E- Learning and global warming

I've always thought one of the major appeals of e-learning was it's potential to make a difference environmentally. Less cars on the road, less building and construction, more time for other activities etc but recent discussion about the impact of computer use itself may be calling this into question as is indicated by this article on digg There has been a longer history of concern about energy usage from buildings and as this article from Inhabitat points out 40% of landfill is building construction waste. For a long time now I could not see the logic of people having to travel for meetings and or study but if the solution is no better than the problem what is the point? There is little sense in substituting one type of problem for another so as computers are ubiquitous now the emphasis should be shifting to energy efficiency how energy is generated. If that happens then both sets of problems are being addressed.

It's easy to add online video to your courses

It cant be much simpler than this to add video to your educational content. Flixn allows you to simply record, review, and save your content for use in your pages. It took about 5 minutes to get this together, it wasn't really that difficult at all. As for the content anyone who knows me knows I play guitar - but not much slide- except last weekend I caught Steve Edmonds absolutely ripping on slide during his show at the Crowne Plaza Terrigal -he really brought the house down with his rocking blues and Hendrix covers - he has inspired me to have a go. I thought this would be better than doing a talking head piece to the camera.

Why blog when you can Ecto?

I recently discovered and signed up for Ectoa Web 2 Learning Management System. I know Nuvvo has gone before but this looks really good. Much of the horsepower is provided by embedding Google gadgets into your page. There isn't much you cant do with this, it's free, hosted and simple to understand and work with. I cant really see why anyone would prefer to host their class content using a blog when this level of sophistication is available.

Teacher's worst nightmare or business opportunity?

For some the future must be a scary prospect their worst fears realised. This virtual newsreader project clearly shows how some of the basic show and tell aspects of vocational training could be handed off to electronic assistants.In fact they could achieve a lot more than that. Northwestern Uni Newsreader
newsreader video on youtube
The situation could be more interesting in the university lecture scenario. Here is a link to the proceeding from the recent Learning Technologies conference in Queensland Australia.
Conference keynote on the videoloinq site via mediasite
As you can see from an audience point of view considering most lectures are a one way knowledge transfer, there would not be much difference between the live experience and the presentation you can see on the screen. (By the way check out the holographic? ultra minature laptop in this presentation complete with virtual keyboard!) It is easy to imagine a scenario like those in the art community where a single painting is printed and sold using numbered copies. Perhaps this is the way teachers and lecturers can monitise the E-learning phenomenon.

Wikis that aren't geeky

I'm not really that struck with wikis perhaps its the way they look,I dont know. There are exceptions of course wikipedia is one of my favorite things on the web and this new one for global curriculum sharing Curriki also strikes a chord for it's vision of global curriculum sharing. (original link on ehub) Perhaps its when this type of site gets a critical mass happening that they become more interesting - lots of them seem pretty empty to me otherwise.

$ 5.8 million up for grabs

More than $5.8 million is being made available in 2007 for E-learning projects from the Australian Flexible Learning Framework. By far the largest amount is going to to the training of teachers (2.8 million). For more details check the website. AFLF

The big picture

Sometimes it is valuable to think beyond the commonplace and the familiar and come to grips with some of the broader issues behind phenomena like Web 2. An article on RoughType discusses the ownership issues around Web 2 in a way that is overdue in the vocational education community. Original link courtesy of new master media

Best free web 2 applications

Here is a short list of web 2 apps that I like including free office suites and file conversion.
online office suites
ajax13
think free
zoho presenter
collaboration
thinkature
dimdim
photo editing
fauxto
pikipimp
video
bubbleply
flixin
democracy
pixpo
jumpcut(online editor)
blogs
edublogs
pbwiki
file conversion
zamzar

