Posts Tagged web 2.0
Curatr – a new platform for online learning
I’ve been a little bit radio silent over the last couple of weeks as we’ve approached the soft launch of our latest creation, Curatr. But now it’s finally time to break cover and see if we can get people as excited about our little creation as we are. So that’s what I’m going to try and do!
First of all, a flashy video. Sorry, but it will actually benefit your understanding of what we are trying to do here and I can’t explain it any better in less than 2 mins!
So fundamentally, Curatr is a new platform for delivering learning experiences over the web. It is the result of us trying to marry-up some great new approaches that have been emerging themes in E-learning for a little while now. At its core are a couple of key principles:
• E-learning works best as a two-way process.
• We can learn from anything.
We’ve added a few more facets to the central tenets as we’ve gone along and there is any number of buzzwords that you can use to describe them. We’re talking social learning, personalised learning, mobile learning, learning by exploration, games based learning and many more.
The upshot of all this is that Curatr is what you make of it and I wouldn’t want to suggest it is the be-all and end-all answer to any of those genres. But it certainly takes a leaf out of their respective books and allows for users to create a learning experience built around whatever approach they deem most suitable. So long as it keeps the two key principles.
The result is something quite different. And, in order to practice what I preach, I made a video in order to explain it, instead of you having to read pages of my waffle!
Right now we are looking for private beta testers to help us bring the project along in the next few weeks. Head over to www.curatr.co.uk to find out more, watch the same videos again and sign-up to the beta.
We’re looking to deliver our first public release as quickly as possible and I promise some innovative approaches to the commercial proposition that goes with it.
I’ll be talking more on the blog about the theory behind it and the features we incorporate but, in the meantime, if you’ve got any questions for me please feel free to put them in the comments here!
Managing the Social Learning Mess: Auto-curating content
Let us suppose that we’ve created a social approach to online learning, where-by our users not only take content from our Learning Environment, but actively add content to it as a part of their participation. One of the biggest problems facing those tasked with administrating such a platform is going to be information overload.
I admit this stage is somewhat ‘down the line’ in terms of a successful social learning environment, but to ignore planning for this would be short-sighted.
Simply leaving the task to administrators is not often a viable option; online learning is supposed to cut administration work, not make it worse. Developing a good taxonomy and naming convention can certainly help to spread the load, but this too has limitations.
What is required is a method of ‘Curating’ the content that your learners contribute. The role of the Curator is a vital one; sorting the wheat from the chaff and bringing some sort of order to what would otherwise be chaos.
Curators also go beyond these functions and use learning objects to tell us a story, providing deeper insight into what would otherwise be just a collection of ‘things’. But the job is a difficult one, requiring a subject matter expert and a good deal of time; see this post by Jeff Cobb on the need for good content curators.
In developing our new software, we’ve been looking into ways of “auto-curating” content which learners contribute to the learning environment. This is just one piece of a much larger puzzle that our latest product seeks to address, but it is a vital piece none-the-less.
A bit of background on how our learning environment works:
Learning objects are first of all organised into collections. Collections can be as be as big or as small as the editors of the learning environment deem appropriate. For example we may have a “dinosaur” collection, or perhaps we would look to do things at the level of the “T-rex”. Indeed, for those of us very involved in palaeontology we might choose to make our collections at an even ‘lower’ level, for example “the foot bones of the T-rex”.
Within collections sit objects. One object can exist in many collections. Objects can be any piece of digital information, from a web-link to a video, to an animation.
These objects carry with them an array of metadata, including details such as keywords. It is relatively easy to suggest that an object is like another object by using these details, but it is not a perfect match. And when we open our learning environment to contributions from all-comers, it is not easy to enforce a metadata tagging system which is always used, or always used correctly. Such data also fails to take into account the perceived quality of a learning object – do a lot of people view this object and rate it as a worthy object?
What if we could tell that an object was like another object without it actually sharing any metadata at all? We would be then in a position to automatically suggest which learning objects were related to each other and to start the Curation process without the need for human intervention.
