.

I have several reflections on the device, from different perspectives.   The overall question is whether the iPad, too, is a game-changer.   Personally, the obvious question is: “do I have to have one?”   Which naturally leads to the performance support perspective of the device (or vice versa).   And, given my predilictions, there’s also the mlearning question.

Bill Brandon of the eLearning Guild has already opined about the mlearning potential of the iPad. He notes that it’s oriented towards content delivery, and could be a replacement for textbooks.   That, alone, is a big win, though not unique to the iPad (cf Amazon’s Kindle).   Without a camera, he notes, it’s only usable for voice or text chatting.   The form factor is nice, but it’s kind of large to slip in a pocket, and it’s really too large for elementary kids’ hands.   I still think a camera-equipped iTouch is a better form-factor for K-6.

From there, we start looking beyond content delivery to more interactive apps.   Here’s where we start seeing some real opportunity: we can start putting simulations on the device, not just content.   Interactivity is key, to me, and that’s what the iPad has over the Kindle or the Nook (tho’ Amazon has now opened up the Kindle’s Software Developers Kit, it’s still lacking color).   the possibility of running meaningful learning games is a real opportunity.   With network connectivity, it can be social as well; in addition to the internet browser there are also already dedicated FaceBook and LinkedIn apps for the iPhone.

Of course, a second opportunity is to start using the device as a way to take notes and share thinking. With email and web access, you can collaborate with others.   Can you use it to create representations to share?   Apple is coming out with iPad versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote (spreadsheet, word processing, and presentation software, respectively). This is, to me, a major win (with a caveat).

The ability to use the device not just for consumption, but for creation, is where we start turning this from an entertainment & learning platform into a productivity platform. If you want to not carry a laptop (or even a MacBook Air or a netbook if you’re a Windows person, both seriously worth considering), this has to have certain characteristics.   I, personally, wouldn’t need the 3G connection (meaning you have connectivity wherever you can get a cell-phone signal, not just a wi-fi hotpot), as I’m fine using my iPhone for the always-on connection.   However, I need to write.   The additional keyboard is extra weight, but the capability would be worth it (nice if it folded for travel, however).   The ability to create presentations is also a big win.

One thing is missing, however.   I diagram.   A lot (as I illustrate here).   Keynote has shapes, but it’s not a diagramming tool as yet (I checked, there’s no palette of shapes I can keep open). I don’t know if that will be remedied in the iPad specific version (with a multi-touch interface), but what would really be nice is an OmniGraffle (or Visio, for you Windows folks) for the iPad. Short of that, I’m not sure it’ll meet my needs. Which answers the question about whether I’d get one. Not without diagramming (and Brushes seems more a paint app than a diagramming, that’s not what I need).   I don’t consume a lot of music and movies. I do outline, write, and diagram.

Still, this is a significant move, for none of the above reasons.   I’ve written before about the new dynamics for the publishing industry (specifically, educational publishers).   The story is similar for other forms of publication: magazines, newspapers, and books.   eBook readers are changing that market, but only the mechanics, not the inherent nature of the experience.   It’s still about ‘reading’, not about information.   Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and now Apple, are creating a new market for the old product.   However, Apple has changed the market for a new version of the product. They’re creating the opportunity for those providers to elaborate their content with dynamic media such as video and audio, and interactive media: modifiable graphs, and of course simulations and games.

Now it’s not only possible for a publisher to create a richer, more fully information, even educational experience, but there is also a new direct channel for that endeavor.   It doesn’t have to be based on individual subscriptions to a site, but it can be arranged through a single broadly available channel.   It will, however, require the concomitant components I suggested were necessary: an understanding of user experience and content models.

I think the iPad is flawed in several ways: lack of camera & multi-tasking (and the form-factor limiting HD movie screen formats), and as yet a dearth of critical software.   However, it’s a platform, and consequently those can come in either hardware or software updates.   What it has made possible, however, is a change in business models, and that’s a more significant outcome.   Whether it succeeds is another issue, but I think the groundwork is there to make the change.   Who’s up for trying to lift their game into the new model?

