Radio is a really cool application.  You can do lots of interesting things with it.  Like publishing information in RSS format.

Quote: "That was really my eureka moment: my first realization that content management was screwed.

In more technical terms, I realized that Content Management was starting to wrestle with what Clayton Christensen calls The Innovator's Dilemma: the inability of successful companies to adapt to a new, disruptive technology."

Comment: Very much in the vein that the previous post refers to.

[Serious Instructional Technology]

» Some interesting points here especially with regard to Christensen.

• Clayton Christensen is all too familiar with that issue as well: "Markets that do not exist cannot be analyzed: Suppliers and customers must discover them together."
• Every website has different needs - especially big, complicated websites.
• As a result, most CMS software vendors fall into the same business models as the Mainframe vendors selling to corporations: long sales cycles and extensive consulting requirements.
• Blogging is the first and truest killer app of Personal Publishing

 

Gurteen Knowledge-Log. David Gurteen has just setup his own weblog on knowledge management. Beyond this, he is aiming to establish a KM [Column Two]

» Although i'm probably on peripherally a k-logger at the moment I'm very interested in k-logging and how it develops. 

It just seems so right.

I love the idea that I and project mates can blog our own ideas and viewpoints and that these can be aggregated into some whole greater than each of us constituent parts.

I also love the idea that we can aggregate from these ourselves and build upon them.

I'll be watching the GKL with interest.

 

eLearn Magazine: In-Depth Tutorials: Learning Objects. Quote: "It's hard not to fall in love with the notion of reusable learning objects. The idea of a world filled with little self-contained lessons that you can assemble into any course you can think of seems so…well…cool. How could you not want something like that? Unfortunately, after five years of struggling with the challenge of finding that world, I have come to the conclusion that I am simply not smart enough to lead the way to the Promised Land of e-learning, where milk and honey flow from the earth and learning objects can be plucked like ripe fruit from fig trees." [Serious Instructional Technology]

» What people are learning is that designing re-usable learning objects (RLO's) is no simpler than designing re-usable anything else!

So much extra thought and effort has to be expended to understand the context something was designed in and then re-engineer & re-package it for arbitrary other contexts.  It's very hard.   And the tools provided to educators are no more, and often far less, sophisticated than those provided to engineers or software developers doing the same kind of tasks.

Other major problems I perceive:

• models of excellence - do you have a catalogue of really excellent RLO's to learn from yourself?
• time for excellence - are you being paid to take time to really think hard, design and package RLO's?

The storyline metaphor presented in the article is interesting and possibly helpful.  But as the authors point out:

Because there's nothing quite like a good concrete example to make a lesson stick, a repeating storyline across the entire arc of a course tends to tie all the lessons together very effectively.

We thought about picking a story that would work across all courses, but since we didn't have a clear idea of what all courses (both planned by the client and created by the learner) would be, we couldn't be sure that our storyline would always work.

To the contrary, we worried that if some of the stories were different then most or all of them might have to be different, even within a single course.

It's a pretty bleak looking frontier alright.