e e learning

the dark side reaches the blogosphere

while the timing tells you how far being on the news i am, imagine my surprise when, as i was sifting through my rss reader late last Sunday night working on a project due on Monday, my sleepy eyes stumbled across these four words:

death threats against bloggers

what the.....?  of course, i immediately clicked through to kathy sierra's creating passionate users to see what this was about. no, it wasn't another odd marketing technique from kathy.  it was a post announcing that she feels compelled to stop blogging because of the death threats and other heinous comments being made both to her blog and in posts on other blogs about her.

as i read the post, which she has moved off of creating passionate users and links to from there, i was in total shock.  shock that kathy has been enduring this hell for months.  shock that the outrage hasn't been louder (after all, i'm just now seeing it).  shock that one of the very best blogs in the blogosphere has been swallowed by the black hole of puerile pranks, at best, or a sociopathic stalkers in the worst case.

as i've previously written (see The Future of Media, Part 2 on Learning Circuits Blog) there are those who are predicting some dark times ahead for the internet.  perhaps, if they are correct, and i wouldn't bet against them, the anonymous threats against kathy are likely just the tip of a much larger iceberg to come.  why might i feel this way?

throughout history, whenever society was presented with new technologies, there was a ramp up time in which scammers and folks with other nefarious intentions were able to take advantage of a public yet unaware of how to identify the authentic from the fake or otherwise protect themselves.  when paper money was introduced, counterfeiters had a field day exchanging fake bills for real.  when i was a teen, the newly introduced, credit card-sized driver licenses were a  snap to fake. postal scams and telephone scams both were prevalent as those services spread to every household.  atm's and public phones had their dangers until we learned to silence the beep-boop-beep's that told the sharp eared scammer standing just out of sight that you pin is 3-2-3.

why would we think the advance of the internet isn't going to be the same or worse. most of the innovations i mention above were regulated as they were introduced.  but the internet we've created is regulated by no one. and we're proud of that.  we should be.  but let's not be naive and believe there won't be a downside to that freedom.  currently there is no way to truly verify that someone is who they say they are on the internet.  even those cryptographic "words" we have to decipher to enter a comment on this and many other blogs and websites don't keep out the spammer's robots (just look at the recent comments over there in the right sidebar and you'll see what i mean). in the discussion of tim o'reilly's blogging code of conduct, several people point out that requiring an e-mail address means nothing because there are numerous ways to get an email that doesn't identify you nor can be linked to you.  is it more anonymous for me to be "anonymous" or to be "diane armstrong"?  (even kathy suggests in her last post to her blog that she might create a fake persona to continue her blogging under.)

maybe we thought the blogosphere was a different part of the internet.  a safe haven from the ills of the world due to our collective commitment to authentic discourse and honest disagreement.  in many ways it is true. the rallying behind kathy has been much like a neighborhood watch being formed.  the blogosphere has shown it's compassion and willingness to protect it's turf.  but even neighborhood watches often can't do it all.  fortunately, organizations like sxip, openid, lid, oasis/saml, pingidentity, and others are working on solutions.  the question is, will they be just in time or a little to late to avert widespread scams?

tags: anonymity, scams, kathy-sierra, code-of-conduct, blogophere, identity, identity-management

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a bangladeshi student on social networking

               

in this video, atif sattar, a 16-year-old 11th grader in dakar, bangladesh makes a case why social network software like elgg.net is valuable to him. do we really need to worry about "fixing" the schools worldwide? or should we enable students to follow atif's example? (found via elgg.net news via Julie Lindsey's blog)

knowing knowledge

i've been waiting for chance to talk about george siemens' new, self-published book, knowing knowledge.  this is the cornerstone theory of george's new theory of learning which he calls connectivism.  i had the great fortune a few months ago to edit george's manuscript of the book for him.  having spent a great part of my career in the publishing industry, i have alway enjoyed the excitement  that I feel when I've had the priviledge to  preview a book that is going to have impact.  knowing knowledge I think is such a book.

