Online Educa Berlin 2008: Day 2

During the second day of the Online Educa I was able to go to the Going Global with E-Learning keynote in the morning and to the Battle of the Bloggers session in the afternoon. Here are some of my notes and thoughts:

The keynote started with a presentation by Christophe Binot, E-Learning Manager at Total in France. What he showed was quite shocking to me. All the things he described were classic webbased training materials. It felt like I was back in the 20th century. There was no talk of collaborating, of networks, not even of performance support. Instead he focused on the more than 1000 lessons in four languages.

Next up was Richard Straub. He is currently the Secretary General of the European Learning Industry Group (ELIG) and used to by an employee of IBM, but has gradually stepped out. ELIG has the mission to promote innovation in learning in Europe. They are trying to anticipate the 21st century.

The theme of his talk was the unstoppable move towards openness and how this will enable an education continuum.

We are making a move from a closed world to a more open world:

Closed	Open
Top down	Bottom up
Central planning	Participation
Command and control	Autonomy
Bureaucratic	Commons sense
Rigid	Flexible
IPR	Intellectual capital
Proprietary	Community based
Authority	Reputatio

We are moving from a society of relatively static organisations towards what Straub calls the “Hollywood studio approach” of dynamic teams built around a project. The knowledge workers of the second half of the 20st century will be replaced by knowledge entrepreneurs who will work on the basis of flexible contractual relationships.

Focusing on education this might mean that the traditional silos (elementary school, secondary education, tertiary education, employment) will be bridged to create an education continuum of lifelong learning.

Straub then presented some new research from the Lisbon Council focusing on the European Human Capital Index. He had a fascinating graph showing the human capital biography of a German professional:

This is definitely material which I will look into further.

He finished his talk by mentioning that the new notion of blended learning is mixing formal and informal learning (not mixing classroom and online learning), and by recommending Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge.

The last speaker of the keynote session was Laura Overton of the independent, not for profit, community interest company Towards Maturity. Her organisation does research in multinational companies with the goal of improving the impact of learning technologies at work.

According to their research the key factors hindering the implementation of innovative learning technologies are the lack of knowledge about its potential, the high reluctance to adopt and the lack of implementation skills. Interestingly 23% of the global companies also considered the overhyping of learning products by their suppliers to be a significant hindrance to implementation.

Mature companies are moving from aligning to needs to delivering impact. Towards maturity has an interesting model of factors in this process:

Alignment to (business) needs is the most important factor for success.
Learner context. Engage learners and listen to them, involve them in the design and the implementation.
Work context. Connect to regional priorities, don’t fight technical infrastructures, work with local cultures to your advantage.
Building capacity. Collaboratively author content, ensure that local training divisions are equipped using the latest tools, support and connect.
Ensuring engagement. Equip local heroes, organise pilots, develop communication toolkits, create peer to peer communication strategies.
Demonstrating value. Don’t be afraid to ask for value, dig deeper and communicate successes via a wide selection of media.

These strands collectively intertwine. All contribute to impact and involve stakeholders at all stages. Overton sees it like a “six-legged” race where each of these strands has to coordinate with the others to progress.

The Battle of the Bloggers session in the late afternoon was meant to be a reflective and interactive session on what had been the most relevant topics of the conference. A back channel was provided using Backnoise.

Unfortunately I only learnt two things from this session:

Belgium has another unknown comic: session chair Bert De Coutere lead it with a great sense of humour.
A backchannel does not add a lot of value yet. People (me included) do two things in it: they discuss the backchannel itself (“we should have this in every session”) or they make witty remarks.

The blogger panelists did not seem to be too comfortable behind their tables on the stage in front of a very large and largely empty room. We had a heckler that could only talk about how all generations have turned into sheep and a vocal audience member with the age of somebody from generation Y, but the mind of baby boomer. All in all Michael Wesch could have gotten some great cultural anthropological material for research on weird group interactions.

Online Educa Berlin 2008: Language

Language is still our prime tool for learning. I find language a fascinating subject and noticed a couple of things about language during the Online Educa.

First, Jay Cross. He was a panelist during the Battle of the Bloggers session. One topic they discussed was the financial crisis and how it could affect our profession. Jay said that if you are currently a Director of Training it would probably be smart to change your job title to something like Director of Sales Readiness (“we can’t let the director of sales readiness go…”). I think he is right. Language changes perception and a change in how you call something can significantly alter people’s behaviour. This is also the reason why I don’t like to use the Dutch word “allochtoon“: I think it has an unnecessary connotation of exclusiveness and us versus them.

Jay was very insightful about the other topics too, so I decided to go to the front desk an buy his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. I like how he consciously has put “performance” in the title of his book. That way he instantly disarms any suggestion that informal learning is just a pet topic for educational scientists. Instead, it directly addresses the issue that is central in the corporate world: “executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance.”

The ability to adapt your language to the language of the client is one of the skills that any good consultant should have. Ton Zijlstra had an interesting take on this. We met at an Edublog dinner and one of the things we talked about was how he uses del.icio.us to find people who bookmark the same sites as he does, but who do this using different tags. If they use different tags for the same concepts it means they are in a different community or network. That is interesting, because they could be starting point for a whole set of new connections.

The Reichstag Dome: Norman Foster is a Genius

Reichstag, Berlin, photo by chris-dcx cc by-nc-nd

This evening I had the chance to go to the Reichstag in Berlin. This incredible building currently houses the German parliament (the Bundestag).

Admission to the magnificent dome is free. The last people are allowed in at 22:00 and are then allowed to stay till midnight. I hope our Dutch public institutions will take the Reichstag as an example.

