Learnlets

Secondary

Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Proliferating Portals

by 2 Comments

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?

iLust? Changing the game

by 5 Comments

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?

What does the 20th year of the web mean?

by 2 Comments

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.

Predictions for 2010

by 4 Comments

eLearning Mag publishes short predictions for the year from a variety of elearning folks, and I thought I’d share and elaborate on what I put in:

I‘m hoping this will be the ‘year of the breakthrough‘.   Several technologies are poised to cross the chasm: social tools, mobile technologies, and virtual worlds.   Each has reached critical mass in being realistically deployable, and offers real benefits.   And each complements a desired organizational breakthrough, recognizing the broader role of learning not just in execution, but in problem-solving, innovation, and more.   I expect to see more inspired uses of technology to break out of the ‘course‘ mentality and start facilitating performance more broadly, as organizational structures move learning from ‘nice to have‘ to core infrastructure.

While I don’t know that these technologies will actually cross over (I’m notoriously optimistic), they’re pretty much ready to be:

  • Social I’ve mentioned plenty before, and everyone and their brother is either adding social learning capabilities to their suites, or creating a social learning tool company. And there are lots of open source solutions.
  • Mobile has similarly really hit the mainstream, with both reasonable and cheap (read: free) ways to develop mobile apps (cf Richard Clark & my presentation at the last DevLearn), and a wide variety of opportunities. The devices are out there!
  • Virtual worlds are a little bit more still in flux (while Linden Labs’ Second Life is going corporate as well, some of the other corporate-focused players are in some upheaval), but the value proposition is clear, and there are still plenty of opportunities.   The barriers are coming down rapidly.

Each has available technologies, best principles established and emerging, and real successes.   Given that there will be books on each coming this year (including mine ;), I really do think the time is nigh.   And, each is a component of a broader approach to learning, one that I’ve been advocating for organizations.

I’m hoping that organizations will start taking a more serious approach to a broad picture of learning.   The need in organizations is for learning to not be an add-on, isolated,   but instead to be part of the infrastructure.   We are at at a stage now where learning has to go faster than taking away, defining, designing, developing, and then delivering can accommodate.   The need is for learning to break out of the ‘event’ model, and start becoming more timely, more context-sensitive, and more collaborative.   Organizations will need their people to produce new answers on a continual basis.

I’m hoping that organizations will ‘get’ the necessary transition, and take the necessary steps.   As Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”.   I’m hoping we can invent the future, together.   We need the breakthrough, so let’s get going!

Content Models and Mobile Delivery

by 1 Comment

On Friday, I had the pleasure of a conversation of Kris Rockwell, CEO of Hybrid Learning for my in-process mobile learning book. I’d sought him out because of how he was developing mobile.   Using content models to separate out the content from how it gets rendered for display, he’s creating more flexibility across devices. This combines two of my passions, and is part of a performance ecosystem strategy.

Hybrid uses DITA, a standard for wrapping definition around content, to develop their content.   He presented powerful arguments to use this open source topic-based approach.   For one, being open source, you’re not locked in to a proprietary format, yet backed by IBM it’s well supported.   Second, it’s lightweight, compared to say S1000D (which I hadn’t heard of). And, of course, it’s portable across systems, meaning your solution doesn’t die even if your vendor does!

The use of a specification for such description around the content being developed is something I argue for regardless of mobile delivery or not.   When you wrap more rigor, and more semantic granularity around your development process, you’re well on your way to an organized content governance process.   For instance, if you design into a template even for the quick one-off requests that often come through the door in learning units, you are more likely to be able to reuse that content elsewhere, and, conversely, draw upon available content to shorten the development time. Done properly, the if you update the source one place, the changes should propagate throughout the relevant content!     There are lots of cost efficiencies being found in documentation with this approach, and it should percolate into elearning as well.

What Kris is also finding, however, is a real advantage in content portability   across mobile devices. Content so developed can easily be re-rendered for different devices, if they don’t already have the capability to hand.   He argues convincingly that designing for a device is a bad approach, and designing for device-independent delivery gives you the power not only to hit more platforms but also more flexibility for new platforms that emerge.   In short, your content development costs are amortized across more delivery options and ‘future-proofed’.

