Michael Wesch at #OEB08

Michael Wesch has been social mediated innumerous times because he pushes the learning agenda forward. He was keynoting at OEB08 and it was a blast. He managed to mix humor, storytelling, self-relativation and content. The topics he raised were not that new if you follow the learning sphere, but he put everything in an inspiring framework.

Michael Wesch works at Kansas University and he mixes anthropology, ethnology and culture into the new learning equation. He does not only talk about it, he immediately uses it. For a quick intro, visit his youtube channel. His most famous video is probably the 'Web2.0... the machine is using us'.

He talked about the future of education in which he stated that there is currently a 'crisis of significance' in which he states 'How can we create students who can create meaningful connections'. He linked his subject to Papua New Guinea where he lived for an extended time.

For this statement on the 'crisis of significance' he referred to YouTube which has enabled a real shift both in the media world and in the educational realm. Learners no longer are passive, but they create content, distribute, comment, organize, filter ... learners have become active learners and they are becoming more and more connected.
Web2.0 has created a revolution of which the complete impact is becoming clearer everyday. Learners are connecting to their taste in music, culture, content and they are no longer passively taking over the toplists that big media multinationals propose.

This revolution affects learners on many levels. Unfortunately our schools have not adapted to this revolution, they are still very traditional in approach. So many learners are in dubio, they love learning and creating, discussing content... but they do not like the rigid traditional educational ways that fill a lot of our school's curriculum.

Michael Wesch is all over the web, if you are interested this is the link to a paper he wrote about antiteaching.

mobile learning and QRcodes: my session and the audience's ideas

The OEB08 session in which I spoke was amazingly rich in content (talking about the other participants). They all had great applications making use of language technology, sms, multimedia and all combining it in mobile examples. Because I was the last one to speak, I was too nervous to take notes while they were giving it. I looked up links to them:

Gavin Cooney, Learnosity, Ireland on 'Voice: The Killer Application of Mobile Learning';

Mathew James Constantine, IE Business School, Spain on 'Mind the Gap – Narrowing the Distance to the Learner'

Sarah Cornelius, University of Aberdeen, UK on 'Real-Time Simulation on the Move: The Learner Context'


The audience that was present was amazing. They gave idea after idea on how the QRcodes could be used in a learning or broader setting, it was mindblowing. I tried to jott down all of the ideas mentioned:

• Adding it to a business card;
• Using QRcodes to promote an article or thing on the go (in the street, open space);
• using it inside buildings (flour plans);
• using it in tours by linking it to audio that give background information on the sights;
• using it in (newspaper) articles to link to extra/background information;
• putting it on geocaching games and articles;
• using it to guide people directly to a map to go to a hotel, university... (from bus stops, train stations...);
• linking it to audio samples to construct a bigger sound landscape;
• using it to guide learners to sights and learning spaces;
• making a mobile tour and in that tour linking certain spots to the Basque language (or any other language, but I liked the idea of linking it to a language that is not mainstream yet very rich).

So I was very thankful to everyone that attended with all their great ideas.
I also uploaded my presentation for anyone who is interested.

OEB08 Mobile Barcodes QRcodes Inge de Waard

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: oeb2008 qrcode)

OEB08 informal learning and social media workshop by Jay Cross and guides

Jay is a wise man using humor to spice up any workshop and at this occasion he was wearing a yellow tie and suspenders. The audience was very diverse but all with an eLearning perspective and their social media background as well.

The workshop is taken a complete day, but unfortunately I had a deadline to meet in the afternoon, so what follows is only on the first part of the day (before lunch). Jay Cross had asked me to be one of the 'guides' during the workshop. A guide is someone who is into informal learning and/or using social media and willing to share information on it. I am always willing to share, so I rushed to the occasion! Thanks for asking Jay!

Where can you find all of what Jay Cross is talking about:
internet time page;
Jay Cross homepage;

Interesting links:
The cluetrain manifesto: for handling intellectual property in the open internet age.
Web2.0 framework by Ross Dawson;
unconferencing as a conference format;
barcamp as an example of an unconference.

fish bowl format in conferences
idea: for people to be able to have a conversation in a little group but which is aired to the complete group (concentric circles for interaction).
sometimes it works, other times it falls flat. It is important to have a common purpose and to have a format that supports that, otherwise participants might not be that pleased with the issues that will be raised.

