Chat Rooms and MOOs.

Heckuva of a plan, James! Any data (course completion rates, criterion test results) on how it impacts learning? -- BB

Subvert your Lectures.

Todays plan...subverting your lectures with chat rooms or MOOs! Very very very very simple use of technology which can utterly transform the ol' traditional most ugly transmissive form of education there is!

(I admit that some lectures can be useful... about 2% of them and that's due to the character of the speaker)

12:58:38 PM    

Social Software: Stephen Downes' article.

Yow. Lots of comments and re-posts on this article. Nice job, Stephen: a good article raises more questions than it answers. Here are two of the re-posts. I am not yet sure what to say about this, apart from my comments earlier today on "We Learning." Is this the Next Big Thing? It's too early to tell.  I still think something else is going on in the evolution of learning/teaching/facilitation and it may well turn out that this is all merging into that something else. -- BB

Great article by Stephen Downes about combining content syndication and social software. The bottom line - start creating a vast, open, distributed social network system by the simple expedient of including an author field in RSS and pointing it to the author's FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) file.

By Martin Terre Blanche 17 Feb 2004 [Collaborative Learning]

The Semantic Social Network. The Semantic Social Network: "Two types of technologies are about to merge. The technologies are content syndication, used by blogging websites around the world, and social networking, employed by sites such as Friendster [http://www.friendster.com] and Orkut [http://www.orkut.com]. They will merge to create a new type of internet, a network within a network, and in so doing reshape the internet as we know it." Comment: This article is written ahead of its time. What is expressed here will probably only develop more explicitly in the next several years. However, that doesn't detract from the valuable insight it provides. The essential message: blogging provides content, social networks provide community. When separated, their value is diminished. When combined, weaknesses of each are minimized.

12:52:40 PM    

More competition from your alma mater.

If you, as an e-Learning entrepreneur, try to compete on price alone, you are going to lose to community colleges every time. Take advantage of the weaknesses in the lecture-rooted nature of many offerings from the education community -- add value through better design. (No offense to my friends in the education community, but entrepreneurs have to think about the fact that, through the taxes they pay, they are forced to fund their own competition.) -- BB

Mainstreaming Distance Learning into the Community College - Linda M. Thor and Carol Scarafiotti, JALN. Rio Salado, one of the Maricopa Community Colleges in the Phoenix metropolitan area, has not only carved a market niche as a leading distance learning provider for working adults, but has experienced double-digit growth increases as high as 40 percent [Online Learning Update]

12:43:00 PM    

Intellectual Property issues in e-Learning: Paying for things you never thought about.

This is only going to get worse. -- BB

More E-Learning Patent Suits Expected in 2004 - Learning Circuits. E-learning suppliers will dig deeper in 2004 to pay license fees for patents that cover inventions and business processes used in online learning. That’s the prediction from patent attorneys and other experts following another growth year on the intell [Online Learning Update]

12:37:06 PM    

Dept. of Obfuscation Reduction.

Info management terms. Good example of what happens when every small nuance in a concept is given its own multi-syllable term: Definition of information management terms. No wonder people get confused about technology/learning terms. via [elearnspace]

12:24:27 PM    

Designing what?

Instructional Design. Good resource (except for the .pdf powerpoint note format)What do Instructional Designers Design? via [elearnspace]

12:20:51 PM    

Content Management Systems: Comparison tool.

CMS Matrix. Resource for comparing features of various content management systems: CMS Matrix [elearnspace]

12:16:39 PM    

e-Learning Trends: Social Software.

"We Learning: Social software and E-Learning" two-part article in Learning Circuits.

Part I: defines social software and looks at basic tools now being used in e-Learning (collaborative software).

Part II: reviews software tools not yet widely adopted for e-Learning (although wikis, which are addressed here, evidently have a strong core of adopters in the education community).

George Siemens, in elearnspace, observes: "I'm much more at ease with a concept of learning that relies on communication/collaboration tools, versus learning that relies on learning management systems. The former puts the learner in control, the latter puts the instructor in control. [elearnspace]"

I'm not so much an either-or advocate for these tools or about locus of control issues. I think the whole concept of "learning" is changing as we understand more about the neurological elements, and along with it the concepts of "teaching" and "training" are also changing. But maybe my behaviorist roots are showing again. I do think that we have ignored for too long the place of communication and collaboration in learning, and I think many of our tools that are rooted in the one-way, lecture, classroom, sage-on-the-stage world are the wrong way to go for much of what has to be learned in an information-based world.

Thinking out loud again ... don't take any of this too seriously.

12:11:31 PM    

TrackBack and e-Learning.

The biggest problems I have with TrackBack are that it makes your weblog or other content too easily abused by spammers and that it can have unfortunate interactions with search engines. Also it's clumsy. -- BB

TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places. TrackBack: Where Blogs Learn Their Places. Trackback is the currently very underutlized twin of RSS. It's the push back part of blogging. But it suffers for the same reasons as any type of network-creating tool: too difficult to grasp how it works and what the benefits are. The process in doing it is easy. However, so much of our dialogue is generally one to one. I call you. You call me. I email you. You email me. Trackback allows for the development of peripheral conversations (almost as if we could be party to office gossip about our own thoughts). We still don't understand the value or role of that in communication and knowledge sharing. Our physical history of dialogue is too different. Still, trackback, or some similar concept, will eventually become an important concept in learning online. [elearnspace]

11:41:46 AM    

Monoculture and LMS.

I guess this is an interesting observation, but ... I'd have just said that too many LMS schemes try to make your learning problem fit their solution, charge too much for the privilege, and want to make it look like your fault when the solution fails to work. -- BB

Monoculture. Apply this same concern to enterprise level systems (particularly relating to learning management systems): Monoculture: "In biology, species with little genetic variation -- or "monocultures" -- are the most vulnerable to catastrophic epidemics. Species that share a single fatal flaw could be wiped out by a virus that can exploit that flaw. Genetic diversity increases the chances that at least some of the species will survive every attack." Alright, maybe it's a bit dramatic...but the point remains, to do things ONLY one way requires that many other options have to be ignored. This results in reduced innovation and creativity. Learning is too rich a process to be confined to the structure laid out by most learning management systems today. [elearnspace]

11:37:44 AM