in part 1, george takes on the traditional challenge in books on knowledge and learning of trying to define these term. he posits a theory that many will blast as relativistic, but he avoids the cartesian trap by placing knowledge in the connections between people and objects.  connectivism allows for a priori knowledge without falling into fatalism and  a posteri  knowledge without the atomistic, self-centered world view of many followers of descartes. learning then becomes a matter of pattern recognition and personalizing our experiences.  we are continuously assessing and hypothesizing what we have learned vis a vis the new data being presented to us now.

this is powerful stuff in that it not only explains common everyday knowledge and experience, but explains how breakthrough knowledge and innovative thought appear next to the mundane.  michael jordan talks about "just knowing where the ball is going to be."  football quarterbacks sense the openings in the patterns.  evidently individually we all have different abilities to decypher different patterns with varying degrees of ease.  thus you find someone like albert einstein saying to the reporters who were constantly hounding him, "why are you following me, i'm just a scientist."  quantum physics is just a set of patterns, no different to einstein than the patterns that make up the concept "breakfast."

in part two of knowing knowledge, george turns to the question of "what does this mean in the real world?  if your journey to understanding elearning has involved frequent visits to elearnspace.org then this section will feel very much like home to you.  it's "siemens-ism" at its best.  george runs through a host of issues around the social nature of learning and knowledge, the interaction of learning and organizations, what this all means for education - both personal and societal.  clearly, these are the patterns decyphers with jordan-esche ease.

he concludes the book with a 5-domain implementation model which outlines how connectivism can be implemented system-wide in an organization.  while it may seem daunting, that is only a reflection of the complexity of the organization, not connectivism itself.   one concern i do have is that george states that the implementation model is triggered by an organizational change having occurred.  it seems odd to me that the model wouldn't either be involved in the change process, or perhaps even precede it  - participating in the creation of the need for change.

despite the amount of information covers, knowing knowledge is an accessible presentation of a complex set of concepts.  his use of a non-linear writing style makes reading through sections of the book easier, encourages reflection, and invites the reader to  "dip in" to refresh your memory on any particular section.

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knowing knowledge is available through george's new site knowing knowledge.   you can download pdf files of the book for free!   the links are found on the blog in the entry entitled knowing knowledge - pdf files.  The various charts in the book are in black and white in the pdf's.  to link to the full color charts, you can find them on george's flickr site under the group knowing knowledge.  finally, true to his theory, george has posted the manuscript to a wiki where he's invited everyone to come and help make knowing knowledge better.

eventually, printed copies will be available for purchase through amazon.com.

imagining the internet

my latest time sink has been a site called imagining the internet: a history and forecast.  it has been created and maintained by faculty, staff and students and elon university with the support and funding of the pew charitable trust's internet and american life project.  the site is a great interface sitting adopt  of a database formed by the data from three "predict the internet" surveys pew conducted in the 90's, in 2004, and 2006.

what's fascinating about how imagining the internet has been put together is that not only does it look forward 150 years in to the future, but it goes back 150 years and looks at predictions around the then just emerging new media of telegraph, telephone, and television.  now i have to admit that i've always been a bit jaded when i hear an expert say "in 100 years, humans will......"  but i'll be a little less so after reading these quotes from the late 1900's:

on the future of telephones

as reported in the book  "bell" by robert v. bruce, kate field, a british reporter who knew bell, predicted in 1878 that eventually:         

"while two persons, hundreds of miles apart, are talking together, they  will actually see each other."

(she's talking about video chat two years after bell patented the phone?!?!?!)

at&t chief engineer and electrical review writer john j. carty projected in his "prophets column" in 1891:

"A system of telephony without wires seems one of the interesting possibilities, and the distance on the earth through which it is possible to speak is theoretically limited only by the curvation of the earth."

(he's talking about cell phones 115 years ago!?!?!?  - although he was abit off on coverage gaps.  curvation of the earth? i wish!!!)

on the furture of television

a report in the indianapolis xtar apcril 9, 1927:

"spectacles may be staged in distant cities and be transmitted for the entertainment of individuals hundreds of miles away.  onversations may be held across the sea and the          parties see each other as clearly as though they were gathered in the same room. distance will be annihilated for sound and sight and the world made immeasurably smaller for the purposes of  communication."