There was a lot more of interest in the conversation, including layered exploration (a “drill down” navigation style) and the potential for ordinary cell phones (dumbphones) to be viable delivers of instruction.   But that’s a topic for another day.   The take home for today, however, is think content models as well as mobile.

Social and Semantic Web

by 2 Comments

Yesterday I attended the Social Web incubator Bar Camp of the W3C, focusing on issues in web support for social media.   It was a small group, overall, but an interesting group, including folks keen on issues like technical underpinnings (discussion of FOAF, RDF, etc), and folks with an interest in more applied topics like enterprise, health, and journalism.

The issue on the table is what sorts of standards might be necessary or desirable to support social networking on the web in interoperable ways.   One statement that resonated was a comparison between the social web and social networks as being analogous to open space versus silos.   As a general rule, if someone can lock you into their proprietary approach, you are subject to their whims.   If, instead, there are open standards, you’re free to approach things in different ways. For example, email took off once one email standard took hold and allowed different systems to interoperate.   On the other hand, proprietary standards may provide the capital and motivation necessary to invest in the development of advanced features (e.g. the ability of Linden Labs to continue to expand Second Life capabilities as they grabbed market share).

The internet as an open standard (e.g.TCP/IP) has allowed for the development of other standards on top.   If not for the http standard, we wouldn’t have have the world wide web.   However, continued development is needed to meet new needs.   So, for example the Salmon project was represented, which is trying to make a mechanism whereby any   comment on a piece of web content, regardless of location and tool (e.g. blogging about someone’s Flickr picture) could be aggregated back to the original content to maintain the discussion.

This can be real propeller-head stuff, e.g. it was admitted that RDF’s uptake has been hampered by a difficult syntax.   Even Sir Tim Berners-Lee, responsible for the http protocol, admits that the // in the protocol isn’t necessary, and regrets it.   I no longer can get down in the weeds, but fortunately understand it well enough conceptually to talk intelligently about the requirements and see the opportunities.

And opportunities there are.   The next generation, I believe, so-called web 3.0, is when we move to system-generated content.   The discussions that occurred on pulling together useful information to the benefit of organizations, like adding valuable information as a response to your searches and discussions.   Rules operating on data by description has powerful capabilities, e.g. the way Amazon provides mass customization.   There are entailments, of course; taxonomies and ontologies need governance as do other content activities.

Naturally, some of it was more approachable than the geek speak, such as the fact that social engineering was as important as semantic engineering, for example that clever interface design can mitigate getting users to tag content.   Similarly, problems that can arise from bad behavior may be better solved as cultural issues rather than technical ones.

The folks there were fabulously knowledge, for example a post-meeting request for ontologies around project management and pharmaceuticals were richly answered.   While much of this stuff is still in development, the opportunities are coming, and having the necessary understanding on hand to capitalize on it is important.   Note that these people are working to make this stuff work for all of us.   Truly valuable and much to be appreciated.

My recommendation is to be aware of the possibilities and requirements. While you are likely not quite ready to take advantage of it (and there are already opportunities, seriously), you don’t want to do anything that would subsequently make the opportunities harder to capitalize on.   So look into your content data engineering from a semantic point of view as well, and prepare for some truly awesome capabilities.

Presenting in a networked age

by 2 Comments

The Learning Circuit’s Big Question this month has to do with the increasing prevalence of internet access during presentations.   The context is that during presentations it’s certainly possible that your audience is multi-tasking, and the question is; what are the implications?   In live presentations, the increasing prevalence of wi-fi or phone data means laptops and/or smartphones can be online, and in virtual ones there’s typically a number of other applications available at the same time.

The audience can be doing things related to the presentation, like live-blogging it, tweeting it, or taking notes (I’ve been known to mindmap a keynote a time or two).   They could even be looking up words or phrases mentioned by the speaker, or the speaker’s bio, or related material.   Alternatively, they can be doing other things, like checking email, surfing the web, or other, unrelated, activities.   Particularly in online presentations, there could   actually be live chatting going on in a side-channel.

