http://www.dokeos.com/

More proof of open source's burgeoning effects in the field of course management systems - this Belgian company has taken the open source CMS Claroline and run with it in a value-added hosting/development/services/support model. News to me was that they have made strides developing a SCORM import tool, for which the lack of widespread support amongst many of the open source CMS has at times been used for an excuse not to adopt or investigate them. No longer! (see also Atutor in this regard). And for North American users, particularly those in the West, a small note that at least one of their customers, Washington State Community College, is nearby. - SWL

12:43:41 PM    

This article describes Cisco's vSearch video training solution in relation to e-learning ROI. While the numbers might make sense, the author's use of KM and e-learning caught me by surprise. Is dishing out training videos a KM solution?

12:42:52 PM    

Doc Searls writes an excellent piece on why weblogs will succeed where traditional knowledge management has failed. His explanation ties in with what we observed couple of years ago: they are personal stories that embody tacit knowledge. Doc puts it nicely: "they are about sharing and growing what we know and what we can tell."

Talking about tacit knowledge, I found this interesting experiment on testing your tacit knowledge. Try it out; its fun.

12:41:24 PM    

"Is it that Digital Natives can’t pay attention, or that they choose not to? Often from the Natives’ point of view their Digital Immigrant instructors make their education not worth paying attention to compared to everything else they experience – and then they blame them for not paying attention!"

12:25:47 PM    

• "a group of people can create a more complete understanding than a single person working on his or her own" This is obvious, but I tend to prefer working alone, so I need constant reminders of this truth. Your ability to establish context for new information is often entirely dependant on the people you're working with.
  
• "a community generates a sense of commitment not created merely by an individual working on their own with the content. As Rheingold notes, 'People everywhere seem more interested in communicating with each other than with databases.'" I've sometimes thought of comparing this with the value of having a workout partner. By sharing responsibility, you increase the commitment level. Rheingold's quote reminds me that no matter how good the data and navigation in our services, people still want to connect with other people.
  
• "content and communication must form a seamless whole"...this seems most difficult to me. Within the context of a single application, perhaps it simply means that when you're communicating, you need easy access to data, and when you're looking at content, you need easy access to communication channels.

12:15:06 PM    

Workforce Connections is the first tool of its kind to be licensed by the U.S. government free of charge to public and private sector organizations.
From the FAQ: "What is Workforce Connections[dot accent]? Workforce Connections is a set of Web-based tools that enable content managers, with no programming experience, to dynamically create and manage online content in a secure environment. Workforce Connections; is an open source custom distribution available under a general public license (GPL) by the U.S. Department of Labor, it empowers non-technical individuals to create, acquire, share and control knowledge in real-time. Users can leverage Workforce Connections to build and maintain traditional Web sites, online courses, knowledge repository, online coach, and communities of practice portals."

Apparently, installing it is a techie's job though.

In the same vein: the opensourceCMS directory and exhibition of PHP/MySQL systems. Motto: "try before you install" - what a great idea.

12:08:29 PM    

An example of an ITS would be a software program that can assemble learning objects to present a simulated medical patient case. A student is presented with a scenario representing a real-life patient with, oh, let's say diabetes. The simulated patient case includes a video of the diabetic patient talking about his/her illness, background reading about the subject, various clinical investigations being undertaken along with a presentation of their result, you get the idea. The student uses this simulated patient case to learn about real-life patients with diabetes, or just about any other medical condition you could think of. Now imagine a situation where for whatever reason, say, cultural convention, we can't show a simulated patient case of a woman, so we must present a case with a male patient. We could manually rebuild the case using data from a male patient, or we could use an ITS that knows how to swap in and out the components of individual cases. This ITS could automatically select replacement data for our student and reassemble a new case to meet the cultural requirements. The use of different languages would be another example where alternate content would be required.

In order for an ITS to perform its data swapping exercise in anything like an automated way, it'd need to know how to find, select, and incorporate new learning objects into the patient case. It would use metadata to perform this magic. These metadata would describe objects in a repository that have the required 'fit' and can act as alternative information blocks in our hypothetical simulated patient case. The metadata required to describe a component such as I have described are very different from the metadata that I as a human would find useful when searching for information about diabetes in our example. It may be stretching the computer program analogy too far but I'd say that the metadata used to define the hot-swappable learning object components would be more like the sub-routines in a program's source code listing. Each sub-routine has its input and output parameters, and when plugged into a larger program in the correct way performs an essential function. Well-written sub-routines from other people could just as easily substitute from my sub-routines, such that with an appropriately diverse bank of sub-routines I wouldn't need to write very much of my own code at all, I could just assemble code provided by others, topped off with a bit of linking code to make it work the way I liked.

