#SCORM the future of #elearning? Get involved!

The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) people have just launched two brand new initiatives that anyone can join and take part in. The great thing about the ADL approach is that it is all about durability and scalability (yes, I like that!). With the start of a new age, the ADL consortium kicks of the quest for a new, contemporary SCORM and pedagogy for the future of learning. This is a great initiative and you, me, all of us are invited to draw our educational future.

A bit about both initiatives

The Tin Can project: rethinking SCORM
SCORM has been around for 10 years! Ten years?! Just imagine how the world has changed from a 'yes, a LMS is wonderful, and switching content around various LMS's rules!' to "Nah, just learn through connectivity, why use LMS or scorm?'. I am not a great fan of LMS, but I do feel that standards in learning materials still have a big potential. As such I am all into this new SCORM initiative!

Want to read more? Lookie here:
The Tin Can project page;
The Tin Can Twitter account.


The future learning experience
This is my cup of tea: pedagogy meets technology, #yam!

The Future Learning Experience project returns ADL to its roots in Applied Research & Development. We envision this effort will contain several sub-projects aimed at providing learning solutions for DoD stakeholders. Future Learning Experience projects, regardless of what they specifically enable, will follow similar design and development patterns that include a transition phase to shift pedagogy, technology, best collected practices, policy and procedures to the DoD, government, academia and industry.

Join for the first theme of the project: definition
The exchange of knowledge happens via online chats and meetings of which three will be occurring in January 2011:Thursday, January 13, 11:30am ET & 8:30pm ET, a #lrnchat will be focused on working with learning technology standards. #lrnchat is an online chat over the social messaging service Twitter that happens twice every Thursday, due to its popularity in the US and overseas. Follow @lrnchat for more information.

Details will be posted soon, but on the week of January 17, there will be a Department of Defense ADL (DADL) Working Group meeting focused on the Future Learning Experience Project
Tuesday, January 25, 11:30am ET, a first #ADLchat will be occur on Twitter. In a
similar format to #lrnchat, this live chat will focus on ADL-specific
topics and allow time for your questions to be addressed in real-time by
the ADL team. Follow @lrnEXP for details.

Want to know more? Lookie here
Project website;
The project's Twitter account;

And thank you to ADL's almighty Aaron Silvers for getting me up to date!

Mimi Ito: what the user wants in mLearning at mLearnCon

A dressed in black woman with Japanese features who talks amazingly quick and eloquent.

Device proliferation is one of the specific features of the new mobile user. It is personal, ambient contact enabling, sharing media. People will go to a great length to have personal, customized media based on - sometimes - a conglomerate of devices.
Japanese youth are into mobile media longer than any other user group around the world. Very few learners and educators take advantage of the new mobile possibilites. We should overcome the boundaries of schools, companies... and really get into mobile sharing and learning across boundaries.
Kids always reiterified boundaries, but in todays society the boundaries are more than ever challenged. The media use of youth has had an innovative influence on society.
Technology becomes a proxi for social context. So both social and context are important. The relationship to mobile devices is a proxi for the social relationships the users have.

We have moved to an era that we can be part of the media flux 24/7. An era of multitasking, where the constant stream of social media is constantly there. Downside of connectivity => constant attention cuts => need new mechanisms to filtering focus.

fluid flows of knowledge is the model we should follow, dixit Ito, refering to Hagel, Brown and Davidson. Using connectivity as resources for lifelong Learning.
social media = social communication + personal media.
Peer sharing, social viewing, locative media, transmedia. The nice thing about mLearning is that it makes it ubiqiutous.

Peer sharing
shift from traditional top-down formal formats to connected, informal formats.
In a lot of ways the mobile phone is the first personal computer (emerging regions, youngsters) = personal connectivity to the mobile world. It is an individual device = powerful adoption pusher.
looks into the effect of mobile phone communication on language, e.g. 'U rawk', 'drinkin til 2'
The important thing about sms is sharing presents, it is about sharing presents, it is about sense of social connection, a social wrapper. Fulltime intimate community. Text messaging drove mobile internet in Japan, because it was not possible to text message across different providers. With this push into mobile internet, other sharing medias followed.
Connecting all this mobile connectivity into learning.
Participatory learning emerged, and the pc was not the best option for this mobile exchange. Ambient access became possible, and this ambient access was linked to the specialist community, or the trusted community. So this enabled building on each others experience. Peer learning gave much better results than the hierarchal learning that was happening before.