Jay mentions he is a bit dubious towards books: a publisher takes a year before publishing it. A book freezes the content for always. The author does not need to get into conversation with the readers. So how do we go about in opening books and make them updateable? He tries it:
Un-book from Jay Cross: Learnscaping

The workshop flow:
We started to know each other (= the participants) by introducing the person on each of our right, building some connections in our heads. And after the intro the workshop was a mix of informal information giving by 'guides' and more didactical as well as informal parts given by Jay.

My two cents that I shared during the workshop:

• kids learn naturally and by doing.... there is no framework, no structure, they just do it: Web2.0 allows this kind of learning. It enables you to explore the knowledge that is out there and to connect with people with similar or related interests.
• Informal learning allows you to connect with people you might otherwise not know off, or in different fields, but by connecting you can see other ways of working to come to the same results and maybe ... these new ways are more (cost)-effective.
• Informal learning is about making choices: you know which knowledge you need, you select, you connect and you put it out there the way you want it for other people to find.
• Informal learning is about forgetting pride: you will never know it all, so be humble and open for learning each day. Titles no longer matter, it is what you effectively know and exchange and collaborate on (what you are really doing) that matters.
• Informal learning makes you critical: you just do not swallow everything that is send to you, you choose, decipher and take what you need because it seems a better fit.
• Social media allows you to let go of rules and explore new possibilities.
• Social media is global, it is everywhere, also in low resource areas: they are using it: mobile journalism, farmers learn through blogging, the whole world is exchanging and discussing knowledge.
• Social media is personal: you make it to fit your interests, yet building on all of our knowledge and insights.

What I jotted down in the course of the workshop:
The world is in an economical crisis, but this is happening at any major cultural/socio-economic shift the industrial age is ending, the knowledge age is here. Informal learning is all about knowledge.

How people learn:

• natural learning
• spontaneous
• informal
• unbounded
• adaptive
• fun
• self-service

what is natural learning?
You learn from mistakes (because it is discussed, because you get a first hand experience of what works and what is not = practical experience),
conversation results in learning (because it is all about communication, argumenting why yes or why not, critical thinking...)
collaboration is learning (one person never again will know it all, not even the largest chunk of anything, the world is a rhizome = everyone is connected and the connections are not always visible).

informal learning is typically

• no curriculum;
• no constraint time frame;
• push (formal which pushes the content to you) versus pull (informal and what you need you can and do find - or build);
• openness and curiosity.

the world is changing at warp speed
some management and supervision have not taken account these changes: firewall restrictions, company rules... But as we look at new learners (not necessarily young but the learner explorers) we find that control is out of date. So it is time to give workers trust and giving them credit for their own way of knowledge gathering.
Discussing on ROI are no longer completely valid as it comes to the growing amount of intangibles that companies have, because ROI focuses on tangibles only. In the business world virtuality is a fact, intangibles are a fact, think of google and its assets.

But social media is about sharing, and openness sometimes gives a strange feeling
openness is a starting point, semantic web which tells you all about private things, but who do you want to give access to what of your private life).
Openness is a starting off point, but which will demand more access rules.
So how can we share things? And to what extend are we willing to change? And to what extend does management allow us to change?

One of the reasons for not opening up is because you want to keep out the people that want to burn the house down. This is something we want to get pinned down.

Questions that were raised (will go into these in later blogposts):

• how do you measure informal learning outcomes?
• how do we cope with intellectual property in an open access environment?
• how do you convince people of using new technologies within an institute or company?

A slideshow on the future of books:

The unbook

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: books book)

When an economic crisis hits eLearning, what do managers have to say about it?

I really need your help here, if you are a conscientious eLearn provider, please add to the discussion (on your blog, forum, here,… anywhere). I came across some old school thinking and solutions regarding eLearning (see below).

There is an old economic tendency that in times of crisis the training department budgets get cut. For more then one reason I tend to disagree with this tendency. When a crisis hits your organisation or company, that is the right moment to rethink training and boost it. The same with R&D (research and development), because it is by rethinking you can outrun your competitors. If something did not keep you from a crisis, something is amiss and new methods can help you overcome them. You need training to get people thinking out of the box (or broaden their box) and you need training to implement new methods that will counter the crisis within the company quickly.