More google mashups

Chicago crime
Bicycle trails
Secret fishing holes

Organisational climate and e-learning

I once wrote a paper on the connection between organisational climate and service quality in hotels. Obviously this has a lot of relevance to the hospitality industry. To me, at the time it was an important connection to make: the way a manager or supervisor behaved influenced the atmosphere that staff were subsequently asked to work in to such an extent that outcomes for customers and stakeholders were ultimately affected. If a manager was condescending or neurotic it was the shareholders or clients who suffered the most. But the problem was, that organisational climate itself was notoriously difficult to define. This was highlighted when one writer claimed that if researchers continued to use the same terms to mean different things climate research would “grind to a halt in an assemblage of walled in hermits each mumbling to himself in a private language that only he can understand” I think that many e-learning and change management initiatives in the vocational education sector face a similar paradox. There is so much to be gained from implementing e-learning intiatives, but, a fundamental disconnect exists between the needs of the practitioners expected to implement the concepts and incorporate them into their everyday practice and the proponents of change especially if they are not involved in day to day educational practice. Borrowing again from service management theory an essential component of long term survival is seeking out and addressing the needs of the customer, in this case the teaching cohort not in perpetuating a private language amongst the initiated. Teachers dont care if it is web 2, javascript, ajax, ruby on rails, shockwave, or rss they simply want solutions to everyday problems that are easy to manage and use in the long term. You can use just about any platform to do this as long as you make sure that what you do do is recyclible into the future. The promise of web 2 is seductive but usability is still the key to utilisation.

Ninjam and the future of online collaboration.

Ninjam is an application that allows musicians to conduct a virtual jam across the internet with no perceivable delay and at the same time recording the result of their collaboration for further post production or mixing. The user downloads a simple piece of software and either plugs their instrument into the sound card of the computer or in my case uses a microphone to record the output of their amplifier. The experience can be extraordinary, last Sunday a few taps on the drums indicated that someone had joined the server( I had forgotten I was still on there) and the other user: Robin Dean, based in Chicago, proceeded to lay down some of the finest drumming you are likely to hear anywhere. The application allows you to chat to get things coordinated and I simply complimented this fellow on the quality of his sound and we were able to talk. He pointed me to his website and as it turns out he is a conservatorium graduate and drummer,composer with two excellent jazz albums under his belt and who has also shared the stage with some very very fine musicians including the legendary Billy Cobham - I thought he sounded really good! For a keen amateur musician like me to have an experience like that sitting in my basement studio at home on a cold Sunday afternoon is extraordinary. I can think of no other way that I could have had the chance to pick up the guitar with a player like that, nor would I, if I had realised his calibre beforehand.

All that aside Ninjam still points to some of the ways that the internet is being transformed into a means of collaboration and of creating new content. A short time ago training in online course development skills concentrated on the production of static content in the form of html pages supported by sessions on applications like Dreamweaver. The emphasis was on a content creation process handled by one intrepid soul or a small team of enthusiasts who either had subject content or web skills. Ninjam points to how “content” can be created by participants as part of their interaction. Learning online can be a lot more than a one on one dialogue between a student and whatever the original teams idea of appropriate content was. For students this type of learning has a limited number of applications, hygiene training for instance, through products like servsafe which is one that from personal experience works well. Generally though you would do just as well to ask a student to read a textbook, because that is all this often really amounts to: reading an online textbook even if the pictures sometimes move.

Now more than ever the Internet is a place where collaboration as a concept is evolving and where content is being created as a direct result of collaboration, and in ways we are just beginning to appreciate. Couple this with emerging trends in search technology and humanised search and, the explosion of a whole range of online services and we are in an age where collective intelligence and shared learning is becoming a reality. This has important ramifications for those who design online courses and how the teacher is positioned in that process. Many of us have moved been or fallen from our pedestal and positioning as source of all wisdom (and overhead creator), to facilitator and there seems to be an even more radical shift coming. Much of the online work that I have been involved with has concentrated on the interaction between the teacher and the students or learners and on communication. I can see a point where the course will become a point that focusses on the creation of knowledge rather than a guided tour through the already known and perhaps the role of the teacher will be very different again. ELGG is described as a learning landscape, this seems to be where they are going.