Linking social media to location: locative media
inward photography, putting themselves in the picture. Outward with pictures. Community pictures: mobile social network that captures where youth was when and which can be shared afterwards as well, so they are always carrying mini sticker albums around (Inge: this is reallllly great!).
Ambient storytelling: university of social California. application that launches once you enter a building, and it provides a set of tools that can be used in the building, creating a knowledge database of what people do and emerse in when moving through the building (qrcodes, ...). Effort to build a history, linked to a location. Visitors and residents of the building can also participate in these activities.

Social viewing
connecting through their mobiles to connect to similar experiences. Japanese example: Nico video: annotations can be made on the videos, so if you are watching a video with many, you can add your remarks at any part of the video and you can put it on any scene of the video. Access to video is increasingly via mobile, but there is a lack of social connectivity in videa and it is precisely the communication layer that drives the learning and attention. One exaple Project k-nect: students could connect to their mentors, peers, content => learning outcomes: Bjerede, Atkins and Dede, it is connectivity to learning AND mentoring (Inge check this).

Transmedia
Social glue happens. Linking up the specific features of mobile devices, and linking them to other media. Example: pokemon, media sensation that crosses cultures and regions. Infiltrating social meanings, it is a huge knowledge economy behind it. content is about gaming and social interaction. Media mobilezes kids to act: viral contageous media. Media is the social glue, one pokemon is taking out, and other people flock together. Opportunistic learning moments, because they have these portable devices. Context of learning and social learning. Gaming is based on sharing more and more, social learning wrapper is getting more important by game designers. Social experience is part of gaming for nintendo, and since pokemon they really got the idea and importance of social gaming. Social connection with other platforms is also gaining importance with Nintendo DS. Now they start with Nintendo DS classrooms.

Manhatta project: collaborative project in New York city, drawing on the work of eric anderson, who looked at the ecosystem of New York. These databases and learning resources is put online. Now a game is made, to get youngsters out in the streets of New York and share eco locations with the database. So knowledge base knowledge media.

Inge question: there have been some projects in trying to get kids of around 12 years old a different learning experience, different in it not being traditional school curriculum, but do you know of any early smaller children initiatives? Ito answer: most of the initiatives are for the middleschool kids, quest for learning school, manhatta project... but it is covering these kids, because they are at an age where they move from being inquisitive to being blocked by peer pressure.

Question to you all: do any of you know of any initiatives directed at really young kids (even beginning with kids only a couple of months old up to 6 year olds) that embeds the new media results that come out of these researches into new forms of education?

Big Question: 5 strategies to keep up with all the latest technologies

In the Big Question launched by Tony Karrer this month, he wonders how do we keep up? Posting a great central sub-question: isn't this an ever-expanding universe of tech goodies? Will we be forced to chase hot tools and social platforms to stay competitive? How the heck are we supposed to stay up to speed on all the latest stuff and be successful using it personally and professionally?

This is a question I pose myself every week. The amount of technological advances that are launched is staggering and numbing at times. It is sometimes numbing, because I feel stupid and behind when following all these new apps and innovations. And taking all these new innovations into account, how can I successfully implement them for learning purposes? The more extreme these innovations seem, the more I feel out of touch with it, and the more estranged I become.

To reduce this uneasy feeling, I use 5 strategies to keep up:

Strategy 1: true innovation through collaboration and trust
The last new development that blew my mind was a lens equipped with nanotechnology that enabled augmented reality. Just imagine that you put in a lens and you can immediately see the information you need to make full use of the knowledge you have or want to obtain? Within a near future relevant data can be superimposed on the visual perception of the person wearing the lens. This has great potential for surgeons, engineers, ... but also for students, for educators as this takes learning, and specifically authentic learning to a complete new level (without too much of an intrusion). This technology will allow professionals to have the latest updated information on e.g. their patient, or the surgery they are performing, or the history of a place you are standing in, or the evolution of a certain aspect of architecture...

Now on a completely different scale: while writing this I realized I just got a new technology out as well thanks to a wonderful team (the iphone, android - and by now multiple phones - to Moodle project). So sometimes, even simple, ordinary educational people such as me can add their two cents to new developments? This made me wonder on what it was that enabled the innovation. I wrote about the little steps we took to get to an educational innovation earlier, but the most important one was: collaboration and trust.

