Friday, June 29, 2007

Kineo Interview with Yours Truly

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of talking with Stephen Walsh of Kineo. I met the Kineo guys back at the April e-Learning Guild Event here in Boston and we've stayed in touch since.

Stephen and I talked about everything from rapid e-Learning, SecondLife and FaceBook, to the current exploding universe of e-Learning (what Gary Woodill referred to in yesterday's Emerging e-Learning Technologies presentation as the "hype cycle"). I feel honored to be included among such e-Learning notables as Jay Cross and Clive Shepherd who have also been interviewed by Kineo. Fancy company!

Because it was a Skype call, Stephen recorded it and you all can listen here.

Enjoy!

Update: I realized an embarrassing typo in my headline. I had written "Your's Truly" when it should be "Yours Truly".

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Emerging Technologies in e-Learning

I sat in on a lunchtime WebEx presentation with Gary Woodill -- Director, Research and Analysis, Brandon Hall Research. The topic: Emerging Technologies in e-Learning. (You can buy each of the three reports in this series for a mere $495.)

About Gary: Classroom teacher in the early 70's. 1984 doctorate in applied psychology. Developed over 60 e-learning programs. Lives in Ontario, Canada. Started with Brandon Hall in November.

"Emerging" = kinds of e-learning that are just starting to show up -- in labs, new company offerings. A big explosion in the last 2 years.

In the 90's there were one or two ways to do e-Learning: CDRoms and then the web. Pages and pictures and some sound and we turned the pages and took a test. This was "e-Learning 1.0".

Gary has worked on three "Emerging e-Learning" reports
  • Emerging E-Learning Technologies: Have looked at 52 emerging technologies. Can look at the TOC. (This was the focus of today's talk).
  • Emerging e-Learning Content: 45 different content formats
  • Emerging e-Learning Services: 24 different services
e-Learning Timeline:
  • 1920s teaching machines, radio, filmstrips. It's been around for a long time. Anytime a new thing comes out it's described as "revolutionary" - it's going to change the way we do things.
  • Even the pencil sharpener was considered revolutionary -- fear that we'd lose the ability to sharpen a pencil.
  • 1980s CD ROMS. Then the world wide web.

We've gone through one generation of online learning. Now we're into web 2.0 -- new technologies that weren't there 10 years ago.

e-Learning = teaching and learning through electronic methods. (Jay Cross in 1998) Not just self-directed learning, not just page turners.

Understanding e-Learning: The Restaurant Analogy

Restaurant
Dining Room + ordering service + food prep + delivery service = Dining Experience

Learning and environment technologies + requirements gathering + preparation of learning activities + delivery of learning activities = Learning Experience

Can go to a big restaurant and have lousy food -- similar gap with online learning. Instructional designers can take the tools and create a good learning experience or not.

Self Serve
Can also pick up packaged food -- self-service from a vending machine, etc.

Self-direct learning experience == a standard course prepared and available on a web site. Just like a vending machine, you do it by yourself.

Fast Food
Food prepared in small components -- small chunks cooked and rapid delivery.
Learning objects: standard small chunks put together and done in a rapid e-learning experience.

What if a whole new way of delivering high quality meals is developed? Hilcona out of Lichtenstein -- new frozen food tech.

Disruptive technology:
  • Restaurants vs. Frozen Foods
  • Movie Theaters vs. Blockbuster
  • Wired Phones vs. Cell phones
  • F2F Training vs. Online Training
A lot of current online training is not disruptive, still incremental.

Incremental vs. Disruptive Innovation.

Incremental:

Some forms of online training support current ways of doing things
  • Virtual classrooms, presentation software, authoring tools, assessment tools, LMS.
  • Doesn't change the basic model of an expert/teacher delivering to a group of learners. Requires some changes, but not highly disruptive.
Disruptive:
What can we do with this new tech that we couldn't do before? Disruptive technologies radically change how we do things.
  • Global Networking (finding any info at any time from all over the world)
  • Artificial Intelligence (affective computing, computer can personalize based on who you are)
  • Peer to Peer Technologies (instead of teacher being in charge -- people are learning from each other. This is how a lot of young people work today. They often don't take courses unless required/certification. I have a problem, where is the answer? Web? Book? Person in next cubical?)
  • Collaboration Software
  • Learner generated content (instead of teacher preparing things, learners put things online and edit together. Sometimes it's not even consciously done -- they might put up photos and tag them -- don't mean to generate content for others, but they do)
  • Wearable computing (being a cyborg and having implants is the stuff of sci fi -- but it's not that far away)
"We look at the future through rear-view mirrors." (Marshall McLuhan) -- I'm not trying to be a smarty-pants here, but I looked this up and Gary was close: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future."