Last week I read an article on the subject in the sciencedaily, which was also listed in and prlog and in innovationsreport (it is a press release issued by Online Educa Berlin - OEB): “The present world’s economic woes are opening up new opportunities for innovative forms of education and training such as informal learning, e-learning and blended learning. Faced with shrinking budgets, the use of learning technologies is becoming increasingly attractive for businesses: This was the appraisal articulated by the consultants and training professionals who responded to an impromptu survey undertaken by the international e-learning conference Online Educa Berlin.”

In the press release there are some nuanced quotes and then a very scary one. A nuanced one from Sue Martin from Global Certification Portfolio Manager at SAP: "In times of tight or zero travel budgets and increasing environmental awareness, the importance of learning technologies has to be given a second look.”
Yes, I agree. A second and in-depth look at training (face-to-face and eLearning) is the way to go. But will eLearning cost less than face-to-face? Well, not sure, certainly not in the beginning of the development. And the myths of eLearning could pop-up again too.

With this in mind I predict a growing need for more qualified eLearning evaluators. They will enable management to get a good idea of what works most efficiently (yes, I am also an eLearning evaluator) and it will result in solid eLearning.

But then the article lists a very scary quote!

Christophe Binot, E-Learning Manager at the French oil firm Total, adds: "The newest solutions make it possible to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a course for a thousand employees within two hours. The ROI outperfoms training in a classroom."

What the HUH!!! eLearning is NOT about turning some kind of stupid non-descriptive, non-assessing powerpoint into a course! Can you imagine the non-interactivity of these powerpoints?! I mean in TWO HOURS! Oh my lord and goddess! How can OEB keep this quote in a press release? They know better than that. Okay he will be a keynote speaker at their conference, but looking at what is quoted here, I can almost imagine what his speech will be about (but I give him the benefit of the doubt, miss quotations have been made before).

Maybe winter is getting to me... darn dark clouded days...

CALL FOR mobile learning PAPERS - Deadline for submissions (2nd call): 19 December 2008

For the mobile enthusiasts out there (and if you have not put in a paper) look below. I am part of the review committee and the conference and speakers looks promising. All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process:

IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE MOBILE LEARNING 2009 Barcelona, Spain, 26 to 28 February 2009

* Keynote Speakers (confirmed):
Professor Angela McFarlane, Director of Content and Learning at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK Professor Hiroaki Ogata, Dept. of Information Science and Intelligent Systems, University of Tokushima, Japan

* Conference background and goals

User Created Content & Mobile Technologies: From Consumers to Creators bypassing the Learning opportunity?

Over the pass three years Mobile and Social technologies have featured strongly in the Horizon Report series which examines emerging technologies likely to have an impact on teaching, learning. Mobile devices have progressed from an adoption projection of two to three years in 2006, to a much more imminent adoption prediction trajectory of a year or less in 2008.
Whether earlier the educational value of mobile technologies was thought to be delivery of content to people's devices, the emphasis now has clearing changed to focus on their capabilities that enable users creating and sharing content.

The 'former audience' combines traditional activities such as searching, reading, watching and listening, with producing, commenting, sharing, and classifying its own content. New genres of filmmaking and photography where the message gains ground over the form are developing. The proliferation of user-created content is fuelled by the wide availability of at-hand mundane technology such as mobile telephones, and the wider broadcasting outlets. These are mainly web-based however increasingly user-created content such as videos of breaking news stories feature in traditional broadcasting channels as for instance television.
The increasing range of web 2.0 and mundane technology choices, facilitating the development of user-created content and providing opportunities to meet and collaborate, offers immense potential for teaching and learning. However, the danger remains that the transition from consumer to creator might miss the learning opportunity.

The IADIS Mobile Learning 2009 International Conference seeks to provide a forum for the discussion and presentation of mobile learning research. In particular, but not exclusively, we aim to explore the transition from content consumer to content creator in experiences that take advantage of the learning opportunities this provides.
* Format of the Conference
The conference will comprise of invited talks and oral presentations. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the form of a book and CD-ROM with ISBN, and will be available also in the IADIS Digital Library (accessible on-line).
The best paper authors will be invited to publish extended versions of their papers in the IADIS Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems (ISSN: 1646-3692) and also in other selected Journals.