There is no longer - was there ever? - one person making an amazing innovation. Nowadays there is always a complete team behind an innovation, and most of the time it is an multidisciplinary team. To keep up with innovations that might have educational potential, I connect to people I trust and admire. So, one of my key keeping up strategies is to construct my own trusted knowledge team, assembled from different disciplines.

Strategy 2: follow just a couple of tech-zines:

• Lifehacker
• Techcrunch
• Read and Write Web
• Geek’s mobile news
• Afrigadget.com

Now this latest one always brings me back to earth and feeds my creativity. Afrigadget recycles, finds amazing solutions for priority needs, and gets the mind going. For instance this wonderful African robot made from spare parts of television sets (that is something more than lego’s mindstorm).

Technology is not all about miniaturization (like nanotechnology), it is about using what is there and improving to fit the needs of your setting or goal.


Strategy 3: keep the focus on my own educational challenges
Keeping a broad perspective is good, but for deepening my knowledge on certain innovations, I need to filter what is out there. Picking up what might solve an educational problem I encounter or focusing on what I can use and what might be helpful for future problems (it is always good to be proactive in any professional branch), helps me to overcome possible educational challenges.

Strategy 4: tuning out, allow my brain some time alone
Another important one is simply tuning out. Let all the information that I absorbed become structured in my head and simply wait for it to be processed. This might sound strange, but I feel that my mind knows better than me at times. It knows how to arrange all the information and turn it into something useful. But it only does this when I let it have its ‘playtime’. During that time I chop wood, rearrange my garage, dig holes in my garden… do all sorts of things that do not include using my professional thinking mind/brain. I trust my brain to come up with great ideas, I know it feels very happy when it can do so.

Strategy 5: reflect, write and share
And last but not least: feeding it all back to you! There is no network to get anything from, unless you give. And let’s face it: giving simply feels good also. Reflecting on newly obtained knowledge, and writing about it gives structure to all the new ideas. It might also safe others time in finding solutions for their challenges, or others can help fine tune it.

So in short how do I keep up?

1. Getting and giving to a network of people that I trust and are knowledgeable;
2. Staying on top through tech-zines;
3. Balance my curiosity for new innovations, with my focus on new educational needs that need to be tackled.
4. Tuning out from time to time.
5. Sharing the new found knowledge.

By the way @TonyKarrer, I will be heading your way in June, attending the mLearncon2010 in San Diego from 15 - 17 June 2010.

Are you a Homo Competens? Bert De Coutere can tell

Last week I met Bert De Coutere during a preliminary meeting on a platform site for eLearning in Belgium. Bert is a great learning person to know. He is involved in learning management at IBM and as such he has given so many presentations, lessons, workshops… that I think he is one of the sole people you can just ask to stand up and share knowledge on any learning strategy. His motto is: learn, do, share! And … he is Competent!

But how can we tell anyone is actually competent? How do you know you are competent and can we measure it? Well, Bert came up with a wonderful book on the topic. The book is called Homo Competens: let's talk about competent people in the network age; or HoCo for short. The book has a lot of links and references and it is updated regularly (contemporary eBook).

If you are into human resources, change management, or management as such, you might want to buy this book. In just as little as 196 pages Bert opens up a framework for measuring competency.

Now, this is the first book of Bert on the subject and as such he covers all the basics. The book also features some introspective questions, which lead you to think about yourself in a more Socratic way. Is what you think you are really true? And clear for others?

Some of the key pointers from the book:

• You build and maintain competencies by doing three kinds of activities: you learn, you do and you share. You do these all at once, but the biggest category of activity will determine your level as apprentice, practitioner or master.
• Competencies have only indirect value. The real value is in what you DO, not in what you are ABLE to do.
• The ownership of your competence is shared amongst yourself, your employer and your government. In this day and age, you have the biggest claims on your competence. Therefore you re the prime responsible for selecting them and investing in them.
• When you are craving for recognition, share!

The book makes you think. As I was reading, I mostly agreed, but sometimes disagreed with what Bert wrote, and that – to me – makes up a good professional book, as I feel that I am thinking, I know I am learning (adding to my competency).

If you want to look around first, check out the Google books or just simply jump on it and buy it from Lulu (the eBook is only 10 USD!).

I found it a wonderful read, and the book really made a difference in how I analyze my own competency. So I agree with what Clive Shepherd wrote “I know because Bert told me so.”

Bert, I am already looking forward to the follow up book! If you want to stay on top of Bert's activities, you can follow his blog.

