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Cyberlearning (ahem)

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A high-powered panel assembled by the NSF has reported on The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.  With people like Christine Borgman (Chair), Ken Koedinger, Marcia Linn, and Roy Pea (to name just the ones I’ve met), you’d expect some pretty clear thinking.  (So where did they get the term ‘cyberlearning’?  Yuck!)

Defining cyberlearning as “the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning”, they’re obviously onto the right stuff.  I couldn’t agree more about the potential for these technologies to transform learning.  As I’ve mentioned before, the technology is no longer the barrier, it’s now our imagination and conviction.  And now that we can do anything we want, when we go back and look at most formal learning, we realize it’s based on an outdated model.

Without having read the full report, let alone reporting on it here, I did have some thoughts on their top-level recommendations, that I thought I’d recite:

1. Help build a vibrant cyberlearning field by promoting cross-disciplinary communites of cyberlearning researchers and practitioners

Regardless of label, working at this in an interdisciplinary way is absolutely the way to go.  The conceptual foundations for the categories/silos are crumbling, so too should the barriers.  I realize this is the NSF, but I hope that they’d also reach out to the Dept of Ed, corporations, NFPs, etc.  Maybe even independent consultants?  :)

2. Instill a “platform perspective” – shared interoperable designs of hardware, software, and services – into NSF’s cyberlearning activities

This is insightful.  Using their resources to facilitate, whether through grants or even requirements for projects, interoperability and (the other meaning of) web 2.0 ‘software as a service’ approach could pay off in a big way.  Society has a vested interest in an open playing field.

3. Emphasize the transformative power of information and communications technology for learning, from K to grey

I love the phrase “K to grey”; far better than ‘cradle to grave’, ‘womb to tomb’, or anything else I’ve heard.  And I like the emphasis on going beyond formal and institutional learning.  Make those skills part of the infrastructure!  I presume they mean those terms inclusively, that is it could start before K, (in some small ways only, not bashing kids onto computers, but allowing digital tech to be part of the environment), and continue after you’re grey (or I’m in big trouble!).

And it’s more.  They talk about interaction with visualizations and data, etc, but I want to also talk about bridging formal and informal, moving to an apprenticeship model with greater ways for people to interact around topics, and create communities.  They emphasize teachers, but I want to suggest that, increasingly, we’re all teachers, as well as learners.

4. Adopt programs and policies to promote open educational resources

This, to me, is really a revisitation of the ‘platform’ proposal as well.  Open API’s, open source, and open education.  We all stand to benefit, I reckon.  They’re talking about materials generated with NSF funds, but even materials used as part of NSF projects should err on the side of open materials.

5. Take responsibility for sustaining NSF-sponsored cyberlearning innovations

This last one seems like a ‘given’, but it’s really about saying that the output of NSF projects should have maintenance and extension beyond the project finish.  I like this; for NSF SBIR grants (I reviewed them a couple of times) you’re supposed to have a business plan; even pure research grants could have ‘put into action’ components in the proposal.

There are lots more specific recommendations, good ones, in the report.  It’s a bit biased towards formal education, but still is visionary.  This is a useful time to push initiatives like this, and I hope the report leads to the interdisciplinary efforts called for.

While I realize we’ve more pressing immediate concerns that might govern our near-term ‘man on the moon’ project, I still think a full K12 curriculum online would be a really cool project.  The only limits are now ‘between our ears’ as my friend Carl used to say.  If we can do anything, what will we do?

Formal learning & social networking

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After hearing Mark Oehlert and Brent Schlenker do such a great job on eLearning 2.0 at the Guild’s Summer Seminar, I got my own chance to talk about it to a corporate group, but with a twist.  Much of elearning 2.0 is about informal learning, but the organization was moving to using social networking tools to scaffold their move from face-to-face to more online learning.  So I was asked to talk about social networking and formal learning.

I started from the informal picture, however, both to introduce the 2.0 tools (their environment in particular had blogs, feeds, wikis, discussion boards, portals, and profiles), and to talk about some case studies of successes.  I led to the point that the informal participation has big upside potential, but you can’t spring it on them when they move beyond novice stage, and that wrapping it around the formal learning is a vehicle to help them become comfortable with the tools.  That is, the first reason to use social networking around formal learning is to make it part of the repertoire of the community.

