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