* Types of submissions
Full and Short Papers, Reflection Papers, Posters/Demonstrations, Tutorials, Panels and Doctoral Consortium. All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process.

* Topics
We invite researchers, practitioners, developers and all those working in the mobile learning arena to submit work under the following topics:
- Pedagogical approaches and theories for mLearning
- Collaborative, cooperative, and Contextual mLearning
- Creativity and mLearning
- Gaming and simulations in mLearning
- mLearning in educational institutions: primary, secondary and third level
- Informal and Lifelong mLearning
- New tools, technologies, and platforms for mLearning
- User Studies in mLearning
- The social phenomenon of mobile devices and mLearning
- mLearning in developing countries
- Speculative ideas in mLearning: where next?


* Important Dates:
- Submission deadline (2nd call): 19 December 2008
- Notification to Authors (2nd call): 19 January 2009
- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration (2nd call): Until 2 February 2009
- Late Registration (2nd call): After 2 February 2009
- Conference: Barcelona, Spain, 26 to 28 February 2009

* Conference Location
The conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain.

* Secretariat
IADIS Secretariat - IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE MOBILE LEARNING 2009 Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3
1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal
E-mail: secretariat@mlearning-conf.org
Web site: http://www.mlearning-conf.org/

* Program Committee

Mobile Learning 2009 Program Chair
Inmaculada Arnedillo Sánchez, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Mobile Learning 2009 Conference Chair
Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Portugal

Steering Committee
Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Open University, UK
David Parsons, Massey University, New Zealand
John Traxler, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Mike Sharples, University of Nottingham, UK

Committee Members: *
* for committee list see here

* Co-located events
Please also check the co-located events:
e-Society 2009 - 25-28 February 2009
Information Systems 2009 - 25-27 February 2009

* Registered participants in the Mobile Learning' conference may attend e-Society and Information Systems conferences' sessions free of charge.

Low resource areas and mobiles: get into online forums for global knowledge dissemination: e-agriculture.org

‘Mobile Telephony in Rural Areas’ is the latest virtual forum that is organised by e-agriculture.
The forum has been running for a few days now and it is worth a visit and/or additional discussions. You must register for the forum first. Mobile phones are the success story of bridging the rural digital divide, bringing tangible economic benefits and acting as agents of social mobilization through improved communication. But what are the real challenges that face reaching rural areas, and what are some of today’s most beneficial applications that can help these rural communities, specifically regarding agriculture development?

This Forum examines the challenges that rural communities face in enhancing the benefits of mobile telephony, and looks at some examples of interesting initiatives and good outcomes from around the globe.
There are a couple of experts attending the discussion amongst which Christian Kreutz, who I know always delivers great content and ideas.
The e-agriculture.org forum is part of a global initiative to enhance sustainable agricultural development and food security by improving the use of information, communication, and associated technologies in the sector. This is your chance to interact with subject matter specialists on the topics of your choice. If you would like to suggest a Featured Forum topic, please send an email to info@e-agriculture.org.
For more information on online events, we recommend the CGIAR document 'No Travel required', which can be downloaded in PDF format here.

What they write about themselves: E-Agriculture is an emerging field focusing on the enhancement of agricultural and rural development through improved information and communication processes. More specifically, e-Agriculture involves the conceptualization, design, development, evaluation and application of innovative ways to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in the rural domain, with a primary focus on agriculture.
E-Agriculture is a relatively new term and we fully expect its scope to change and evolve as our understanding of the area grows.

Facebook in case of divorce

Just a suggestion for sociological research in social networking software's.

In a divorce you want to do two things: split up everything of value and leave the past behind while moving on without too much of a hassle. Facebook and other social networking sites make this virtually impossible.

You know how it goes. You split up, you divide books, cd's, movies... and in the next few months you get frustrated because you keep searching for the books, cd's, dvd's you once bought yet no longer can find anywhere. But hey, after a couple of months and some therapeutic talks with friends, you let go of those once treasured items and you go on.