I then segued to my second point, which is that social networking tools are better formal learning. To help make learning ‘stick’, to achieve our goals of retention and transfer, I have previously suggested that there are several activities that accomplish the memory elaboration, specifically connecting it to personal experience, to exercise and extend the conceptualization, and to apply the concepts to specific tasks.  Each of these can be accomplished well through social networking tools.

For example, blogs are really personal (or group) journals, and it’s easy to have a learning task to reflect a couple of times a week (for example) on what the current course means to you personally. It can be to explain things observed in the past, how it applies to current situations, or how it will better prepare people for the future.  It’s about re-activating and re-processing the information (Thiagi‘s exercises, for instance, are great at getting people to re-process information), but here adding in that connection with pre-existing personal context.  Of course, reading other learner’s blog posts, and commenting, can extend the value of the individual post.

Discussion boards are a great way to support extending conceptualizations.  Learners can be asked to post a response to a thought question (or even to have to create one), and comment constructively on someone else’s post. Well-written questions can ask learners to rethink the information in ways that the lecture and examples didn’t cover.   The point is to reprocess and elaborate the information.  Critically reflecting on another’s elaboration requires integrating their thinking with your own, for a real challenge in coming to grips with how they’ve interpreted it (and opportunity to refine one’s own understanding).

While simulations may be the ultimate learning application environment, another valuable tool are group assignments.  Having the learners respond to a challenge where, in teams, they create some written output collaboratively on a wiki is a great chance for them to have to express their understandings.   In doing so, by applying the concept to a context, they need to a shared understanding of the concept, which fosters greater comprehension.

Profiles, as well, can help individuals flesh out information about their fellow learners, and make more meaningful connections (as well as potentially track down useful mentors).  While not as rich as face to face interpersonal interaction, adding personal details helps extend their persona in ways that bring technology-mediated interaction closer to that personal exchange.

These few examples suggest how social networking not only facilitates informal learning, but can and should play a role in formal learning, for the sake of both formal and informal learning.  I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think about when formal learning shouldn’t include a social aspect (except the situation of ‘critical mass’ in totally asynchronous learning).

I’m still not convinced there’s an LMS that integrates social networking tools in a way that makes a smooth segue from formal to informal, though I know Mzinga’s making a stab at it.  You want to move to loose coupling, yet you want seamless integration.  Not sure what the reconciliation is of these.  Your thoughts?

eLearning 3.0

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In preparing a presentation for an organization on the learning value of Web 2.0, I realized that the development I’m looking forward to is web 3.0 and the learning possibilities.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m very enthusiastic over the 2.0 learning opportunities, as I’ve gotten to know them.  It’s just that the work I was doing years ago now has the technology infrastructure to be brought to life in a viable and ubiquitous way.  What it means is personalized learning wrapped around your life, instead of leaving your day-to-day life to attend an ‘event’ or self-directed searching.

Web 3.0 and beyond

The key here starts with the next generation of the web, the semantic Web.  What this is about, to me, is the use of tags and meta-data to start adding meaning to the information out there.  To date, we’ve separated form from content, but the machine can’t operate on the data independently.  If we had semantics, meaning, through tags and meta-data, the system can start trolling for content. And, of course, we can start auto-tagging based upon content and generation as well as making it part of our habits (e.g. as I try to remember to categorize my blog posts).  The point is, with this information, we can start connecting things.  This isn’t just about search, but about pro-active and opportunistic information delivery, and moving to the distributed learning model I’ve talked about before.

A second opportunity is Web 3.0’s service-oriented architectures (SOA), or rather web-oriented architectures (WOA).  This is where capabilities are separated out into separate network-delivered services with API’s that anyone can tap if they have the proper codes (and authority).  What this does is let you build applications in a light-weight way, cobbling together the capabilities you need into the services you want.

What does this mean for learning?  It means that you can tag learning content and make it available.  Then you can have a system that looks at your learning goals, and your current activity (through a variety of context-sensitive mechanisms), and pull in a small tidbit opportunistically, or connect you with just the right person afterward.  The point is to move from macro courses to micro-learns, where you might be prepped right before an important task, supported in the middle of it, and provided reflection afterwards.  So your performance situations become learning situations.