Are these activities valuable to the listener? Are they valuable to the presenter?   Certainly, note taking is (though it doesn’t take connectivity).   There’re results on this, particularly if you’re re-representing the material in different ways (mind maps, or paraphrasing).   Blogging is, effectively, note-taking so should be valuable too, and tweeting may also be valuable (any studies?   Research topic!).   Certainly looking up things you don’t know so you process the rest of the material could also be valuable if it doesn’t take too long.   And the reprocessing and seeing others’ thoughts from chat could be valuable.   Even playing solitaire can be an advantage to listening, if you’re taking up some extra cognitive cycles that might otherwise lead you off into related thoughts but away from the presentation (likely only true if it’s just audio).

On the other hand, it might also add an intrusive overhead. Multi-tasking has been shown to provide a performance decrement.   Related activities help, but unrelated activities will hinder the ability to process. It may be that you can get so caught up in the chat, or the search to comprehend a term, that you lose the thread of the discussion.   And if it’s complex, the cognitive overhead might prevent you from actually being unable to make the necessary links.   Certainly the tasks that aren’t content related are an intrusion.

So what’s to do?   There are possible actions on both the part of the presenter/organizer, and on the part of the audience. For the audience, it’s got to be a personal responsibility to know how you learn best, and take appropriate steps. If note-taking helps you focus and elaborate, do so.   If tweeting, blogging, or mind-mapping does so, rock on.   If you really need to focus: put away the laptop and phone and focus!   It’s for your benefit!   Really, the same is for students.   Now, individuals may not be as self-aware as we may desire, but that’s a separate topic that needs to be taken care of in the appropriate context.

For the presenters or organizers, as the most onerous step they could prevent wi-fi access.   However, increasingly others are benefitting from the tweets from conferences and the blogging as well.   I think that’s overly draconian, an implicit sign of distrust.   If the presentation doesn’t match the audience interests, they should be able to vote with their feet or their minds.   As I told a medical school faculty years ago, you can’t force them to attend, taking away the internet might make them resort to doodling or daydreaming but while you can lead a learner to learning you can’t make them think.   It’s up to the presenter to present relevant material in an engaging manner.

As a presenter, you can actually use these channels to your advantage.   As a webinar presenter, I like having a live chat tool.   I monitor it, and use it to ask questions. In the last presentation I gave, it was awkward when a moderator had to read me the questions from the audience, and I couldn’t ask a general question an just survey the stream.     I realize it’s difficult to both present and monitor a chat stream, and not all presenters can do it, so having a moderator can be a benefit. But stifling that flow of discussion could be a bane to those who learn better that way.

I haven’t had a tweet stream monitor in a live presentation yet, and it could be harder to pay attention to it, so again a moderator could help.   In smaller sessions you can have interaction with the audience, but in larger presentations, it might take someone to follow it and summarize, though having a monitor that the presenter could see easily could also work.

However, it seems to me that you can’t force people to pay attention with or without technology, providing a rich suite of ways for people to process the information is valuable, and it can be a valuable source of feedback during the presentation.

Which leads to the new skills: for audiences, to know how you best process presentations and take responsibility for getting the most out of it; for presenters to improve their presentation skills to ensure value to the audience and support richer forms of interaction with the audiences; for moderators to track and summarize audience feedback in various forms; and for organizers to support these new channels.

There’s no point in trying to stifle technology affordances, the real key is to take advantage of them. If we have to learn, adjust, and accommodate, it’d be awful boring otherwise!   :)

Virtual Worlds #lrnchat

by 4 Comments

In last night’s #lrnchat, the topic was virtual worlds (VWs).   This was largely because several of the organizers had recently attended one or another of the SRI/ADL meetings on the topic, but also because one of the organizers (@KoreenOlbrish) is majorly active in the business of virtual worlds for learning through her company Tandem Learning.   It was a lively session, as always.

The first question to be addressed was whether virtual worlds had been over or underhyped.   The question isn’t one or the other, of course.   Some felt underhyped, as there’s great potential. Others thought they’d been overhyped, as there’s lots of noise, but few real examples.   Both are true, of course.   Everyone pretty much derided the presentation of powerpoints in Second Life, however (and rightly so!).

The second question explored when and where virtual worlds make sense.   Others echoed my prevailing view that VW’s are best for inherently 3D and social environments.   Some interesting nuances came in exploring the thought that that 3D doesn’t have to be our scale, but we can do micro or macro 3D explorations as well, and not just distance, but also time. Imagine exploring a slowed down, expanded version of a chemical reaction with an expert chemist!   Another good idea was for contextualized role plays.   Have to agree with that one.