Using a range of semantic web techniques, this is what we have attempted to do. Firstly, by adopting the Resource Descriptor Framework (RDF) in storing our learning objects, we are able to discover a lot more about the objects.
For example, think about Wines (I tend to veer towards alcohol metaphors when things get complex). The following statement breaks down the Stonleigh Sauvignon Blanc into an RDF readable format: (example taken from W3C)
SauvignonBlanc rdf:ID=”StonleighSauvignonBlanc”
locatedIn rdf:resource=”#NewZealandRegion”
hasMaker rdf:resource=”#Stonleigh”
hasSugar rdf:resource=”#Dry”
hasFlavor rdf:resource=”#Delicate”
hasBody rdf:resource=”#Medium”
SauvignonBlanc
Because of the way in which the information contained here is broken down, we can tell on a number of levels what a Stonleigh Sauvignon Blanc is like. It could be grouped with other Wines which are of Delicate flavour. Or perhaps we just want to group it with other Wines produced by the same Maker – Stonleigh. Or we can use combinations of multiple nodes to infer which wines the Stonleigh is most like.
Outside of RDF, we can also infer an amount of information about an object given other objects that we know connect to it in someway. Our software allows users to connect objects together as a part of their own “guides” – a way of knitting objects together to create a logical sequence of learning. Where these guides include some objects which share metadata, and some which do not, we are able to infer if an object is like another object.
Taking a crowd-sourced approach to grading our learning objects, we can also discover more about the usefulness of an object and its quality. This allows us to curate objects to not only find like objects, but also to find like objects of a certain quality.
In short, by utilising a number of semantic web techniques, we are aiming to create a learning environment that has the ability to organise any amount of content into suitable categories automatically. There remains a need for human intervention at some levels – for instance, the final “sense” check before things are sent live – but the workload is vastly reduced.
This is just one of the innovations we are looking to introduce with our new software, which we’ve aptly named Curatr. I’ll be blogging more on the features of Curatr in the coming weeks, but its safe to say we’re pretty excited about it.
A first crack at my abstract for ALT-C submission
This year will be the first one which I aim to hit both conferences and journals in anger. ALT-C is a good place to start, not least because the closing deadline is soon! The theme of this years conference is “Into something rich and strange” – making sense of the sea change. I can’t help but feel that the whole nautical metaphor is somewhat let down by being held in Nottingham, but you can’t have it all!
I really wanted to put forward our Curatr software in a paper for the conference as I really believe it has great potential to change things quite radically, but I’m simply not going to have the quantitative or qualitative data required of a credible paper. What I do have however is the results of a project that has been running for just over a year near, A.C.E. the Adaptive Case Engine. This is a project we’ve been developing alongside Pearson Education and it has some great potential to knock down the barriers that stop complex simulations being created quickly and easily.
So with that in mind I’ve knocked together a short Abstract as my starting point for the paper. I realise I’m working backwards; it’s not the only work I’ve got in progress so it all makes perfect sense to me! This is all contributing towards my EngD, but I’ve been told on several occasions that the ability to get papers in at peer reviewed conferences (and perhaps even the ALT-J afterwards) will stand my doctorate in very good stead. So here goes nothing….
Abstract:
It has been established that three key issues, Time, Cost and Quality, constrain the capabilities of corporate E-learning initiatives. These factors are related and a frontier exists between them which constrains the characteristics of the E-learning. The limitations introduced by these factors have a direct effect on the overall success of E-learning implementations.
Simulations and games are attracting increased attention in corporate E-learning circles. The effectiveness of teaching games is thought to be high; however the cost and time of development is often restrictive. Recent surveys suggest that the average time to develop a complex simulation is around 800 hours. A new solution, designed to cut this development time whilst maintaining the quality required of a complex simulation, has been developed. The Adaptive Case Engine (ACE) allows for complex, adaptive case studies to be created “in the cloud” and then played either online or offline.
In order to test the effectiveness of our new solution, an initial prototype was developed using more traditional development methods. The development time for this project was circa 200 hours plus initial authoring time of around 40 hours. The same case study was subsequently developed within 3 hours using the new ACE system.