To do this effectively means linking the meaning of your current activity with the status of your learning goals, and putting together an effective delivery mechanism depending on your technology infrastructure, preferences, etc.  The goal is to make a system that’s like having a personal mentor, but much more affordably.

Now, don’t get me wrong. While this is doable, it’s quite far off, and won’t be easy.  It depends on several developments, such some reasonable work on standardizing on terminology (or a successful implementation of folksonomies) for both content and tasks (and/or a very good mapping process).  It’ll also require some business model that makes it viable for participation on all parties.  Finally, it’ll require some tuning to make a user experience that’s effective without being intrusive.  Still, I think it’s a great future, and would love to have a well-implemented version coaching me!  How about you?

Money and trust

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I found out another site was aggregating my, and other’s, blogs, indicating that they had the best folks in knowledge management.  Flattered as I was, I asked that my blog be taken off their roles.  Let me explain why.

First, I hadn’t been asked. I think it’s only fair to ask for the right to copy someone else’s work (I recall the time Jay and I found a white paper we’d jointly written being given away as an article in a university consortium’s newsletter!).  Let the author know why you’re doing it, and what the proposal is for them (publicity, cash, what have you).  Many would be happy to be included in a list, but I want to opt-in, not opt-out.  I wouldn’t even have found out if WordPress (my blog software) didn’t track references to the blog as comments.

I note that the indication of who the posts are from is hard to find.  There’s a link to the original, to be fair, but otherwise there’s no list of who’s included in this list.  Where’s the blogroll?  Who is aggregated there?

Another concern is that there’s no indication of *who* is behind this.  From an authenticity and trust factor, I like to know who’s behind a site.  I get mighty uncomfortable when I find site for organizations and there’s no human name to be found.  Why are they hiding it?  One of the criteria in being web-literate is knowing not only the authorial voice (who you’re listening to), but also editorial voice, that is, who’s doing the selecting, who “approved this message”.

However, worst of all was the advertising all around the page.  Google ads to the left and right, Amazon ads in the body!  So, if people go to that site, this (unknown) person’s making money.  And I don’t mind people making money, but they better add value.  That’s why I recently went through the trouble of getting a Creative Commons license for my site.  I want attribution, and I don’t want anyone making money off of my work (at least, if I’m not :).  I don’t have a thing against ads on blogs or sites, if they’re making a contribution, e.g. an aggregation, adding value by being selective, communicating who it is and why they should be trusted.

So I opted out.  I’m willing to be wrong, but frankly this didn’t strike me as a fair relationship.  And a lesson in work literacy.  So, am I too uptight?  Or was this a reasonable decision? (And fair warning to my fellow bloggers.)

Informal budget ratio <> 80/20?

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Donald Clark raises an issue on his blog about confounding informal with Web 2.0, and the point I found interesting is his query about the 80/20 in/formal learning metrics.  He queries the statistics, and the issue of supporting informal.  I took it (and no blame to him if I misconstrue) to be an issue of should we match our budgets to that ration.  I commented:

Interesting point, and right in many respects. The point of the 80/20 (or 75/25) is to help people realize that they’re not supporting the 80, rather than to totally match the investment. The formal learning probably takes more resources, over time, as there’s more development required. However, how much have we invested in the informal? Typically, bugger all. My take, at least, is that there needs to be some up-front investment in the informal, but then it (should) become self-perpetuating (with the usual maintenance/upgrade/review costs).

The way I see it, as you broaden your responsibility from just training to support performance, eCommunity, mobile, etc (eCommunity being the social component of web 2.0, and a major component of informal), you need to systematically support informal.  Most of the time, it’s providing resources and an infrastructure for informal learning to flourish (the culture is the hardest part).  It’s not as resource-intensive as the process of getting learners from novice to practitioner (except the initial investment in infrastructure and boot-stratpping).

So, to me, it’s about considering informal, making a systematic plan for supporting, it, and launching it, while continuing to develop the necessary formal support for learning.  The latter will change as we develop capable learners (assuming you’re putting meta-learning in, and you should be), but there will be a role for each, but that doesn’t mean that the support requirements are a one-to-one match.  At least, that’s how I see it.  What say you?