Wireless vs. Horseless
Wireless will go the same route as the horseless carriage. We won't be talking about wires in a few years.

How you teach will depend on who you are teaching.

Technology Innovation Cycles:

Some books about technology innovation if you want more on this --
Innovation Cycles look like this:
  • Pioneering efforts to solve a problem
  • Breakthrough developments
  • Skepticism/new efforts by established companies
  • New designs -- explosion of forms -- this is where we're now with e-learning
  • Dominant design emerges
  • Consolidation, mergers, companies disappear (talked about the e-Learning Hype Cycle -- with the bust in 2000/2000 -- now we've got the same hype with web 2.0 -- we'll see a similar boom & bust cycle).
  • Incremental changes
There are always reactions to change and resistance: Western Union -- "the phone has too many shortcomings..."; AT&T gave back computer networking after a 6 month trial....

Established Product vs. Disruptive Change
Companies get worried and make "strategic changes" in their product -- add a new feature -- this is what's happened with established e-learning companies. But they're not looking at the disruptive changes.

The bell curve is made up of these areas:

  1. Developing Technologies
  2. Ascending Technologies
  3. Peaking Technologies
  4. Maturing Technologies
  5. Declining Technologies

(don't buy maturing and declining tech; problems with developing technologies -- important to understand where particular technologies are on this curve.)

List of 52 Emerging eLearning technologies: I just typed down some of these, you'll have to view the slide deck for a full list....
  • Animation Tools
  • Avatars
  • Blogs
  • Clickers
  • Gaming Tools
  • E-Portfolios
  • Mobil Learning
  • Personal Learning Environments
  • Personalization
  • Rapid e-Learning
  • Semantic Web
  • Simulation Tools
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Social Networking Tools
  • VoIP and Telephony
  • Wikis
  • Wearable
  • Peer to Peer
  • Authoring Tools
  • Haptics (the ability to touch things and get a sense of force feedback. Can put a glove on and you think you're feeling something...)
  • Learning Objects and Repositories
  • Location-based Technologies
  • Mashups (came from hiphop -- artists would take samples and pieces and put them together into one creative work. On the web = hybrid -- take content from multiple sites and put them into one. example: Google Earth + local pizza parlors + your personal photographs on top of that. Instead of building website on a server, can build a website that pulls from multiple. Uses SOAP -- simple object a protocol...)
  • Simulation Tools
General Trends:

  • Move from client-server to service oriented architectures (mashups) -- changes power relations and info control and where things can come from. Don't need to do it yourself -- can pull free info and put it into your site and add things to it.
  • Move from page metaphor. "Browserless web" -- ala Google Earth -- full networked application -- like CD ROMs days -- direct application.
  • Learner in more control -- push vs. pull
  • Complex multi-channel learning -- different "personalized" mix for reach learner (Trails study done at University of London -- move around the web you leave a trail as to where you went....)
  • From passive receiving interactive activities and collaboration
Mashups, SOA, and Services: Welcome to Web Hybrid Applications (from the e-Learning Guild)

Physical Technologies vs. Social Technologies:

  • Products change first, followed by processes
  • Classrooms as technologies
  • Now we have physical technologies and social tech is trying to keep up.
  • People don't like to change, so skepticism is that resistance.

INCREMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES
Examples

Agents: codebaby -- incremental -- doesn't change the model of someone telling you something. It's a talking head, a virtual agent. If your skeptical -- it's no different than standing in front of a classroom. This has been useful with literacy. Tire company -- used virtual agent to deliver online without a lot of reading.

Audio/Video Pulseplanet 2 minutes sound portraits of the planet earth.

Digital Ink: www.cs.swan.ac.uk/calculators -- can write on a whiteboard with your finger. As he writes the equations, the whiteboard solves them.

Tours & Virtual Field Trips -- construct a tour online with John Udell using Google maps of Keene, NH. This was an example of a mashup.

Visualizations

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
Examples

Collaboration Tools: wikipedia, flickr, digg

Mashups: http://www.panoramio.com

Motion Capture: http://ligwww.epfl.ch/~molet/mag_mocap.html

Immersive Environments/Virtual Reality: secondlife (check out Brandon Hall's island on Education Island)

Wearable Computing:
Smart Underwear

Get a hug from thousands of miles away from a cell phone:
Gizmodo Hug Shirt

Summary:
These disruptive tech will change radically how we do things.