Accessorize your brain

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It flashed on me last night.   Jeopardy-style, the answer to the question “why do/will smartphones rule” is “because ‘there’s an app for that'”.

Let me explain. First, you have to be clear on what a smartphone is.   David Pogue has tried to call the converged mobile platform which can be customized with applications the “app phone”, because he considers a smartphone to be a phone that can check email. Or, can surf the web, is data-enabled.   Well, Bob Sanregret told me that there hasn’t been a cellphone sold in the past 2 years that didn’t have a web browser.   Sorry, that’s not a smartphone, to me.

So I’m going to reserve smartphone for those augmented phones that are platforms: they have an OS that others can develop for and release applications on.   BTW, it wasn’t the iPhone that was the first in the space; the Treo had a lively market around PalmOS.

So why do I think this is the killer market?   Because these devices do two things: they are platforms, and they are convergent. They are increasingly providing the most potent and portable convergent devices imaginable, integrating a variety of sensors, forms of connectivity, and rich input and output into a handheld device.   And they are providing this on a platform: a device that developers can integrate these capabilities to meet new and customized needs.

It so happens that the barriers to produce these applications are coming down, as well. Web technologies increasingly underpin the opportunities to develop on platforms, making the technical skills required quite accessible.   It’s little more than creating a web page, which is increasingly available to all, and that makes it easy for tools to simplify even further.

What this means is that anyone can pretty much get pretty much anything they need.   You can follow interests in popular media, including music, movies, television, books, comics, and more.   You can access information for shopping, transportation, dining, or even just people to meet.   You can perform magical tasks like calculating each person’s tab and tip, converting Farenheit to Celsius, or track the stars (astronomical and astrological, if you roll like that).   The limits are no longer the technology, the limits are between our ears.   If you can dream it, you can do it.   I’ve quoted Arthur C. Clarke before “any truly advanced technology is truly indistinguishable from magic”.   We’ll, we’re pretty much there.   We’ve got the Star Trek tricorder in our mitts.

And that, to me, is the deal-clincher.   When you can accessorize your brain the same way you do your bod, when you can augment your capabilities, not just your appearance, you’re suddenly capable of being the person you want to be.   You’re a superhero!   And all at the price of buying a customizable, personal platform.   Who wouldn’t?*

*OK, I slipped off into hyperbole.   I’m well aware that there are many people who can’t, or don’t (I live in the real world most of the time). But I’m predicting they will.   And they’re already doing it, through SMS because they don’t yet have smartphones, they only have cellphones.   But that will change, and as I mentioned earlier, I hope we don’t keep so obsessed with progress that we don’t take time to bring along everyone, not just those coming from fortunate backgrounds.

How I became a learning experience designer

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Not meaning this to be a sudden spate of reflectiveness, given my last post on my experience with the web, but Cammy Bean has asked when folks became instructional designers, and it occurs to me to capture my rather twisted path with a hope of clarifying the filters I bring in thinking about design.

It starts as a kid; as Cammy relates, I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to be a learning designer.   Besides a serious several years being enchanted with submarines (still am, in theory, but realized I probably wouldn’t get along with the Navy for my own flaws), I always wanted to have a big desk covered with cool technology, exploring new ideas.     I wasn’t a computer geek back then (the computer club in high school sent off programs to the central office to run and received the printout a day or so later), but rather a science geek, reading Popular Science and spending hours on the floor looking at the explanatory diagrams in the World Book (I’m pretty clearly a visual conceptual learner :).   And reading science fiction. I did have a bit of an applied bent, however, with a father who was an engineer and could fix anything, who helped my brother and I work on our cars and things.

When I got to UCSD (just the right distance from home, and near the beach), my ambition to be a marine biologist was extinguished as the bio courses were both rote-memorization and cut-throat pre-med, neither of which inspired me (my mom was an emergency room nurse, and I realized early on that I wasn’t cut out for blood and gore).   I took some computer science classes with a buddy and found I could do the thinking (what with, er, distractions, I wasn’t the most diligent student, but I still managed to get pretty good grades).   I also got a job tutoring calculus, physics, and chemistry with the campus office for some extra cash, and took some learning classes. I also got interested in artificial intelligence, too, and was a bit of a groupie around how we think, and really cool applications of technology.