(i checked thomas friedman's grandfather did not pen this for the star.)

so now I'm thinking that these predictions probably bordered on being considred lunatic by these writers' temporal peers.   so i looked at the predictions fo the future from today and looked for the lunatic fringe amongst them. 

blackboard's patent

i've been reading through all of the coverage and commentary regarding blackboard's being granted a patent for elearning processes and methods.   having been amongst the team that drove webct into leadership in the

what's your opinion?

is blackboard evil?  or just doing good business?  is the patent office to blame?  or is it all just part of the capitalist game?   check out the instant survey at the top of the left sidebar and voice your opinion.  

higher education marketplace, i've never had much of a soft spot for blackboard, nor their business tactics.  and their immediate lawsuit against a competitor only hardens my heart towards them.

however, i also do believe in looking at issues from all perspectives.  a us corporation has one primary responsibility - to serve the best interests of the companies shareholders.  the only caveat to that prime directive is that they must do so while remaining within the bounds of what is legal.   as well as I know blackboard, they crossed every "t" and dotted every "i" to make sure their filing with the patent board was legal and above board.  cornering a sector of the elearning market with a patent, at least initially, can only be good for the shareholders of blackboard.

every american and every american corporation has the right to file for a patent for something they feel qualifies for protection under the patent laws.  so i have a hard time saying blackboard was wrong for filing.  there are a myiad of companies out there trying to patent pieces of the internet.  (aol granted patent on instant message technology in 2002,  balthasar online, inc. granted 180 patents in february 2006 related to rich media on the internet,  or landvoyage for mapping technology in july 2006.)  it's an easy argument to make that if blackboard didn't grab these patents, a competitor might beat them to the punch and leave their shareholders with a much less valuable company.

as tim o'reilly pointed out in june 2000,  the problem isn't with the company's who are filing and winning the patents.  while some may feel that these corporations have a moral or ethical duty to leave these supposed assets in the public domain, in a free economy like ours, that's just hogwash.  someone is going to claim that patent if it's claimable. 

the finger has been pointed at the patent office for a very long time now.   why hasn't that agency moved to reform their standards to deal with the issue of granting nebulous patents that are clearly going to restrict competition?   why, in lieu of the patent office not acting as congress seen fit to stand by and let this continued land grab of technology go unabated over the past decade?  ultimately it is congress' responsibility to assure that free markets are free, not slowly gobbled up by owners of assets that can't be easily defined.  and as of a few days ago, orin hatch and patrick lahey have put forward an new proposal to be considered by the senate..

there are a few other potential venues for these patents to be rendered invalid or useless.  the first are the courts.  historically the courts have tended to rule against patents which were too broad in scope (lotus' suit against microsoft for excel's violating the "touch and feel" of lotus 123 is an example).  however the courts were indecisive on the blackberry case last year.  leaving their future role in limbo.

the final hope is in the creativity of programmers to out maneuver the patents and render them useless before they can do harm.   aol currently doesn't have a monopoly on chat applications due to their patent granted in 2002.   this is likely due to new technologies displacing old technologies rendering the patented somewhat harmless.  but this puts a tremendous burden on our ability to invent then reinvent faster and faster.   let along consumers needing to adopt the new technologies, forking out more money each time.

so as much as i'd be happy to see blackboard take a swift pipe to the knees, i have to say, i don't think their the bad guys this time.   what do you think.  check out the poll in my left sidebar and we'll see how everyone's opinions roll up!

the future of media

this past tuesday i had the opportunity to join some of top media and content names in san francisco for a conference on the future of media that was held concurrently with a similar gathering in sydney, australia.  while troubles with the audio/video link  between the two sites showed why those media aren't quite yet ready blow text out of the water,  the content of the meeting was tremendous.

in the room in san francisco were chris anderson (wired magazine), john hagel (author), moira gunn (technation), ray kotcher (global ceo of ketchum pr), craig newmark (craigslist), mike linksvayer (cto, creative commons), andy halliday (ceo, ourstory), and david sifry (ceo technorati)

because there was so much covered, I'll share some in a couple of posts here and some in a couple of posts over at learning circuits blog. 

the organizing group, future exploration network, put together a rather interesting report on the current state of media and indicators of what the future may hold.  While some were of interest purely to media types (ie, advertising revenues) some were natural cross overs to learning and knowledge management concerns.

the report was published unders a creative commons attribution, share-alike license.  so please note that the following diagrams were created by the future exploration network.  this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike 2.5 license.