New generation of e-Learning is more disruptive. Mix of tech, applications and services.

Change is constant.

Look at where you are at on the innovation curve.


Questions:

Learning Objects:
I was always skeptical of learning objects. People don't learn in chunks. It came from software objects -- works for programming code, but doesn't work for people. They may be a starting point, but they are generally not reusable because people want to change them. It's a descending technology.

If you're at the beginning of e-Learning -- Brandon Hall has an e-Learning 101 publication.

What you've heard today is based on the reports we've done. In those three reports, over 5,000 links to these technologies.

The new disruptive technologies are about collaboration. How you get people together. These are the ascending technologies. In the new few years, we'll see more of these and they will work better.

What tech are in a decline?
  • LMS have matured -- there's a generation of them that in decline. Proprietary LMS are in a decline. Any LMS needs to have open-standards (not just open source) so you can take your content to another source. LCMS is in decline -- because the learning object model doesn't really work.
  • Service-oriented architecture will replace that learning object.

My thoughts:

Gary's a good speaker. Over 300 people were on the call. Some issues with WebEx. There were no huge lightening bolts for me, but it was interesting.

Hug shirt? Hmmmm....

The browserless web -- that's new to me.

No surprise to see that rapid e-Learning is in the list of ascending technologies.

I can't imagine life without a pencil sharpener and would probably hurt myself severely if I tried to sharpen a pencil by hand. Think about all the old skills we've lost that we don't even think about. What skills will the next generation not even miss?

What dominant designs will emerge as we get through this next phase in the industry? I think rapid e-Learning will be a big one.

I was a victim of the e-Learning Hype Cycle of 2000/2001. The CD ROM based training company I worked at did not successfully make the leap to the Internet. Who will be the victims this time around?

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Facebook for the Enterprise

I'm still mucking around in Facebook, trying to get it.

Found this article, via Alec Saunders: Facebook for the Enterprise = Facebook. Provides some real examples of how business-folk are using FB; compares Facebook (emotional attachment) to LinkedIn (static resume).

But for the first time I can merge my social and business lives in ways that are not intrusive, that feel intuitive and which are both highly productive and deeply satisfying.

The Rise of Rapid e-Learning

Mike Alcock, MD of Atlantic Link Ltd has written an article over at Trainingzone.co.uk: The Rise of Rapid e-Learning.

Some insightful industry analysis, surrounded by a lot of marketing speak.

I'm going to quote heavily from the article here, inserting my own thoughts along the way.

Subject matter experts are embracing the more sophisticated rapid e-learning tools which allow server side development with international collaboration and “instant” course deployment. They have become adept at incorporating flash animations, pdfs, PowerPoint presentations, audio-visual material and any number of other techniques for getting training messages across to users in effective and imaginative ways.

This sounds like a bit of an overstatement to me. How adept are these SMEs really getting? Are they producing high-quality e-Learning? Is it really the SMEs using the tools? Are they working with in-house instructional designers? Does anyone actually have any real statistics on this? I'd be interested to see those.

This continuing technological development means that e-learning developers can no longer rely on being more technologically sophisticated than rapid e-learning and need to utilise their other natural competitive advantages to sell their services. These lie in their creativity, knowledge, understanding of instructional design techniques and their experience.

I completely agree with this. E-Learning development houses need to be able to demonstrate a clear value in their services. Why should companies go with e-Learning vendors when rapid e-Learning tools are available? Why pay someone else $25,000 when you can buy Articulate or Captive for under $500 and do it yourself? Either these companies won't have the time or the resources to do it internally, or they will be looking for that extra-edge that a focused e-Learning company can provide: instructional design expertise, graphic design, interaction design.

Next, the author provides a short case-study. I think this is definitely the wave of the future. I've seen this trend with my company as well:
Laurence Wilson, who runs an independent e-learning consultancy, recently employed this approach on a project for recruitment giant Vedior. By building the courses for Vedior on-line using a collaborative authoring tool, he was able to share the development process with the end customer, ensuring that the client was happy with every stage of the development. At the end of the development cycle, Vedior purchased the tools so that they could update and maintain the courses that Laurence had developed. The client can now commission Laurence to create additional courses for them, confident in the knowledge that they will receive top quality materials that they can then maintain themselves.

Have the e-Learning vendor create the first few custom programs. Then take the development in-house, using rapid e-Learning tools. Vendors create solid relationships with their customers this way -- creating an environment of collaboration and respect for mutual expertise. A partnership grows.