So what do you think? Want to know more? Would you read that paper?
Your organisations next Facebook policy
1.a. If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about. Do this until more work arrives. No exceptions.
I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the attitudes of a wide-range of people when it comes to accessing websites like Facebook at work. Forgive me for incessantly saying Facebook – interchange it for your favourite social network if it makes you feel better – but it is the most popular.
Andrew McAfee, speaking at the DevLearn 09 conference yesterday*, commented that we need to stop jumping on the risks associated with Web 2.0. Currently, in order to get close to any of the benefits that a website like Facebook could provide your company, you first have to jump over all of the associated ‘risks’ that get thrown at you. It’s nearly impossible to do this and even if you do succeed it will be a watered down and caveat-filled experience. Why?
It’s a mindset, one of a previous generation.
Recent UK figures have shown nearly 2.5 million people are out of work in this country. There is significant evidence that being unemployed long-term has severely detrimental effects on both family life and health. People are generally happier when they are in employment. So, reading between the lines here, we all have an inherent will to work. We go into the world of work essentially happy. Then work breaks us down, infringing on the liberties which we take for granted outside of the workplace, for no other reason than to mitigate risk. This sucks.
Eschew risk, embrace opportunity; what’s the worst that could happen?
Browsing social networks is just one liberty that the next generation of worker is going to be denied by most organisations they go to work for. Access to Facebook might not make you happier, but blocking it will almost certainly make you less happy. Social Networks are rapidly becoming a hygiene factor in the minds of new Gen Y workers.
So then let’s look to embrace the opportunity that providing access to Facebook will give us. I’m going to go beyond the normally recognised benefits (of which there are many) and move the discussion to one key area of objection: Time-wasting. If we allow workers access to Facebook they are doing personal stuff on business time and this is wasteful. Yep, I think even I can agree with that.
But let me ask you this; how are you currently measuring employee waste in your organisation? The principles of Lean operations are present in many organisations throughout the world (and many more are paying millions to develop such ideas). The central pillar of this initiative is the cutting out of waste. Some waste is easy to identify. Some waste cannot be avoided. Other waste is difficult to track, like the amount of time a worker involved in a process is not fully utilised. So then, let’s turn the tables on the software packages which track websites visited and time spent. I refer you back to my new policy:
If at any time during your working day you find yourself with a free moment, it is company policy that you MUST logon to your favourite social network and have a play about.
So we insist people use social networks and then we track usage levels to use as Management Information, tracking waste. At the same time as offering great quantitative information with regards to the amount of waste and the times at which it occurs, this system also offers a great visual aid to waste on the shop floor. If you’ve got Facebook open you’re not being utilised. How easy is that from a Line Managers point of view? What a fantastic measure of waste that would be.
Stop evaluating Web 2.0 tools from a risk point of view and start evaluating the opportunities.
*By the way, I did not attend DevLearn 09, all I had to do was follow the Twitter hashtag for a running commentary on McAfee’s keynote.
Modelling E-Learning 2.0
This week we’ve been hammering out some details on what our next version of the KnowledgePortal is going to do. I have to say I’m pretty excited by it. We’ve already got a tool that blends various social and learning media together and now we’re taking it a step further. I can’t say too much, but our playground is going to be our www.opsman.org website, amongst others, so you can expect to see changes there in the coming months.
I’ve been looking back at the books to reconcile exactly what it is that “E-learning 2.0” should be bringing to the party, above and beyond the web 2.0 tools we use already. To go back to basics, I would term traditional, formal learning approaches “E-Learning 1.0”. Here Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) write materials and convey them to students, who are expected to comprehend and put into order what is said.
My thinking is that this action alone is not enough. Nonaka & Takeuchi, in their seminal work “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, highlighted a more complex model of taking Tacit knowledge and making it Explicit. The model details four stages, Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination and Internalization. When the model was written in 1995 the authors could have had no knowledge of the “web 2.0” and its philosophies, but the model is surprisingly applicable to the field and more specifically, to what might be the missing piece in “E-learning 2.0”.