All this also points to a more sustainable future for the Learning Management System. Smaller, more flexible, less prescriptive, more open, far more capable of synthesising the inputs from a lot of different sources including students, teachers, online services of all types: video, images, journal articles, learning object repositories, libraries, search engines, encyclopedias, blogs wikis and experts of all kinds from right across the community. Yet, all of this customisable by the course creators and accountable to the end user: the students themselves. A place to manage learning which, gasp, may well be self managing a lot of the time.
Some links for you to pursue:
Heutagogy
Robin Dean's second album
Nuvvo: a web 2 LMS?
My VirtualBand.com
Ejamming
OPSDO search
Jamming with Skype

Learning objects are just shared resources arent they?

I was recently pointed to the "new" learning object downloads available from flexiblelearning.net.au (These people do a marvellous job). The advantage of the learning object model being that various pieces of a larger piece of content can be used as smaller "chunks" across a range of settings often with the idea that this piece of content can be plugged into LMS and become seemlessly part of the content in this new environment and reused across a range of settings.

That would be great if the content actually existed but from a number of recent, albeit brief, scannings of the Learning Object Repositories which I became familiar with 3 and 4 years ago some seem to have stagnated and few seem to have flourished. Apart from the one mentioned above there doesnt really seem to be any great growth in new content. No doubt many will disagree with me and will have examples of how it is useful for them, but to me the learning object model has always seemed an overly technical and developer centric way to create resources, providing little opportunity for end user customisation. Metadata is used so the object can be shareable via SCORM and LMS systems which have the ability to recreate the navigation necessary for the user to work their way through the content. Making a learning object is not something most teachers would take on in their lunch hour and merely mentioning metadata makes my eyes glaze over. Having downloaded some "cooking" content from the AFLF site, the content did once unzipped become navigable from a menu to one side often, a bit like a frame based site via the built in browser. This could be one way of providing a small piece of content for a student to work through for a make up class but at 2.9mg it is not easily distributed and would need to be made available online which is not always the simplest solution. My favorite LMS "tinylms" at about 1.4 mb it is a very small LMS indeed couldnt utilise the content I had downloaded but I have had this problem before with tinylms.

At the same time as the educational community has struggled to get traction with learning objects, online sharing services like Flickr, Youtube, Imageshack, Vimeo, Google video have flourished. A comparison might be made to the many many thousands of editors of Wikipedia and their commercial competitors who must have a much smaller workforce simply because of commercial imperiatives. To me Flickr and the like have a much greater long term future for the resourcing of online initiatives simply because of the massive diversity of the input available from these sites. One example that stays in my mind is a dessert only restaurant in New York called chikalicious as displayed on Flickr. I cant imagine a better way to display to students what it would be like to work in this place than viewing this stream. It really captures the food and the atmosphere of this place. It might not be SCORM compliant but I reckon that is a great learning object.
If you want to create your own Learning Objects RELOAD might be a good place to start.
Aesharenet is an excellent place to locate learning resources.
Maricopa Learning Exchange is a vocationally based resource repository in the US.
Here is a list of learning object repositories

Organisational dysfunction and change management

Anyone who has been involved in the implementation of any flexible learning initiative will have realised that some of the greatest challenges in getting things done actually come from the systems you have to work with. Often the demands of a large procedure driven organisation seem directly at odds with the those who are trying to implement any type of innovation. A lot of research has gone into the types of management behaviours that are necessary for the members of an organisation to feel they can risk attempting something new and the sorts of management behaviours that send a clear message that if you make a mistake you will be on your own. Much of this work has been done in the research of the underpinings of service quality improvements, some based on theorists like Rensis Likert and his systems of management and research by Francese on the relationship between service burnout and leadership style in a service organisation. Burns and Stalker describe two competing paradigms as being mechanistic and organic organisations. Part of the rationale of flexible learning initiatives is the need for traditional educational suppliers in the Vocational education arena to compete more effectively with commercial alternatives in an environment where a more and more effective commercial case can be made for the private provision of vocational training simply because elearning has been able to reduce the entry barriers for would be providers. You dont have to have extensive infrastructure in order to get started. It's a little bit like a hotel I was once told about that had a mistake book for staff. If you made a mistake you had to record it in the book. The result: no one ever told management about their mistakes. Karl Albrecht also describes 17 Basic Syndromes of Dysfunction within the organisation. Interesting.