Performance Support & Performance Ecosystem

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Jay Cross has an eloquent post talking about the history of Performance Support, ending of course calling for considering the learnscape. Tony Karrer comments on it in his own post looking at performance support and learning technology.

Interestingly, what Jay doesn’t really cover in his history is that Gloria came up with Performance Support to cover up bad interface design.  The systems were monolithic and essentially impermeable to change, so she wrapped a solution around it.  The interaction design field was a little put out about the whole performance support system notion, saying it was really just good interface design. And there’s still too little of that, sad to say (I used to teach interaction design, and it’s a component of the performance ecosystem solution).

What Jay points out, however, is that the learning designer needs to take responsibility for more than just courses, and it’s ok if information is the solution (“‘Information is not instruction.’ …if information gets the job done, it doesn’t matter whether it’s instruction”).

However, Jay starts lumping all of the web 2.0 tools into performance support, which is where Tony gets curious.  He thinks some of the tools fall more into the knowledge management category, but admits he may be getting definitional.  He is in agreement about the need to look at the larger picture and consider all these tools as playing a role in meeting ePerformance, a term he and I agree upon.

Jay cites Marc Rosenberg, and Marc certainly has been calling for us to include knowledge management, performance support, and eCommunity as part of our tools to go beyond eLearning.  Which is where we’re all in agreement.  Good reading, good thoughts, good work.

Hard to cross a chasm with baby steps

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As I indicated, I’m experimenting with Twitter (@Quinnovator).  I’m following a number of people who point to interesting things or make interesting observations.  The benefits I’m finding with Twitter, I note, are random interesting thoughts that juxtapose with my own thinking, in addition to quick answers to questions.  It reminds me of Dave Owens’ long ago system DYK, that randomly gave you some unix tidbits.  It seemed to work, as many times it was irrelevant but every once in a while it was just the right thing.  Same concept as the later ‘tool tips’ you could get on starting up PowerPoint.

This particular reflection was triggered by George Siemens tweeting a response to his presentation: “we’re taking small steps” problem is, small steps=falling behind. need that big leap :).  Mark Oehlert responded with the title of this post.  And it triggered the thought that I’ve heard Jay Cross articulate, that evolution isn’t going to keep pace with the rapid rate of change. (And yes, I’m name dropping, because you too can follow thought leaders through blogs and twitter!)

On the other hand, change is hard, big change exponentially so.  What’s an organization to do?  Yet change is coming faster. One of the ways we’ve thought to address this is an opportunity we’re offering through the Cafe’, getting some high-value external input on major issues in a lightweight way, a jumpstart to out-of-the-box thinking.

What I’ve been assisting organizations to do, and this is definitely a good thing, is to start with setting a long term vision (e.g. performance ecosystem), and making organization-specific short, medium, and long term plans to get there.  However, I’m thinking that, in parallel, what’s needed is doing some ‘out of the box’ exercises where some more disruptive stuff is trialed.  Maybe a ‘tiger team‘ for communication & innovation (and yes, I’m aware of the abuse of the phrase, but in lieu of another quick way to communicate the concept…).

The point is that you can’t just daydream crossing the chasm, and you can’t rethink in increments.  Sometimes you’ve got to take a major rethink, and put it in place and learn from it.  The best advice I recall on this is that you’ve got to have some experiments going on.  A few well-thought out gambles that you’re willing to have fail.  However, it’s not random mutation, but also not intelligent design; rather a hybrid.  Taking a calculated risk.

Like trying out new technologies: the current experimental space is social networking for me, as well as the iPhone.   But you’ve got to keep pushing your personal boundaries to have the awareness for pushing the organizational ones.  So take risks and experiment yourself, and get your organization doing the same.

DevLearn ’08

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Up in the mountains, there’s lots to reflect on, little time to capture it. However, I do want to note that DevLearn is again on the horizon (November), which will include keynote, preconference sessions, concurrent sessions, and more.

I’m really looking forward to Tim O’Reilly’s keynote, as his description of Web 2.0 is fairly definitive.  I reckon I’ll again be part of the pre-conference sessions on Serious Games, er, Immersive Learning Simulations, and Mobile Learning as well.  I have a concurrent session on deeper instructional design which is stuff I really believe is fundamental yet seemingly not widespread, and fortunately has been well received in a few prior instances.