With facebook this is no longer possible! Ex-partners can now suddenly pop-up and start facebooking as well. They - of course - add shelfari in which they mention the books they have read ... and lookie here, some of those titles look really familiar.
They add a profile mentioning what type of people they really don't like (characteristics that look amazingly familiar when you read them). Other also familiar objects suddenly get sold on eBay (this was a gift from my nana!). And to top it off, you suddenly see them linking themselves to people that are 'your' friends. And because your friends are polite, they add your ex-partner to their network. By now you are clicking like mad on your ex-partners profile because you cannot belief your eyes... and as a result you see your ex-life passing in front of your eyes yet once again. By now - if you are a bit of a nervous type - you might be wondering if there is something like a constraining order for social networks?

I am lucky, my ex-partners and I get along just fine. We frequently look each other up (during which time we swiftly take one of 'our' books from the partner's shelves and push it underneath our sweater or coat while exiting quitely). But some of my friends are having facebook-divorce-shivers, inspiring though, I never looked at facebook this way.

Anyone interested in researching the subject? Anyone have other examples?

‘Cartoon by Nick D Kim, nearingzero.net. Used by permission.'

QRcodes in eLearning

While QRcodes do break through in the marketing world, it is only slowly trickling into the eLearning world. This is quite understandeable as QRcodes are mainly used with mobile devices (small segment of learning) and within mLearning only a few people explore QRcode possibilities.

“QR Code is a two-dimensional barcode, used widely in Japan. The advantage of QR Code from well-known barcode is larger data capacity (more than 100 bytes, typically) and error correction.” (from: http://qrcode.sourceforge.jp/). I have been writing on the topic in previous blogposts, but as Online Educa Berlin is approaching, I want to share the presentation I will give at OEB2008 (if you follow the slideshare link, you can also download this presentation).

OEB08 Mobile Barcodes QRcodes Inge de Waard

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: oeb2008 oeb08)

If you are interested and around Berlin on 3 - 5 December 2008, join me in the MOB21 session on Thursday, December 4, 2008 from 14:15 - 15:45 and it is called 'Extending the Range of the Mobile Phone' in room Tiergarten together with other eLearning colleagues:

Gavin Cooney, Learnosity, Ireland
Voice: The Killer Application of Mobile Learning

Mathew James Constantine, IE Business School, Spain
Mind the Gap – Narrowing the Distance to the Learner

Sarah Cornelius, University of Aberdeen, UK
Real-Time Simulation on the Move: The Learner Context

The overall description of this session: What do you use your mobile phone for? Checking information? Taking photos? Playing games? Presenters in this session will describe all sorts of different applications of the mobile phone in teaching and learning – join them to see just how far you can stretch mobile devices. This session is chaired by prof Herman J. Van der Merwe, Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.

Feel free to add your QRcode links and hope to see you in Berlin next week!

eSCART 2008: the demo of the international online course

I know, I know, it is obvious I like this course. I did write about the final report of eSCART2008, but know we have just launched our demo of the course.

It is a short demo and admittedly it can ask you to download the latest plugins of both Flash and Quicktime, but we are working on the low bandwidth option as I write this.

In the meantime, if you are interested, take a look at the course demo (made with Articulate engage). If anyone is interested in the software we used to develop the whole course, I will gladly send the list.

finding eLearning information through a community

Yes, a critical mind is necessary in this knowledge world.
Yes, knowing how to find stuff is increasingly important.
Yes, there are a lot of us eLearning people floating around the web.

And Yes, a redesigned resource is out there for you to find and stroll through. I use RSS, but frankly it takes time to keep it relevant and up-to-date. And RSS has one thing lacking... it does not tell you what you might be interested in or what topic you need to get into. So now, for those times I don't have a feed (or not yet) on a specific relevant topic, I surf to the eLearning Learning community pushed by non other then Tony Karrer.

Tony has a great eLearning blog called eLearning technology on which he posts his great eLearning (focusing on corporate) insights and challenges his readers regularly through the 'Big Question'. His blog was awarded the best eLearning blog in 2007 by Edublog. Yes, he is an inspiring eLearning pioneer.

So, if you are looking for something eLearning related, surf to the eLearningLearning community, choose a keyword, tool and ... find it.