Stage one of the model, Socialization, is most closely related to our traditional methods of teaching. Here SME’s try to convey tacit knowledge to students through a variety of methods. There is little difference between being in the lecture hall or working your way through a piece of E-Learning in terms of this model. The material is presented to you in an order deemed logical and appropriate by the expert and you attempt to take in what you can.
However it is perhaps not until Externalization takes place that you start to comprehend what has been said. Here you take the teaching and reflect on it to generate your own ideas and thoughts. It is the act of writing, of conceptualising the learning that helps you to develop. We occasionally touch here during the course of E-learning programmes, by the use of “learning logs” or similar, perhaps a discussion board. But I would suggest this stage is often seen as optional, especially in the world of corporate training. Learning logs are still very much the domain of Higher Education in my experience and are not so widespread in the workplace. But it need not be a log that Externalisation takes its form from; any technology that allows learners to write and reflect can work here. Blog’s, Wiki’s and comments are probably the mainstays, but Podcasts or Videos would also work.
Combination is next in the model and this is perhaps the most significant point which we miss out on at the moment. Often the learning done earlier is prescribed as the only way the subject makes sense. There is very little opportunity for you, the learner, to take your refined thoughts and re-order them to make better sense of your situation. This is of particular importance in organisational learning, where your experiences are very much significant in how you frame new information and how you will subsequently apply it to your role. In addition to this, the web 2.0 technologies that we might use in the previous stage allow us to then share this knowledge with the rest of the class. So this sorting stage allows learners to take information given by experts, their own writings and their classmates writings and put it into an order which makes sense to them. Here learners could create “learning paths” which visually explain their understanding of a subject. These could be shared between the class and even act as guides to non-students who wish to share in the learning.
Finally, Internalization is all about taking your new learning and actually applying it to the workplace. This act grows and matures your learning and so it might well be seen as important to “re-sort” your knowledge at periodic points, as well as important to keep adding experiences and reflections to the mix.
Right now E-Learning often begins and ends at stage one – sitting down and being told a bunch of new stuff. That’s E-learning 1.0. We and others have tried to embrace some aspects of the web 2.0 into our learning programmes, but perhaps we haven’t seen this bigger picture. Pedagogy experts recognise the value of reflection and as the technology is fairly obvious here, this is the area where most “2.0” tools are currently employed in E-learning.
Stages three and four are where we hope to work with our next version of KnowledgePortal. We want to make linking explicit knowledge a focus for E-learning 2.0, something which builds on the tools that web 2.0 gives us and creates something more specialist for our genre. It is my hope that by adapting models such as Nonaka & Takeuchi’s, we can create a unifying reason for using Web 2.0 tools in our learning which stretches far beyond our currently level of “because we can”.
Why teens don’t use twitter and why it doesn’t matter
Teens and twitter seems to have been all the rage this week, what with Morgan Stanley’s laughable “research” from its 15 year old intern and the subsequent fall out.
The news that Twitter isn’t popular with teens will not come as a surprise to anyone who actually uses the service. As a Twitter user it’s my perception that whilst a few teens are likely to be registered with the site, very few would be considered “active” by any stretch of the imagination.
This morning I saw a blog post with the opinion that teens don’t use Twitter because it isn’t safe. I’m no youth researcher, so I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s BS. Some IT savvy teenagers might feel that way, but you only need to look to MySpace, the most popular of teen hangouts, to know that giving away information is de rigour for the teens of today.
The reason they don’t use twitter is this: it’s bloody hard work to derive value from it.
To get Twitter to work well for you, you need to build up a network of followers that are interesting and that share common ground. You need to look at it fairly regularly and build it into your day. You need to contribute to the discussion beyond telling people what you ate for breakfast (which you do on Facebook already). And it needs to have a focus. For me it’s eLearning. For teens the focus could well be their friends. But a teens network of friends probably all live their lives in the same building – school! I don’t know about you, but whilst I have work colleagues on my Twitter, I tend to turn around and talk to them instead of Twittering them.