The view of Berlin at night was impressive. Walking up the spiral (which is separate from the downward one) make you see the full panorama about three times.

The dome was designed by Norman Foster and built to symbolise the reunification of Germany. When you look down towards the inside you can see the seats of the parliament which get direct sunlight reflected through the mirrored cone in the centre of the dome.

Looking at that mirrored cone I suddenly realised Foster’s brilliance: the cone not only allows sunlight in, it also must allow the people sitting in the parliament seats to oversee all of Berlin when they look up. To me this makes the dome a wonderful physical realisation of a metaphor for not performing omphaloskepsis, but instead looking outward to the world at large.

A great city, Berlin.

Online Educa Berlin 2008: Day 1

I am the Online Educa with Stoas for a commercial purpose: we have a stand with four European Moodle partners and are trying to talk to as many people as possible about Moodle

This means that I have not had the opportunity to really go to any of the sessions. I did manage to go to the keynotes of the first day though, so I would like to write down some of the things that I have noticed there.

Just like Wilfred Rubens I had really looked forward to hear Michael Wesch speak. I should have known that I would have been disappointed. This had nothing to do with Wesch, who is an insightful and entertaining speaker, but with the fact that I already know what he does. He focused on the lowest common denominator in the audience and that wasn’t me.

I guess you could say that he suffered from the exact problem that he is trying to solve in his educational practice: how do you stay significant when you stand in front of an audience in a design built for non-participation. The title of his talk “The Crisis of Significance and the Future of Education” is highly relevant. I thought it was unfortunate that he only focused on the first part of his title and did not talk about recent educational projects like his World Simulation Project.

One slight disappointment was followed by a very pleasant surprise. The Berlin based media scholar Norbert Bolz gave a slide-less talk titled “From Knowledge Management to Identity Management”. This talk was highly conceptual and sociological (if not philosophical).

He talked about five Internet related phenomena and what kind of effects these are having on society:

Serious play or the “paradise of work”. Bolz thinks there will be less of a difference between work and private time. Successful people will be absorbed in their work. The software tools that we buy are also toys. We should learn how to play with these tools (just like with toys) to use them effectively. Younger people are naturally the avant garde of this development.
Self design, also known as branding yourself. Personal brands are humans who have learned how to catch people’s attention. He described a progression from broadcasting to narrowcasting to echocasting and considers Youtube to be a prime example.
Identity management has to do with social wealth. He thinks we are living in the age of reputation and recommendation.
Attention management is about the interrelation between ignorance and trust. To know more is to also know less. All our options are disproportionate to our available time resources. Attention should be considered a naturally scarce resource. There is huge battle for this resource in trying to grab our attention.
Linking value is the most surplus value add in this century. This is because of the logic of networks. Bolz referred to Granovetter’s “ground breaking essay” The Strength of Weak Ties. Old social networks have strong ties, whereas the current social network have weak ties (e.g. a Facebook users with 2600 “friends”) . Networks with weak ties are more information rich while the information flow between strong ties is very small (he gave the example of how lover’s communicate).

All of these are topics which invite more exploration. I am looking forward to doing that over the next couple of weeks and will start with Granovetter’s essay.

Tomorrow is another day. I am hoping to see another keynote session and go to the Battle of the Bloggers (with Jay Cross, Wilfred Rubens and Stephen Warburton; looking forward to the strong language!).

Online Educa’s Platinum Sponsor Fronter is a Closed Source Proprietary Product

Warning, this is a bit of a rant…

I hate false advertising. That is why I was delighted to read that Apple had to pull an iPhone ad recently (see: What the banned iPhone ad should really look like).

I am currently at the Online Educa in Berlin where Fronter is the Platinum sponsor. I found their brochure in the conference bag and was appalled by what I read.

Fronter has decided to adopt the discourse of open source software without actually delivering an open source product. Recently, this has been a strategy for many companies who produce proprietary software and are losing market share to open source products. This is the first time that I have seen it done in such a blatant way though.

Some quotes from their brochure:

The essence of Fronter’s Open Philosophy is to give learning institutions the benefit of an open source and open standard learning platform – while at the same time issuing guarantees for security, reliability and scalability, all included in a predictable fixed cost of ownership package.

And:

Fronter’s Open Platform philosophy combines the best of two worlds; innovation based on open source, with guarantees and fixed cost of ownership issued by a corporation.

Finally:

Open source: The Fronter source code is available to all licensed customers.
Open guarantee: In contrast to traditional open source products, Fronter offers tight service level agreements, quality control and a zero-bug regime.

I am sure the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) would not appreciate these untruths. So let us do some debunking.

The term open source actually has a definition. The Open Source Definition starts with the following statement: “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” It then continues by listing the ten conditions that need to be met before a software license can call itself open source. Many of these conditions are not met by Fronter (e.g. free distribution, allowing distribution of the source code or allowing derived works).

These conditions exist for a reason. Together they facilitate the community based software development model which has proven itself to be so effective (read: The Cathedral and the Bazaar if you want to know more). Just giving your licensees access to the source code, does not leverage this “many eyeballs” potential.

I really dislike how they pretend that open source products cannot have proper service level agreements or quality control.SLA’s and QA is exactly what European Moodle partners like eLeDia, CV&A Consulting, MediaTouch 2000 srl and my employer Stoas (all present at this Educa) have been delivering in the last couple of years.

What is a “zero-bug regime” anyway? Does it mean that your customers cannot know any of the bugs in your software? Or is Fronter the only commercially available software product in the world that has no bugs? I much prefer the completely transparent way of dealing with bugs that Moodle has.

Fronter people, please come and meet me at the Moodle Solutions stand (E147 and E148). I would love to hear you tell me how wrong I am.