It was always my intention to write a post summarising last April’s Moodlemoot in Loughborough in the UK. It was a highly enjoyable event with many Moodle luminaries present and there was much to write about.
However, I doubt I will ever write that post, so I have decided to share the presentation that I did titled 10 Things to Like About Moodle. It tries to describe the factors that have contributed to making Moodle such a success in the seven years of its existence. The audio is sometimes a bit hard to understand (too much hand-waving on my part), but overall it should still be valuable to many people.
About one and half years ago I wrote two Dutch articles for Van twaalf tot achttien, a magazine catering for teachers in secondary education. These articles were the first in this magazine to be published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that I can publish them on this blog and that you will be able to reuse what I have written (as long as you comply to the license agreement).
I have always believed that is very strange that our government subsidises many schools and teachers to create learning materials, but that these organisations and people are not required to share these materials under a free license. This has mainly to do with a lack of awareness of this problem and I am hoping that this article increases knowledge about the importance of free licensing of software and content.
Note how the designer who laid out the page wasn’t very interested in the contents of the article. His or her thought process must have gone something like: “Ah an article about software… let me find an image of a CD… yes, great Adobe Creative Suite CS2”. Really fitting for an article that talks about the Gimp!
The second article was co-written with Leen van Kaam (at the point of writing a colleague at Stoas Learning). It is titled Scenario’s voor de implementatie van een Elektronische Leeromgeving (ELO) (Scenarios for the implementation of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)) and describes a maturity model for implementing virtual learning environments in secondary education. It can be used to set goals and manage expectations in schools and should make it easier to understand why certain parts of a VLE implementation are successful and other are not.
Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write an essay of no more than 500 words discussing the title in relation to Knowledge, Innovation and Quality. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.
Ikea by Flickr user splorp, CC licensed. Anybody interested in co-authoring a book titled: "Ikea for Dummies, Guerilla Shopping for the Whole Family"?
Outsourcing, the process of subcontracting to a third party, is mostly discussed in the context of large businesses offshoring some of their work to other countries. Reasons for outsourcing can vary, but usually have to do with saving costs, getting access to proprietary knowledge, improve quality through standardisation or help with research and innovation.
I have also seen the term used in two other contexts:
People now outsource part of their brain functions to technology. To use myself as an example: a lot of my memory is now outsourced to my mobile phone (much more than the phone numbers of my friends; also reminders, lists, pin codes, etc.).
Smart companies outsource a lot of their work to their customers, saving costs in the process. The most brilliant example is Ikea. In the old days furniture was delivered fully assembled and straight into your living room. With Ikea you drive your purchases home yourself and then spend hours putting it all together. Ikea takes this very far, letting you tap your own soft-icecreams.
“Subcontracting” to the customer has become very pervasive in the Western world. You take your own groceries from the shelf (in the past somebody got them for you) and in some supermarkets you are the one scanning them at the cash register. Full service gas stations don’t exist anymore. Money is taken out of ATMs, not at a teller and in many restaurants you have to clean up your table yourself.
There are two types of outsourcing to the customer:
Things that are just as fast and convenient when you do them yourself as when they are done by somebody else. The ATM is an example. This type is usually made possible by technology and will keep expanding in our society.
Things that are more inconvenient or take more time to do yourself, but that allow the service/product to be cheaper. Gas stations are an example of this. This is only interesting for a customer if there is an attractive balance between time lost and money saved. When time is very valuable, paying a bit extra to get service becomes interesting. That’s when you decide to get your groceries delivered for a fee or pay somebody in India to research and book that next trip abroad. As long as the costs of labour in the BRIC countries stay much lower than labour costs in the US and Europe I foresee more and more cases of individual customers offshoring what was outsourced to them.
If I had more words, I would have tried to explore what these trends might mean for the way that we teach, train and learn. I can imagine that learners soon will be asked to assemble their own curricula, find their own sources and even assess themselves. In that sense there are parallels between outsourcing to the customer and the shift from “push” towards “pull” in learning.
Maybe in a next post?
Unfortunately, I didn’t stick to the self-imposed rules in this post. But Lars von Trier didn’t do that in most of his Dogme 95 movies either (and he took a “vow of chastity” which cannot be said of me!).
Ever since I attended a conference in a Disney World resort in Orlando I have been meaning to write a very cynical post about how authenticity is disappearing from our society (think Epcot: I visited Germany, Japan and Coronado Springs in twenty minutes total). In the post I would lament on how nothing is real anymore and that everything is fake. Have you looked at any ad in Wired recently? 100% photoshopped. Have you been to the great wall of China? No part of it is really old, it has all been “renovated”. Whenever I go anywhere or look at anything the experience that is delivered to me seems over-engineered.
I have decided not to write that post. I experienced some authenticity tonight: Leela James in the Melkweg in Amsterdam. This is the best concert I have ever attended. It was better than John Legend in Bruxelles, better than Postmen in the Melkweg. Even better than Zap Mama in the Westergasfabriek. Leela rocked the house for over two hours and showed that we still have artists that can express true feelings on the stage (shame on you Maxwell). The intensity of her show was incredible and her voice is truly exceptional.
Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process.
For this post we agreed to write an essay of no more than 500 words.
You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.
I am convinced that large multinational corporations are relics of a bygone era. And yes, I am happily working for one.
Advances in technology have made it incredibly easy to organise people into productive working groups on short notice. Large corporations owe their existence to the fact that they were the most efficient way to organise big groups of people and allowing them to facilitate complex processes. Nowadays the overhead that these organisations demand are not defensible anymore. Many of the functions inside these businesses will be done by much smaller organisations which “automagically” spring into existence wherever there is demand. The organisation itself will slim down to its core competencies.
This imminent change will have effects on the labour market and how people will plan their careers. It will allow for many more people to be an entrepreneur: being hired for their expertise and working in ever changing groups on a diverse set of knowledge intensive projects. For these people the distinction between their professional life and their private life will increasingly blur. Some work will be done for a wage, other work for a fee, some will done as charity and finally some will be done to study.
Increasingly I see this happening in my own personal career. I am a blended learning adviser at Shell (wage), occasionally I am hired by other organisations to consult around educational technology (fee), I spend a fair amount of time supporting people in their use of Moodle and in helping to make it better (charity) and do a lot of very conscious reading (and writing) to learn more about the things I am interested in, increasing my value on the job market (study). These things aren’t done between nine and five only and continuously change in their prominence.
It succinctly shows what is important in life: finding a way of getting paid for what you are good at and want to do. The model provides heuristics for whenever one of the three elements is missing (e.g. “Learn to say ‘No'”). So how do you make sure that you will stay in the “Hooray!” zone during the majority of your career?
I think you have to do the following:
Be 100% transparent. Only if you let people know what it is that you do will you build the trust necessary for them to engage with you.
Work on enlarging your network. Because, increasingly, this is where your knowledge will reside.
Try to always give more than you get.
Invest in your education. The investment should be in time, not in university fees.
Make career choices that increase your opportunities and give you more flexibility.
Only be loyal to companies that give you a challenging environment in which you can develop yourself.
And finally, in all of the above, make proper use of technology.
If you heed to this advice the “Hooray!” should come naturally.