I somehow got the job of computer support for the tutoring office, and that’s when a light went on about the possibilities of computers supporting learning.   There wasn’t a degree program in place, but I found out my college allowed you to specify your own major and I convinced Provost Stewart and two advisors (Mehan & Levin) to let me create my own program.   Fortunately, I was able to leverage the education classes I’d taken for tutoring, the computer science classes I’d also taken, and actually got out faster than any program I’d already dabbled in! (And got to do that cool ’email for classroom discussion’ project with my advisors, in 1979!)

After calling around the country trying to find someone who needed a person interesting in computers for learning, I finally got hooked up with Jim Schuyler, who had just started a company doing computer games to go along with textbook publisher’s offerings.   I eventually managed to hook DesignWare up with Spinnaker to do a couple of home games for them before Jim had DesignWare start producing it’s own home games (I got to do two cool ones, FaceMaker and Spellicopter as well as several others).

However, I had a hankering to go back to graduate school and get an advanced degree.   As I wrestled with how to design the interfaces for games, I read an article calling for a ‘cognitive engineering’, and contacted the author about where I might study this.   Donald Norman ended up letting me study with him.

The group was largely focused on human-computer interaction, but I maintained my passion for learning solutions.   I did a relatively mainstream PhD but while focusing on the general cognitive skill of analogical reasoning, I also attempted an intervention to improve the reasoning.

Though it was a cognitive group, I was eclectic, and looked at every form of learning.   In addition to the cognitive theories that were in abundance, I took and TA’d for the behavioral learning courses.   David Merrill was visiting nearby, and graciously allowed me to visit him for a discussion (as well as reading Reigeluth’s edited overview of instructional design theories).   Michael Cole was a big fan of Vygotsky, and I was steeped in the social learning theories thereby.   David Rumelhart and Jay McClelland were doing the connectionist/PDP work while I was a student, so I got that indoctrination as well.   And, as an AI groupie, I even looked at machine learning!

I subsequently did a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center, where I was further steeped in cognitive learning theory, before heading off to UNSW to teach interaction design and start doing my own research, which ended up being very much applied, essentially an action- or design-research approach.   My subsequent activities have also been very much applications of a broad integration of learning theory into practical yet innovative design.

The point being, I never formally considered myself an instructional designer so much as a learning designer.   Having worked on non-formal education in many ways, as well as teaching in higher education, my applications have crossed formal instruction and informal learning.   As the interface design field was very much exploring   subjective experiences at the time I was a graduate student, and from my game design experience, I very naturally internalized a focus on engaging learning, believing that learning can, and should, be hard fun.

I’ve synthesized the eclectic frameworks into a coherent learning design model that I can apply across technologies, and strongly believe that a solid grounding in conceptual frameworks combined with experiences that span a range of technologies and learning outcomes is the best preparation for a flexible ability to design experiences that are effective and engaging. Passionate as I am about learning, I do think we could do a better job of providing the education that’s needed to help make that happen, and still look for ways to try to help others learn (one of my employees once said that working with me was like going to grad school, and I do try to educate clients, in addition to running workshops and continuing to speak).

And, I’ve ended up, as I dreamed of, with a desk covered with cool technology and I get to explore new ideas: designing solutions that integrate the cutting edge of devices, tools, models, frameworks, all to help people achieve their goals.   I continue to think ahead about what new possibilities are out there, and work to improve what’s happening.     I love learning experience design (and the associated strategic thinking to make it work), believe there’s at least some evidence that I do it pretty well, and hope to keep doing it myself and helping others do it better.   Who’s up for some hard fun?

What does the 20th year of the web mean?

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Gina Minks, who I know only through Twitter (@gminks), tho’ hope to meet someday, tagged me for the following Questions from On. Her post was immensely personal, and I have no such deeply significant experience, but I have been on the internet since before there was one, so I reckon I can throw out a few ideas.

The questions are:

  • How has the Web changed your life?
  • How has the Web changed business and society?
  • What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years?