The real excitement for me is having a chance to catch up with some of the brightest folks in the business, like Tony Karrer, Will Thalheimer, Ruth Clark, Judy Brown, David Metcalf, Mark Oehlert, Brent Schenkler, Frank Nguyen, Lance Dublin, Karen Hyder, Michelle Lentz, and more, as well as the new folks I’ll meet.

The Guild’s conferences have always been a highlight of the year for me, so I hope I’ll see you there!

Future of the Book?

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Last nite was the NextNow event on the future of the book/publishing/? Jay Cross really helped by adding significant data around and input to the discussion; a very public thanks.  He’s also blogged it, with video.  We had a very diverse audience of around 30 or so; many were authors, there were CEOs & entrepeneurs, artists and musicians, noted scientists, and more. Many shared one or more of my own publishing experiences, including as author, board member of a not-for-profit that publishes, editorial board member of a journal, and, of course, as a blogger.

After introductions, which already raised many issues, Jay walked us through the history of the book (Guttenberg was an entrepreneur, the first totable book was sized to fit in saddle bags), and we talked about the pros and cons of books.  We discussed our varied experiences with publishers, and there were quite a few unhappy ones.  Then we got into the issues.

As I mentioned earlier, Jay and I had come up with a few, including editorial ‘voice’ (who’s vetting the information), interactivity, volatility, ownership, and money.  Interestingly, as the discussion continued, others emerged.  Michael Carter raised an interesting point, that we were conversing about books and publishers, and they’re not the same things, and that it was really about matching ignorance with knowledge.  He also mentioned that the current chapter and book size is arbitrary, which is something I’ve seen in textbooks.  Christine Walker mentioned how our cognition might change without the book experience.  There was considerable optimism about setting information free, which I didn’t squelch with my concern about the need for ‘filters’.

We covered the ‘collected papers’ model, where proactive instructors or good editors choose appropriate contributions to a definitive compilation (with my note that most instructors just want to choose a text, and there are compilations that are just vanity projects without a representative or definitive sampling for the topic).  We also talked about marketplaces, and Laleh Shahidi mentioned a learning object model of content, of which there’ve been several experiments (including Propagate, a system that Peter Higgs launched way back around 1998!).  One of the ideas would be to have several authors to choose from, but then you’d need ‘templates’ for topics, with agreed structure.  One of the current situations is that authors present totally different takes on subjects.

At the end, it appeared that publishing is about 4 things:

  • development: the right choice of message and author for the knowledge gap
  • production: the right choice of presentation of the information
  • marketing: the right marketing of availability to need
  • money: the business model that surrounds the first three

The interesting thing is that with the internet (and on-demand printing), the production costs have essentially hit zero. There’s clearly a role for editorial choice, but at some point everyone can publish, and we need ways to find what we want, which is really about the marketing, which was clearly where many authors (including yours truly) felt that they were let down.  We heard of an interesting experiment in viral marketing, with Amy Jussell mentioning a blog-produced book. The question is whether such an effort is replicable. Of course, there’s still the cachet that comes with having a publisher choosing.  The flip-side is tha traditional publishers still take months from final manuscript to final print.

So, no answers, but lots of interesting issues.

Future of Publishing?

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Based on a strange twist of circumstance, Jay Cross and I will be leading a discussion on the future of publishing in an online era here in the Bay Area next Monday (July 28).  He and I prepared some days ago, and came up with several issues, including who owns IP, new business models, moving from content to experience, increasing rates of change, and more.

The fact of the matter is that the day of the (non-fiction) book is at an inflection point.  That’s not to say we won’t still want to read books from time to time, at least those of us ‘of an age’ ;).  But what, where, when, and how will be our primary sources of information, moving forward?  My book cover

Certainly there are some interesting experiments going on.  On ITFORUM, Bev Ferrell and others have been citing a number of initiatives of self-publishing and open textbooks.  Certainly fodder for thought (particularly when I’m working with publishers on several projects, and have had a book published!).

We aren’t providing answers, but we’ll be with a very knowledgeable cohort and hope to work through to some interesting ideas.  If you’re in the area, and are interested, let me know and I’ll lob coordinates at you.