The book is also stuffed with Bert's drawings (REALLY nice feature), here are some of them:

Competent People In 10 Pictures

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere.

PhD thesis on tagging learning resources in a multilangual context

For years people are pushed to tag their learning resources, but I often wondered whether these tagged resources actually do get reused? Or whether tagging between peers that live in various parts of the world only works in theory, but does in fact not result in sharing resources in actual learning life. But here comes Riina with a clear answer to these questions.

Some great shared learning resources have been around for some years: the Open Educational Resources Commons, which was set-up by ISKME which was launched Februari 2007 and has strong partners e.g. UNESCO, OER commons works with tags a lot. Another renowned one is of course the MIT opencourseware, but then the latter does not use tags much.

There are also other smaller scale projects that share their learning resources. Together with other ITM-people I am working on an eLearning partnership that enables all to exchange learning modules, hence decreasing all our time in developing online courses, because we divide the workload and at the same time enabling us all to share our content/elearning knowledge across many different settings. This is way I was thrilled reading the phd in question that covers sharing learning resources across borders and more specifically how tags work in those situations.
At the same time, I sometimes wonder what happens with any Dutch work I write? How can people find Dutch papers, or articles in any other language, if they only have tags to go on (which are sometimes quite different depending on the language). Of course tagging in different languages for the same written document might be an answer, but Riina offers a far more interesting and workable solution, which relies on networks underlying the content based mainly on the three factors: user, item, tag.

Riina Vuorikari wrote her phd entitled "Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context", and in the introduction she describes the main ideas behind it:

"Social tags offer an interesting aspect to study learning resources, its metadata
and how users interact with them in a multilingual context. Tags, as opposed to conventional metadata description such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), are free, non-hierarchical keywords that end-users associate with a digital artefact, e.g. a learning resource. Tags are formed by a triple of (user,item,tag).
Tags and the resulting networks, folksonomies, are commonly modelled as tripartite hypergraphs. This ternary relational structure gives rise to a number of novel relations to better understand, capture and model contextual information. The (user,item) relationship is a parameter of the interaction between a user and the learning resource. In the (user,tag) relation, on the other hand, tags are regarded as part of the user model that reflects user’s interests and intentions. The full relational structure emphasises the (item,tag) relation that allows tags to be part of describing the item that they are related to (e.g. a learning resource). Additionally, the (item,tag) relation can be extended to the metadata of the item (e.g. LOM), from which an additional relationship (tag,LOM) is inferred."

The thesis describes two exploratory studies and "introduces a trilogy of studies focusing on self-organisation, flexibility and robustness of a social tagging system using empirical, behavioural data captured from log-files and user’s attention metadata trails on a number of learning resource portals and platforms in a multilingual context."

This is a very interesting thesis (181 pages) on tagging and how to get the most out of it.

(photo information from thesis: Figure 8.1. A learning network: a social network graph of about 5000 eTwinning teachers connected through common projects. The nodes are teachers and the edges are common projects (Breuer, Klamma, Cao & Vuorikari, 2009).

European report on 'The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy' also mobile social media

The European Commission JRC (Joint Research Center), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies released last week at the EU Ministerial Conference on e-Government a comprehensive report on social and economic implications of Social Computing [aka Web2.0, social media].

'The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy' (Eds.) Yves Punie, Wainer Lusoli, Clara Centeno, Gianluca Misuraca and David Broster. Authors: Kirsti Ala-Mutka, David Broster, Romina Cachia, Clara Centeno, Claudio Feijóo, Alexandra Haché, Stefano Kluzer, Sven Lindmark, Wainer Lusoli, Gianluca Misuraca, Corina Pascu, Yves Punie and José A. Valverde.

For anyone interested in social media and the impact it has on both society and economy, this is a very worthwhile report.