How has the web changed my life? Well, that’s an interesting question.   Starting at the beginning, as an undergraduate I discovered computers and learning (I got a job managing the computer records for the office that coordinated tutoring on campus, after having been a tutor, and recognized that computers for learning was a keen idea).   I managed to convince my Provost to let me design my own major, and hooked up with two brilliant academics: Hugh Mehan and James Levin, who let me be part of a study to conduct classroom discussion via email.   This was circa 1978, but our university was on the ARPANet, and consequently we had networked computers and email.   So I had an early taste of networking capabilities and it was seen as just part of the infrastructure.

After working in the real world for a couple of years (designing educational computer games), where I got a taste of PLATO (another networked environment), I went back to grad school, where we again had networks with email, and sometime during that period I discovered UseNet, a sort of topic-based discussion board, and became an active user.   (This was before we had any idea this would be stored forever and become searchable, and movie reviews, recipes, and other such stuff I wrote back then can still be found!)   It was a great way to get ask questions, share ideas, follow certain people.

So, when I moved to UNSW for an academic position following my postdoc, I’d met some Aussie surfers online before I went, and hooked up with them for some surf sessions when I got there.   It was during that period that the web came out, following on initiatives like WAIS and Gopher that provided ways to store and find information on line.

The point is, when the HTTP protocol emerged, it wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d been immersed in a distributed digital information environment for years, and consequently one new protocol didn’t seem like that big a deal.   So in a sense I really missed the sea-change that so many people felt, and pretty naturally took advantage of creating web pages, sites, and then online content.

One big change for me, however, accompanied a subsequent development, the CGI protocol.   A student and I had developed a learning game for the Children’s Welfare Agency, and it was successfully distributed on floppy disks.   When I found out about the CGI protocol, I realized this would allow maintaining (game) state, and that we could then play games on the internet.   I had another student project port the game to the web.   It may be old-fashioned now, but I’m thrilled that it still works, 15 years later!

Since then, the web has both been a source of employment, as a channel for designing learning solutions, and the more common infrastructure for life that others have discovered (info, commerce, collaboration).   Along the way, in addition to the game, I’ve developed online conferences (back in 1996), an online learning competition (1997) streamlined online course (circa 1998), and an adaptive learning engine (1999-2000), all ahead of their time (for better and worse :).   And the innovation continues.

How has the Web changed business and society? Here I don’t have much to say in addition to what’s been written by many. It’s provided an opportunity for information to reach more people, flattening hierarchies, breaking up information monopolies, and serving as a source for democratization.

Businesses have been able to dis-intermediate the market, cutting out middle-men.   Internally, it has been possible for organizations to flatten the hierarchy, and work more effectively while distributed.   Externally, companies are able to have richer dialogs with their customers and partners.   It’s been less easy for companies to control information, as well, as the Cluetrain Manifesto and the 95 theses has alerted us to.

It’s also created new businesses and business models.   Web 1.0, producer generated content, had some impact, and I’ve argued that Web 2.0 is about user-generated content, has created new opportunities.   Web 3.0 will be even more interesting, with capabilities of delivering custom information and capabilities.   Which leads me to the last question:

What do you think the Web will look like in twenty years? I really think that the web will have become transparent. For most of us, the information access capabilities will be transparent: so ubiquitous we take it for granted.   There just will be information wherever and whenever you want it.   We’ll be surrounded by clouds that follow us that define who we are and where we’re at both physically, chronologically, and metaphorically, so that information will be available on demand in whatever ways we want.

From the production side, we’ll be creating information by our actions that will be aggregated and mined for useful ways to serve us.   We’ll have new models of learning that integrate across technologies and space to develop us in meaningful ways to empower us to achieve the goal we want.   And, most likely and unfortunately, there will be information to continue to try to sway us to do things that others would prefer we do.   I would hope, however, that we’re moving in a positive direction where we slow down our progress to the point we can make sure we’re bringing everybody along.

The opportunities are huge and potentially transformative, we just have to marshal the social will.

Finally, I’m supposed to tag two people to continue this chain letter.   My colleague Jay Cross has talked before about how the internet changed his life and it’s a great story, so I’ll suborn him here.   I’ll also ping another colleague who you should know about, Jim Schuyler, who shared several of the journeys I mentioned above.