Learning 2008: Mashups & Widgets are the Future of the LMS

“Mashups & Widgets are the Future of the LMS” was the title of the talk by Bryan Polivka of the Laureate Higher Education Group. This is a group that runs 36 universities over the world. All of these universities have different methodologies, styles and cultures. It is Bryan’s challenge to find solutions that work for all of these universities.

Bryan outlined his problem for us: The learning model is determined by how content connects to students connect to faculty connect to assessment. Their universities are still in the traditional LMS paradigm. This is a problem because we now have all these new things like podcasts, mobile phones, 3D worlds, social sites, etc.

His solution to this problem is to go back to the basics. What is the core of what they want to do with learning technology? According to Bryan they decided that Content – Students – Assessments form the core interaction. This is what should be supported by the LMS, the rest can be flexible and can be set up in multiple ways.

He then went on to highlight the widgetisation of the web (his example was Pageflakes). It used to be the case that the Internet was laid out according to the physical metaphor of the web page: a virtual location. You moved from place to place by switching web pages. That infrastructure is in the process of being broken up: you now have the possibility to pull in data from all over the web and display it in a single location (look at popurls as an example).

An LMS should support this through its architecture. Bryan gave a quick demo of Asiatrac Learning Studio. This LMS is created in Thailand and allows embedding of all of its contents as a widget on another site.

The courses in the Laureate group’s universities are designed through a very solid design process. This allows them to have a lot of high quality content (much video and audio) in their repository of digital assets. The repository allows for tracking and can display its assets in an LMS, but also in a Facebook app or through the iTunes university. All they need is to make sure the student authenticates. The university is now in control of what options they will give their students and they can experiment with having the content only available in Blackboard, or sharing it more widely capitalising on the site that is currently en vogue with their students.

I find this a very interesting strategy and love how Bryan managed to conceptualise his whole presentation very clearly. It would be great for current LMS’ to have more of an architecture that would support its contents being displayed elsewhere. However, I do see two issues that could use some more thought:

Content is seen here as broadcasted material (audio, video, interactive e-learning modules, etc.) and not as pedagogically designed activities. Where is the student as a constructor of knowledge in this story? How do you facilitate and moderate student interaction and collaboration?
How do you ensure that the learning experience doesn’t become too fragmented? The British Open University has explicitly chosen a strategy in which all the learning takes place inside the LMS (or as they call it: the VLE, compare Niall Sclater). This way they have full control over the design of the learning experience and are able to optimally facilitate their learners with a unified and clear interface.

I would love to explore this topic further. Does anybody have any pointers?

Learning 2008: Wrap up of day 2

Here are some more things that I thought were though-provoking, interesting, relevant or funny on day 2 the Learning 2008 conference:

Out of Control

One of my personal heroes was speaking today: Kevin Kelly. He is one of the founding editors of Wired Magazine and has an incredible depth and breadth of knowledge about technology in this world. A couple of months ago I read his wonderful Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World. He wrote it in the early nineties, but he was so ahead of the curve that it is only now that people are really starting to get the implications of what he was writing about. In this conference he spoke about his general outlook on technology. He is an optimist and thinks that technology will be a solution to many of our problems (this is also the basic premise of Wired Magazine). If the current technology isn’t working, then what we need is better technology. He even goes so far as to say that technology isn’t morally neutral, but morally good. It is our duty to bring technology to the (developing) world. When it comes to learning it would be interesting to see how we can become more individualised (compare the snowflake effect mentioned in an earlier post) and still leverage the increased power of the group. His recommendation to businesses who want to turn themselves into learning organisations is to start by becoming a teaching organisation. Learning and teaching are symmetrical.
I attended a discussion led by Aaron Silvers titled “Rapid Development: Operational & Strategic Impacts”. Most people in the US use Articulate to author content. How do you maintain your content when you use a lot of audio and video? Does video production have to be expensive? Aaron has been using a lot Flip cameras in his company. Devices like this can change the way we create content. My ex-colleague Marcel de Leeuwe has just bought a similar device and has used it to interview me (in Dutch) about my thoughts on the conference: a very quick method that still produces decent quality. Nigel Paine (former learning officer at the BBC) was later in the day talking about how these small video cameras were used by the BBC to capture small nuggets of knowledge or wisdom inside the company. These were then shared and could be rated. This became a big resource which was used a lot and created some true workplace heroes.
The session led by Russ Sharp of the BMO Financial Group was interesting for two reasons. Firstly because he told us that the BMO’s LMS is Docent 6.5. They have a license till 2013, but have just heard from their vendor that there is no upgrade path now that they have merged with SumTotal. To me this is another clear indication of why you should try and find open source solutions for your problems: you can be sure that doesn’t happen to you when you are the master of your own software. Russ did not become a pessimist though: he sees the coming years as a chance to reorient the company on their learning strategy. He toured the US visiting companies (like Sun and Cisco) to see what they were doing and looked at 3d worlds, social networking, user generated content, etc. His most important lesson: different businesses have different solutions and there is no silver bullet.
In the closing session of the day Masie interviewed Nick van Dam, the Global Chief Learning Officer of Deloitte Touche. He explained the fascinating new HR philosophy of Deloitte. They are in the “Human Capital” business: meaning that they do not have software or hardware to sell, but are all about the people. They need to “grow people fast” and can only do this when they allow people to “customise” their own career. It should be possible to keep on changing your career plan: slow down and work less one year and then speed up the next. This will be the only way that they can Deloitte will be able to keep their employees. Nick also heads the global nonprofit e-Learning for Kids foundation. They are dedicated to putting free and fun e-learning materials on the Internet for children aged 5-12. Pay them a virtual visit: they have some very creative stuff online.

That was all for day 2. Day 3 will be the last day already.

Learning 2008: The role of search in learning

Maze. Cropped photo from woodleywonderworks

Julie Clow, manager Learning Technologies at Google and George Selix from Sun Microsystems had an interesting session today titled: “The Role of Search in Learning: Leveraging Fingertip Knowledge in Our Designs”.

Julie opened the session by asking the audience to answer the following six questions in two contexts: for a self-initiated learning event and for an expert driven event:

What was the latency between the desire to learn and the event?
What was the total time spent on the learning event?
What was the cost of learning?
What % of total content have you used/will you use?
How engaged were you during the learning event?
How did you find the learning opportunities or resources?

Try and do the exercise now…. I’ll wait. You will notice some (obvious) differences in your answers for the two contexts. This led Julia to asking the following: Where do people go to search for learning opportunities in your organisation? How successful are these searches? (Do we even know?).

The problem with searches on the Intranet is that they cannot use the same algorithm that has made Google so successful: there is way less inter-linkage between different pages than on the web, which makes it harder to provide relevant search results. This begs the question on how you could design learning programs while taking into account the fact that people might search for them. Metadata could be relevant for this task. The people in the audience did not use metadata much and the general consensus was that metadata is only useful when it matches something that is relevant. Google, for example, has a leadership program which consists of five fields and a couple of competencies in each field. They have added information about these competencies as metadata to each of their learning resources. This way they anticipate what the user might search for.

Where is search in the ADDIE model? According to Clow we should think more deliberately about search during the design phase (I know… I too was surprised that this might come from Google; however I do agree with her). A useful model for doing this might be Conrad Gottfredson’s idea about the five moments with a need for learning:

Learning how to do something for the first time
Learning based on prior learning experience
Learning at the point of application
Learning when things change (delta-training)
Learning when things go wrong

All in all a session that has given me many questions to think about and ideas to try out when I next implement a training program somewhere.