Barriers were explored, and of course value propositions and technical issues ruled the day. Making the case is one problem (a Forrester report was cited that says enterprises do not yet get VWs), and the technical (and cognitive) overhead is another.   I wasn’t the only one who mentioned standards.

Another interesting challenge was the lack of experience in designing learning in such environments.   It’s still new days, I’ll suggest, and a lot of what’s being done is reproductions of other activities in the new environment (the classic problem: initial uses of new technology mirror old technology).   I suggested that we’ve principles (what good learning is and what VW affordances are) that should guide us to new applications without having to have that ‘reproduction’ stage.

I should note that having principles does not preclude new opportunities coming from experimentation, and I laud such initiatives.   I’ve opined before that it’s an extension of the principles from Engaging Learning combined with social learning, both areas I’ve experience in, so I’m hoping to find a chance to really get into it, too.

The third question explored what lessons can be learned from social media to enhance appropriate adoption of VWs.   Comments included that they needed to be more accessible and reliable, that they’ll take nurturing, and that they’ll have to be affordable.

As always, the lrnchat was lively, fun, and informative.   If you haven’t tried one, I encourage to at least take it for a trial run. It’s not for everyone, but some admitted to it being an addiction! ;)   You can find out more at the #lrnchat site.

For those who are interested in more about VWs, I want to mention that there will be a virtual world event here in Northern California September 23-24, the 3D Training, Learning, & Collaboration conference.   In addition to Koreen, people like Eilif Trondsen, & Tony O’Driscoll (who has a forthcoming book with Karl Kapp on VW learning) will be speaking,   and companies like IBM and ThinkBalm are represented, so it should be a good thing. I hope to go (and pointing to it may make that happen, full disclaimer :).   If you go, let me know!

Standards and success

by Leave a Comment

Apparently, Google has recently opined that the future of mobile is web standards.   While this is wonderfully vindicating, I think there’s something more important going on here, as it plays out for a broader spectrum than just mobile.

I’ve been reflecting on the benefits that standards have provided.   What worked for networks was the standardization on TCP/IP as a protocol for packet transmission.   What worked for email was standardization on the SMTP protocol.   HTTP standardization has been good for the web, where it’s been implemented properly! What’s been a barrier are inconsistent implementations of web standards, like Microsoft’s non-standard versions of HTML for browsers and Java.

The source of the standard may be by committee, or by the originator.   Microsoft’s done well for itself with the Office suite of applications, and by opening up the XML version, they’re benefiting while not doing harm.   They own the space, and everyone has to at least read and write their format to have any credibility. While IMS & IEEE held meetings to get learning content standards nailed down, ADL just put their foot down with SCORM (and US Defense is a big foot), and it pretty much got everyone’s attention.   But it’s having standards that matters.   The fact that Blu-ray finally won the battle has really opened up the market for high definition video!

On the other hand, keeping proprietary standards has hindered development.   At the recent VW talks hosted by SRI, one of the topics was the inability to transfer a character between platforms.   That’s good for the providers, but bad for the development of the field.   Eventually, one format will emerge, but it may take committees, or it may be that someone like Linden Labs will own the space sufficiently that everyone will lock into a format they provide. Until then, any investment has trouble being leveraged in a longer term picture, as the companies you go with may not survive!   There’s an old saying about how wonderful standards are because there are so many of them.   The problem is when they’re around the same thing!   I was regaling a colleague with the time I smoked (er, caused to burn up, not lighting up!) an interface card by trying to connect two computers to exchange data. One manufacturer had, contrary to the standard, decided to put 12 volts on a particular pin!

And, unfortunately, in the mobile space, the major providers here in the US want to lock you into their walled garden, as opposed to, say, Europe, where all the phones have pretty much the same abilities to access data.   This has been a barrier to development of services.   The web is increasingly powerful, with HTML5, and so while some things won’t work, web-based applications are defaulting to the lingua franca for not just content exchange but interactive activities.   The US is embarrassingly behind, despite the leading platforms (iPhone, Pre, etc).

