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.