a chart from the report that i found interesting broke down the types of content created by americans and australians on the internet.   about 1/3 of all adult  americans and australians have contributed content to the web in one or more ways.  i think it's interesting to note that only 8% of american adults have created and posted a blog.  has the blogosphere, at least in america reached it's peak?  if you analyze the statistics, this means that almost 1 in 10 americans are initiating the blogosphere, another 2 are commenting on blogs and another 2-4 are reading what the others are writing.  seems, if anything, it's still author heavy.  the last bar seems low when you look at sites like flickr, photobucket, and youtube.  but then again, this data is a bit dated (at least last year)

another of the interesting sets of data was demographic data regarding the age of those who have created content on the web through blog, wikis, their own website or by posting music, photos, and video to sites like flickr or youtube. The common folklore is that the blogosphere is just teenage girls writing their diaries.  well, while 42% of people 18-29 have contributed content to the web, 18% of people 65+ have also contributed content!  With the US baby boomers getting older, you can imagine that number will go up.

finally here is a bit of a shocker. if, a week ago, someone had asked me how much i would be willing to bet that my answer to the question of what was the dominant language in the blogosphere was correct, i would have put a large sum on my guess of english.  i'd be a much poorer man today if I had done that today.  turns out more blog posts (37%) are written in japanese than either english (31%) or chinese (17%).  with the almost assured explosion of chinese to come, how long will it be before english is in the number three position?

see also:

do you trust me? on Learning Circuits Blog for a summary of the theme regarding trust that arose in the conversations at the conference.

technorati tags:future exploration network, mass media, blogs, internet content

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a leader from around the world

the headline caught my eye - elearning sector buzzing with activity.   it took me a few seconds to realize that it was from india's moneycontrol.com and not a western source.  i found two things very interesting about this interview with vikas joshi, chairman and managing director of harbinger group.  harbinger was named to trainingoutsourcing.com's list of top 20 specialized learning process providers. (note: you need a free membership at trainingoutsourcing.com to view the list.)

the first thing that struck me was that this seems to be pretty big news in india.  hearing the tone of mr. joshi's comments would the indians are in the elearning business not as a second tier player.  rather they are gunning for world market leadership.  they are hungry and mobillizing!

second, while the following quote include a mangling of kirkpatrick's name and a twisting of his theory, i found one bit to be quite insightful.  the quote

How do you think the success of e-learning should be measured?

Traditionallydropout or the completion rate has been the measurement tool. If thedrop out rate is close to zero one can measure people's performance. AsKurk Patrick's model suggests, one has to look at the following todetermine the success: 

a) Completion rate

b) ROI is an important factor

c) Impact on performance

(before you go giggle about the errors - quick - name, and spell, the full name of the person credited with founding the indian institutes of technology - arguably an equal to mit and oxford and the birthplace of india's current scientific superiority.)  ok now that we have that silliness out of the way, let me point out mr. joshi's comment that "if the dropout rate is close to zero one can measure people's performance."  now it may just be me, but i've almost exclusively heard advocates of forgetting about dropout rates in favor of roi analyses or performance measures.  but mr. joshi is correct that unless dropout rates are significantly low, the validity of claiming a learning intervention had any impact on anything is non-existent. 

think about it.  if only 15 of 100 participants complete a learning intervention, but we want to know the impact the course had on the 100, you can see how quickly we'd be shown to be ineffectual in our effort.  if 100 people are targeted for an intervention designed to create the change needed to meet the company's strategic goals, then we either better be retaining everyone one of those employees until the end of the program AND gaining the improvement required from nearly all  of them or we need to figure out a way to get a bigger pool of learners so that when everyone drops out we're still left with 100 who have met our goals.

just like our colleagues in the supply chain, all of the slack is being removed from the chain of processes we work with to move the workforce forward.   you know the folks at harbinger group are examining the efficiencies of their processes.  as mr. joshi says,

one needs to understand the business processes for developing a world class product and solution for the industry.

he may not have kirkpatrick's levels memorized correctly, but he seems to have an answer to winning the race to dominance in elearning dialed in!