In one sense this is sad that we can’t do better, but at least it’s good to have the web as a fallback now.   We can make progress when it doesn’t matter what device, or OS, you’re using, as long as you can connect.   The real news is that there is a lingua franca for mobile that you can use, so really there aren’t any reasons to hold off any longer.   Ellen Wagner sees a tipping point, and I’m pleased to agree.   There may be barriers for enterprise adoption, but as I frequently say: it’s   not the technology, the barriers are between our ears (and maybe our pocketbooks :).

Update: forgot my own punchline.   Standards need to be, or at least become, open and extensible for real progress to be made.   When others can leverage, the greatest innovations can occur.

Standards are hard work, but the benefits for progress are huge.   This holds true in your organization, as well.   Are you paying attention to standards you should be using, and what you should standardize yourself?

Mining Social Media

by Leave a Comment

One of the proposed benefits of social media is the capture of knowledge that’s shared, taking the tacit and making it explicit.   But really, how do we do this?   I think we need to separate out the real from the ideal.

The underlying premise is that we have an enlightened organization that’s empowering collaboration, communication, problem-solving, innovation, etc (what I’m beginning to term ‘inspiration’ in all senses of the word) by providing a social media infrastructure, learning scaffolding, and a supportive culture.   Now, all these people are sharing, but are we, and can we be, leveraging that knowledge?

The obvious first answer is that by sharing it with others, it’s being leveraged.   If information is shared with the relevant people, it’s been captured for organizational use by being spread appropriately.   That’s great, and far too few organizations are facilitating this in a systematic way.   However, I’m always looking for the optimal outcome: not just the best that is seen, but the best that can be. So how can we go further?

The typical response is using data mining that focuses on semantic content: systematically parsing the discussions, and using powerful semantic tools to attempt to capture, characterize, and leverage information systemically. (Hmm, you could map out the knowledge propositions, and link them into coherent chains and then track those over time to see significant changes, even regularly re-sort to see if different perspectives are changing…oh, sorry, got carried away, enough adaptive system designing :).

In terms of social media systems, while there are analytics available, semantics are not part of it, as far as I can see.   Further, I searched on social media mining, and found out that the first international workshop will be happening in November, but it’s not happened yet. There’s an interesting PhD thesis on the topic from UMaryland, but it’s focused on blogs and recommendations. In other words, it’s not ready for prime time.

The point is, that machine learning and knowledge mining mechanisms are in our future, but not our present.   Don’t get me wrong, there are huge possibilities and opportunities here, but they’re a ways off.   So, are we back to the best that can be?   I want to suggest one other possibility.   The systemic mechanisms are nice because, set up properly, they run regardless, but there’s another approach, and that’s human processing.   For all the advances in technology, our brains are still pretty much the most practical semantic pattern matching engines going.   So how would that work?

Well, let’s go back to the role that learning professionals play. We’ve already looked at how they could change as learning units take over responsibility for the broader picture of learning in the organization.   Learning professionals need to be nurturing social learning, and that means being in there, monitoring discussions for opportunities to draw out other members, spark useful feedback, develop skills, and more.

Well, they also can and should be looking for outcomes that could be redesigned/redeveloped/reproduced for broader dissemination.   They should be monitoring what’s happening and looking for information that’s worth culling out and distilling into something that’ll really bring out the impact of that information. Turning information into knowledge and even wisdom!

Yes, that’s a greater responsibility (though it’s also fun; you shouldn’t be in the learning space if you don’t love learning!).   It’s a new skill set, but I’ve already argued that.   The world’s changing, and the status quo won’t last long anyway.   So, while you can just allow and hope that individuals will perceive the value of the information created, and even facilitate by encouraging people to participate in all the relevant communities (which will likely cross role, product/service, and more), there’s a step further that’s to the benefit of the organization and the learners.

We’ll steadily build support for that process, but it will be facilitated, and advanced, by individual practice to complement, supplement, and inform the mechanistic approaches.   Don’t ignore this role; plan for it, prepare for it, and skill for it.   Responsibility for recognizing should be shared, so that the individuals in the network are also doing it (for example, retweeting valuable information), and that’s a learning skill that should be developed.

Here’s hoping you find this valuable!