This wide report covers different thematic areas. In addition to a cross-cutting analysis across areas in Ch1: Key findings, Future Prospects and Policy Implications

It contains thematic analysis:
Ch2: The adoption and Use of Social Computing
Ch3: Social Computing from a Business Perspective
Ch4: Social Computing and the Mobile Ecosystem
Ch5: Social Computing and Identity
Ch6: Social Computing and Learning
Ch7: Social Computing and Social Inclusion
Ch8: Social Computing and Health
Ch9: Social Computing and Governance

In Part II: On defining Social Computing, its Scope and Significance, you have a chapter (chapter 4) which is completely dedicated to mobile social computing and which offers some great tables and analysis. You might want to click on the image to enlarge the picture, it gives an overview of the techno-economic activities in the mobile content and applications ecosystem. So just taken out two quotes from the report:

"Learning from users (user-driven innovation) is the response increasingly adopted both by the new mobile industry and by new public policies (e.g., by providing wide access to “living labs”). At the same time, it could also be argued that users are still not empowered enough in the mobile
domain. Currently, users are not in control (or even aware) of the information that players cross the mobile value chain have about them and how this could be used."
With a relevant quote to low resource areas: "it must not be forgotten that the base conditions for the success of any mobile advanced service are the availability and affordability of mobile broadband connections and the availability, affordability and usability of mobile devices. In particular, these conditions have an inclusive angle for those people who are under served by market priorities."

From their website: "The rapid growth of web 2.0, or social computing, allows users to play an influential role in the way commercial and public products and services are shaped. The report "The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy", published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered.

The report shows that social computing goes beyond individual networking and entertainment, as it empowers tens of millions of Europeans to support their work, health, learning and citizenship in innovative ways.

The research found that social computing is reshaping work practices, as employees join communities of interest outside their organisations to improve their knowledge and skills. Social innovation enabled by social computing contributes to improved lifelong learning processes, business competitiveness, social inclusion and integration of immigrants, among others."

Blogphilosophy: does the international eLearning we provide make the world a poorer place?

Jonathan Gosier who currently lives in Kampala, Uganda has just published a post on singularities of globalization and convergeance.

In his post he says that "Increasingly, people the world over share the same cultural moments. The Presidential Inauguration of U.S.A. President Barrack Obama on Tuesday was among the top events witnessed by more eyes on this planet than ANYTHING ever…in all of human history. This is not only due to the increasing number of methods available to consume media (the Web, Satellite TV, Digital TV, Mobiles etc.) but due to increasingly global nature of everything about us."

I agree with him that the USA is taking over once again. Although I am in favor of the president shift towards Obama, I do feel it is strange - and at the same time very meaningful - that a formality as an inauguration is headline news across the world. I cannot help but think that with Obama the US supremacy in the new world order has become clearer. In my opinion the supremacy of one nation (whatever nation it is or however it is called) is a loss for human diversity, human creativity and human knowledge creation. Do not get me wrong I love the creativity of Americans and their culture, but I also love other cultures and their creativity. This dichotomy in my thinking sometimes gets the better of me when I am asked to be involved in setting up eLearning projects in South countries.

With introducing eLearning in regions that are increasingly investing in technology I tend to feel a bit awkward. Promoting education for all is of course without doubt a good thing. But when that education is not constructed locally or with locally build technology, it makes learners and/or learner providers dependant on outside manufacturers, non-local educational methods and knowledge. For instance, if I am building a course I use software's, although I try to use the open source softwares as much as possible, I am sometimes seduced to working with commercial software for some reason I find valid at that time. So by delivering that type of eLearning courses, I am promoting indirectly the softwares (and supposed necessary connectivity) it needs to be viewed. The methodology used in these courses is also pushed, although other regions might benefit from their long lasting educational methods. By offering courses, regions might be seduced in getting the equipment necessary to follow these courses, so they buy technology that is in most cases sold from other - more dominant - regions. The same with the content. If content or one type of knowledge is pushed, don't we risk losing other valuable knowledge? In certain areas they use medicines from local plants, but if knowledge is pushed that disregards those local medicine techniques, they risk to be lost (just because the pushy knowledge people did not pick that specific knowledge up).
So although I want to promote knowledge, critical thinking, ... I indirectly help big companies from the north to sell their products to the south. So in a way I help to promote a monoculture. And monocultures are bound to fail in the longrun, because it is diversity that keeps all of us fresh and evolving rapidly.

If enabling learning is not a participatory process in which a diversity of methodologies, knowledge, personal insights can be exchanged and build upon, we risk losing the knowledge that is out there, yet not (fully) accounted for. That is one of the reasons why I am a promotor of participatory learning techniques. Nevertheless this doubt of whether or not I am doing the right thing keeps on popping up.

Thankfully I learn a lot from my colleagues in other regions. They come up with great solutions, find new hardware and software solutions that ease my mind, but still. Do we all need to learn the same things in the same world and consume the same things and as such disregard diversity? Is one culture a good solution for us all?

(Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net.)