...further change in the industry which I believe, within five years, will see rapid e-learning tools being used almost universally in the production of e-learning, both in-house and by consultants. Many companies will continue to buy e-learning from consultants in order to draw on their non-technological expertise, but they will insist on these courses being written using rapid e-learning tools which enable the company to collaborate on, amend, and extend the learning as it suits them.

Let's see what happens.

Monday, June 25, 2007

The Blogging Dinner Table

Brian Grenier did an interesting informal survey of the edublogosphere, the results of which are quite interesting.

I was really struck by the age graph with the most respondents falling in the 35-50 year old range. Perhaps because that's me, and I like being trendy (well, not really).

Brian asks, "Though I am curious as to why the 18-30 year old segment is not better represented?"

I think the answer is that they're all on FaceBook and MySpace.

I did a interview with a twentysomething the other day, and thought her online habits were somewhat revealing. Granted, this was one person. She has FaceBook up all day long and reads a few of her friends' blogs, so that she can keep in touch. I would say the main point of her Internet usage is to stay connected in her personal life.

I remember way back to my twenties and I was much more interested in my friends and meeting new people than in professional development. FaceBook would have been great.

Carolyn commented in my interview post,
I try to do an informal survey of students when I go to campuses to deliver orientations to our online courses. The big three for our students are Facebook (almost every student has an account), chat and text messaging on mobile phones. The big driver for our students seems to be the need to stay connected with friends.

As I've, ahem, matured and married and had children, my social needs are much less in the forefront. But my need and desire for professional connection and professional development have certainly grown. And blogging fits that need. Blogging fills a gap I didn't even know I had.

It's a web 2.0 professional maturity lifecycle model.

Getting Pysched for FaceBook

I'm definitely feeling out-of-my element in this whole FaceBook thing. I'm trying to get into it and discover it's potential professional uses. I now have five friends (in case you were wondering). And I've joined a group: FaceBook for Business in which I've posted some questions, gotten some answers, and been asked to participate in a beta test for a FaceBook widget.

I'm just scratching the surface, I suppose. There must be more, or is there?

Ran across this article, The Psychology of FaceBook, which talks about the collecting of friends and relationships aspect of it all.

FaceBook is in transition, that's for sure. I am joining for the first time with completely professional interests. Others have established identities and networks built on personal interests. Is it ok to blend this all together? Doesn't that threaten to get too weird?

I see FaceBook groups for instructional designers, but not much is going on there. There's an e-Learning group -- on first glance it appears to be just a collection of people without the content of the blogosphere.

If you're interested in exploring, please friend me. I'm feeling lonely and really nerdy. I need a bigger collection. I'd like to push this somehow, but I'm not sure.

Friday, June 22, 2007

The Buzzing Blogging Hive


This morning I had the pleasure to chat live with Brent Schlenker and Allison Anderson in one of Brent's occasional "talk casts". It was very cool on many levels. If you're up to it, listen in....by the end of the hour or so (and bless you if you actually make it to the end) Brent and I just ramble on a whole variety of e-Learning topics.

Early in the conversation Brent asked us about our blogging experiences. I shared my beehive metaphor, which I now share with you in a more fully fleshed out form:

Way back when, when I first started blogging (gosh, it was the summer of 2006; can't believe how much time has gone by! Seems like just last year....) -- so way back then I experienced the web in as a one-dimensional form. A flat wall of websites and wikipedia and stuff.

When I first tried out blogging, I was in a vacuum. I hadn't read other people's blogs yet, so I didn't get it. It was a very flat world.

Somewhere along the line as my current job evolved, I started doing more "research". And I started reading more blogs. And it was like pulling a board away, starting to get a peek at what lay underneath the flat wall.

Somewhere along the line, I got up the guts to actually comment on someone's blog and then I realized I needed to just throw my voice into the mix. It turns out, I had something to say, and I wanted to be a part of whatever this thing was/is.

Eventually the board came off completely. There was some chipping of paint and a bloodied finger on a rusty nail. Underneath the flat wall, I discovered a teeming hive of hard-working honey bees. Buzzing loudly. A lot of cross-pollination. Dripping with the sweet nectar of knowledge, the honey of all of this collective work.

This flat web wall became a whole 'nother world.

Each of us is in our own little honeycomb cell, but we journey far throughout the day.

Hives overlap -- where are the boundaries between corporate e-Learning and educational technology and k-12 teachers and higher ed and non-profit management and enterprise 2.0?

The boundaries get blurrier the longer I buzz around.

The Queen Bee for whom we're all working -- is she the greater good of humankind? Is it all that noble? I hope so.

It sure is fun.

image courtesy of stockexchange: Alison Oxley