(Oh, I almost forgot. The answer to the founder of IIT.  You may have known his last name - Nehru - but I bet there were few if any who knew or could spell his first name.  Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister of India when he called for the formation of universities which would rival MIT.  The seven campuses of IIT are considered to be that today.)

 

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and you think facilitating at 8am is tough!

ran across this two part webcast recording at webcast academy - which was linking to them orginal files at worldbridges.net.   

conversation with albert, part 1 download mp3 ( 56:28, 25.8MB)

conversation with albert, part 2 download mp3 ( 40:58, 18.7MB)   
   

this astounding webcast features albert - a blind, sufi, self-labeled hippie teacher in a refugee camp in western sahara. the first 8-10 minutes are pretty slow as the show's hosts help albert with some technical issues. but for the next 90+ minutes, albert paints a picture so stark and so genuine that you can almost feel the sand brushing against your cheek and the desert sun beating against your shoulders.

make no mistake, albert may have alot of things making life nearly horrific by developed world standards, but he is a teacher of the highest caliber. to hear him talk of a female student who overcame the oppression that comes with being born west saharan (10 out of 10 babies born today will be dead by this time next year, Albert tells us), the gender bias that comes from being born into a conservative muslim society, and an education system that usually, at best, teaches hygene and desert survival skills is to hear a teacher proud in the fact that he made a difference in at least one student's life.

take the time to get to know albert through these webcasts.  It will be two hours you'll remember for a very long time. 

technorati tags:webcasting, western sahara, teaching

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my 2006 predictions

in learning circuits blog, clark aldrich proposes his top 11 trends in elearning. while i agree with many of his ideas, i do disagree on some.  here's my top 10 list with biggest impact listed first.

1 - web 2.0 gains enthusiastic acceptance in learning - rss, web services, blogs, wikis and the other "web 2.0" technologies are going to inspire new models for the delivery of learning to more employees - and they'll not only get it, but they'll love it.

2 - the googlization of learning continues - "googling" is the spearhead of a paradigm shift in the way we construct knowledge and deliver and find information.  this shift by shear nature will continue to impact learning.

3- methodology and design are rediscovered - primarily because of the previous two factors, the ability to simply dump content into a technology platform won't be so simple anymore.  to determine which of the myriad of options available to use will require a return to sold design and the development of new instructional and learning methodologies.   no longer will it suffice to just let the technology determine what we can do.

4- the rampant adoption of podcast and like delivery technologies will finally be the tipping point for audio and video to over take text as primary delivery mode for content.

5 - blogs and wikis disappear - the functionality and usage of blogs and wikis will begin to be subsummed into other more primary technologies.   socialtext and project management software incorporating wiki technology are two examples of the forward trend.

6 - open source tools take over lms market - the movement that has begun in higher education will spill over into the corporate marketplace providing one more front for the corporate lms vendors to shore up.

7 - simulations will continue to gain exceptance - the barriers to acceptance of simulations, and their generally higher price tag, are falling.  simulations will gather momentum at all levels of corporate training.

8 - mobile technologies will continue to change delivery options - as personal data appliances become more dependable and extendable, learning professionals will find ways to fulfill the dream of learning any time, any where.

9 - workflow learning - new enterprise software will enable learning interventions to be placed into the workflow in ways only imagined til now.

10 - talent hired for general aptitudes needs training - the war for talent will soon result in companies having to hire the person who demonstrate general aptitudes and then train them to specific job requirements.

creative people of the world unite

i've been doing some work on my personal brand recently and, not surprising, one of the traits listed as a strength for me is creativity.  in the narrative on this strength i'm advised that:

the solutions, ideas, and initiatives that you offer will often be seen by others as unusual, unique, and unexpected. this will probably cause others to frame you as a creative person useful in addressing issues that do not have standard solutions.

it's crazy, but even their description of this "strength" seems to beg off at the end almost apologizing for saying "you do understand this means you're going to be seen as one of "those" - a creative person.  well, you do have your health."  bah!  stop the apologies.  '...addressing issues that do not have standard solutions?"  if that's the limit of the domain i have to work in for the rest of my career, i'll be one busy man.  because more and more of business is requiring non-standard solutions. 

so my fellow creatives out there, grab your copy of florida's rise of the creative class, keep focused on those issues that do not have standard solutions, and I'll meet you in the board room, soon.