Learning 2008: Wrap up of day 1

I have already written two posts about the Learning 2008 conference. This last post about day one will just be some random things that I noticed and want to highlight:

The session on Mobile learning with industry leaders from Chrysler, Accenture, Microsoft and Merril Lynch was surprising to me. Mobile learning was mostly used by these companies to make their learning more efficient and thus drive down costs without losing effectiveness. Basically a matter of ROI. Existing learning materials and courses are converted into on- or offline materials for the Blackberry or Windows mobile. Their employees can then do some of the required business curriculum while they are on a plane, on the way to their car or while playing with their child (yep, that last example was actually used). They were after the holy grail of learning designers: design once and deploy everywhere. The problem with this is that they do not take the affordances of the mobile device into account. The fact that this is a cell phone which could be used for audio, that it is a communication tool that has rich possibilities (e.g. location awareness through GPS) was not taken into account. To me that is a shame.
Richard Culatta works for the CIA and gave a presentation titled: “Two Brains are better than one: Leveraging social networks for learning”. He talked about a whole bunch of free tools which can be used for social learning. The CIA uses these tools in different ways (e.g. the Intellipedia, a Mediawiki implementation). What I liked about Richard’s presentation was his enthusiasm and his energy: he covered a lot of ground in a short time and was very interactive with the audience. Maybe because he is well aware of the concept of the attention economy. I wish all presenters would take the cost of my attention into account!
Wayne Hodgins is working with Erik Duval on a book about the Snowflake effect. His job title is “Strategic Futurist” and works from his sailing boat in which he sails around the world. He talked about how everybody is a snowflake, a metaphor for the uniqueness of everybody. Different music services (e.g. Pandora and Last.fm) already take this uniqueness into account. Why don’t we apply these principles to learning activities? Finally he talked about mashups as a generic concept. Why don’t we use the unique qualities of humans and mash them up when we create a project team?
Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, talked about the Wikipedia in general, which is currently the number four website in the world. Masie asked her about how neutrality is ensured. Her idea is that transparency is the answer to everything. By being clear that someone thinks A, but somebody else thinks B, you actually add to knowledge and make things clear. The foundation will be working on improving the interface for editing articles which can be quite difficult for complex pages. They might also try to look at what they can do with video and audio, although we have to realise that they are not as easily collaborated with as with text. Masie wondered about students using information from the Wikipedia for their assignments. Is that something we should encourage while the information might not be correct? Sue answered by talking about the most accepting country for Wikipedia: Germany. Professors in Germany are starting to see it as their duty to make sure that Wikipedia is correct and updated.
Finally an interesting link: Learning for International NGO’s (Lingos).

On to day two!

Learning 2008: Your behaviour defines your succes

I am at a resort in Disney world at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2008 event. There is a true abundance of sessions, workshops, fireside chats and magic (it is Disney after all). I will be trying to do some semi-live blogging about what I see.

This morning we had a general session where Masie interviewed a couple of people on the main stage. There were two that I found particularly interesting.

Arch Lustberg is a very senior (literally) communication adviser. He was talking about the different (vice) presidential candidates and how their communication styles are perceived by the public. His conclusion is that all of them are only successful when they stop being a bad actor (trying to be something they are not) and become good performers. It is authenticity that builds trust. He spoke the nearly self-evident truth: “The way I perceive you, is the way you are (at least from my perspective)”. By being aware of this and what you do with your face for example you can influence the situation. He has written what appears to be an interesting book about this subject: How to Sell Yourself: Using Leadership, Likability, and Luck to Succeed

Amy Sutherland has written What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage: Lessons for People from Animals and Their Trainers a book about the lessons she learnt from observing how animal trainers are taught. Animals can’t talk, so all that you have to work with is your non-verbal behaviour. Sutherland used the animal training principles/techniques that she picked up on improving the relationship with her husband. She gave two interesting examples:

Least Reinforcing Scenario (LRS). This has to do with showing as little behaviour as possible when an animal (that would include humans) does something you do not like. By ignoring the behaviour you make sure that you do not do anything to elicit the behaviour again.
Incompatible behaviour. This is reinforcing behaviour that is incompatible with the behaviour you do not like. Sutherland disliked how her husband would stand really close to her when she was cooking. She then decided to provide some Doritos and a beer on the other side of the kitchen isle. This worked really well for her.

To me both Lustberg and Sutherland focus on the same thing: your behaviour directly defines your success in social situations. If you are not happy about what other people do while working with you, you should think about what it is that you can do to change the situation. It is much easier to change yourself, than to change somebody else.