Google maps and garbage scout

Mashups are a really interesting Web 2 development. Typically the functionality of google maps or some other application is combined around a community of interest to create some sort social utility. There are a couple that I really like: garbagescout for its recycling funkiness, and
publicLoos: A Google Maps Mash-up of Public Restrooms in San Francisco which is kind of funny, Flickrscape for it's topic specific slideshows created from a topic search within Flickr and gvisit which allows you to see where your website visitors have come from. Virtual Tourism is one I haven't seen before which seems to have promise as well.

Free Office Suites: opensource online and the open telecaster

There is not a person alive who does not like something for nothing. Especially when it comes to software and the days of having to pay for your office suite seem to be coming to an end. At the very least there are now very usable, practical alternatives to computer users with an Internet connection. I have been using Openoffice or Sun office before it for at least ten years with few complaints except that sometimes the tables went a bit wonky when opened with the Microsoft product. The advantages of using openoffice include the ability to export your files to pdf ( improving printability - most important for online resources)and swf. I recently discovered that open office draw has the ability to open dxf (CAD)files as well and a recent project of mine " the open telecaster" ha ha - yes I am having a go at making my own guitar- has been drawn up using a free blueprint from the net brought up to life size proportions to test it's accuracy with draw and from which I created a template using masonite. Now that what I call cool--- free plan, free software, recycled timber,all hand tools, to build an item hopefully of enduring musical value. Anyway back to the point there are some excellent online office alternatives as well including:

goffice
thinkfree
writely
zoho virtual office
Last time I looked I liked thinkfree the best of these.

Windows Live Academic

The use of journal databases as a source of referenced content has always been one of the advantages of running a course from the internet. Students have access to a wide range of peer reviewed content from reputable sources. Finding this content has usually required logging in to a database provider via an institution that has set up accounts for it's students.The site allows the user to search academic papers, weblog feeds, the web , news, images etc. It also allows individual user customisation of the site via the use of macros. Windows Live Academic This looks really good and could change the way search is conducted.

Blackboard vs Moodle

This is an interesting study of the relative levels of satisfaction with blackboard and moodle from a student prespective. Blackboard vs Moodle

Web 2 e-learning and the bureaucratisation of the learning management system.

It might just be me but it seems that the innovations of the web 2 revolution have not really filtered into the e- learning realm. Sure there are no doubt many instances of web 2 apps being utilised within an LMS but there are no real examples of web 2 applied to the whole LMS. There are examples: nuvvo http://nuvvo.com/ for instance is promising,as is schooltool http://www.schooltool.org/and more recently chalksite http://www.chalksite.com/ but nothing as yet approaching the power of the much maligned LMS. What I think we are all waiting for is an LMS that has lots of features combined with the ease of use of many of the popular web 2 apps. I think we are waiting for something that gives the power back to the teacher to decide what content they consider appropriate for their students,and which can be updated on the fly with content updated as is needed. Maybe it is the bureaucratisation of the Learning Management System that is the real problem and not the technology itself. Asp or php of themselves are surely not the problem. The problem is probably the misuse of these technologies to serve purposes that have not been fully examined. Why for instance is there so much emphasis on control over and above that exercised by the teacher? These are bureaucratic concerns about the utilisation of new teaching methods even though it is at least ten years since they could have been considered new.