There's only one problem with this metadata scenario, the kinds of metadata present in the LOM are not the kinds of metadata we'd need to make this ITS work, and this simple ITS described here is only one of thousands of potential ITS', each fulfilling specific high-level learning needs. So what we really need are working groups within subject domains scoping out how they want their intelligent tutoring systems to function, and to start agreeing on ways of describing learning objects to allow them to fit together in meaningful ways. Metadata can mean different things to man and machine, and one size will not fit all. We have lots of metadata we could be using, let's try to agree on the metadata we should be using and start using e-learning in interesting ways.

12:00:40 PM    

Myths of Open Source: "The arguments for and against open-source software get trivialized. It's not a technology issue; it's a business issue."
Comments: I would extend that thought slightly - sometimes, open source is also an ethical issue...most of the time, however, it's a world-view issue. If I adhere to central "command and control", top-down viewpoints, proprietary software is attractive. If I believe in decentralized, collaborative, open environment, open source is attractive. These are, obviously, generalizations...but accurate enough to detail each camp. It's important to note that it is not a money issue. I'm all for democracy and earning money. However, the only way to ensure that our future is democratic (and gives people the ability to innovate and create an income) is to preserve openness now. With that said, I'm not against proprietary software. If someone writes a program and wants to keep it "closed", that's their decision. Let the market decide...but don't stack the market in favour of either one.

11:55:24 AM    

Dunbar's Number: "This all leads me to hypothesize that the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups -- as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages -- hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50. Anything more than this and the group has to spend too much time "grooming" to keep group cohesion, rather then focusing on why the people want to spend the effort on that group in the first place..."

11:53:38 AM    

Online communities 'are old-skool': "'Online communities are old-skool. The heat these days is around social networks, buddy lists &blogs -- all bottom-up social tools that place the individual at the center, and grow outward from there. This is a very different design model than message boards, chat rooms and virtual worlds, which are virtual places where where like-minded people congregate.'"
Comment: Actually, online communities aren't "old-skool"...just some of the tools used to create communities. Community creation and fostering is the end goal, now we have more social tools available (blogs, buddy lists) than we've had in the past (message boards, chat rooms).

11:52:40 AM    

Reflection is an important component of learning. We form links between known and new knowledge during this stage. Most educators realize the importance of reflection and build it into evaluation, class time, and assignments. I had an experience this weekend with my 10 year old daughter that brings to mind another important related (but not often discussed) concept: debriefing learning experiences.

My daughter has a strong sense of self-criticism. While doing her homework recently, she expressed certain negative viewpoints about her learning skills and abilities. As a parent, I automatically shifted into "instructor" mode and tried to highlight the error of the conclusions she was drawing from her past learning experiences. In doing so, I realized how rarely we focus on the conclusions we draw from failures in learning.

For learners, a negative experience is catalogued as a "I can't do that" statement...and if not questioned, it is perceived as a fact in future encounters. We need to actively promote debriefing in all learning experiences...particularly negative ones. It can help to prevent the formation of erroneous impressions of learner competence.

Here's a few thoughts on the types of questions we should teach learners to ask themselves:

• How much effort have I really put into this subject/learning activity? Is it realistic to expect competence (ability) based on the effort I've put in?
  
• What about the experience is most frustrating?
  
• What other stressors around me/in my life could have contributed to the feelings of frustration?
  
• Have I tried to seek help?
  
• When I detail my feelings into two categories (facts and feelings), have I unintentionally treated feelings as facts?
  
• What conclusions can I draw from this experience? Was I ready for the subject matter?
  
• What could I have done to better prepare myself?
  
• What can I do to improve my ability to understand/relate/perform in this subject matter?
  

11:51:28 AM    

Emerging Technologies in Elearning (.ppt file)...a broad overview of what is happening/will happen in elearning. Learning objects/repositories have received their share of hype...I'm more interested in slides towards the end of the presentation...focusing on personalization, semantic social network, and "gaming"/environments.

11:50:03 AM