And so teens derive no utility from using Twitter – its too hard and delivers too little to them, especially when compared to competitors like Facebook and MySpace.
But guess what? It doesn’t matter.
Morgan Stanley’s intern actually came up with a far more salient comment about teen life than his “teens don’t use twitter”. Teens like free. They go out of their way to get something for free. In other words, you’ll never make a penny out of them, so why bother?
Twitter has something which not many other social networks can claim. A user base of work-age professionals who value the service as a part of their working day and have a bit of spare dosh.
That’s why you shouldn’t worry about Twitter’s future cash flow…
The future of eLearning – Google Wave versus Microsoft Natal
I’ve been contemplating the future of eLearning for a while now and one big quandary awaits me. Will companies continue shelling out cash to create formal eLearning courses or will they seek to harness the informal learning opportunities that arise in the everyday working process? The latter is the holy grail of the learning organisation and is perhaps a pipe dream. But chasing it is an awfully attractive proposition – imagine the gold at the end of the rainbow.
This week brought us two examples of innovative new technology that, from my eLearning perspective, are almost the epitome of our conundrum. They are Google’s Wave and Microsoft / Xbox’s Project Natal.
Both have big hitters behind them, Google employing the Rasmussen brothers (of Google Maps fame) to do nothing less than reinvent Email. Microsoft employing gaming and AI guru, Peter Molyneux (of Black & White fame). So you know both are serious about changing the way we work and play.
Google’s Wave technology creates new opportunities for us to harness informal and social learning streams. I’ve been telling anyone who will listen (surprisingly few) that Email is one of the biggest technology burdens to organisational learning. Email has its place, but so often information which could be useful to a wider audience is locked up and lost in private conversations, never to be seen again.
Google’s Wave allows users to communicate in a “Wave” (fundamentally a threaded conversation), both synchronously and asynchronously, sharing files and keeping track of who did what, when, plus a whole lot more.
This is exciting me and a few others in the learning world for a number of reasons. First of all, it’s unlocking email and creating opportunities to share and develop knowledge, very much in the “2.0” mould, whilst providing an audit trial of what’s gone on. Second of all I can install it on my server, locking it behind a firewall if needs be. Third, and most significantly, Google have released an API for the open-source Wave technology, allowing developers to build upon the platform and create applications to extend the functionality. I can already see applications to build onto the Wave, VoIP as mentioned by Matt Bury earlier, or perhaps social bookmarking technology for instance.
This may represent a legitimate platform for eLearning developers to build upon in an effort to reach the “holy grail” of harnessing informal learning. And that’s pretty exciting, even if it’s a long way off happening.
If this is the future of informal learning, then Microsoft’s Project Natal, specifically the “Milo and Kate” demo, might just represent the future of formal learning. Its current platform couldn’t be any different – the Xbox. But it’s just as exciting. The demos showed at E3 this week combined a number of new features, from a new user interface, to the “ability” to recognise and respond to emotions.
It was no coincidence that Stephen Spielberg leant a hand at the launch. Before he started shooting “Minority Report”, Spielberg called a meeting of the best technology experts and futurists in the business to brainstorm, over a weekend at the exclusive Shutters on the Beach resort in Santa Monica, on what the near future would look like. I can’t help but think that either the guys and girls he got together were psychic, or they are the same people who are now making Project Natal.
Microsoft showcased a range of abilities, but it was Peter Molyneux’s “Milo and Kate” demo that caught my attention. He showcased a game in which the character recognises, responds and interacts with a player. Watch the video to be impressed, I can’t do it justice in words. The demo is obviously well scripted, although apparently it does work if you stick to the material. I was critical at first, as either AI just leapt forward 15 years, or it’s a bit of scam, as the creators must have made a scenario for the player to move through. But then it struck me; that’s fine. It’s what we do. We make scenarios for players to learn from and lead them through it with good pedagogical techniques. And what an experience it would be if it could look, feel and work like that.
The simplest scenarios I can think of would be aimed at youngsters, who would be learning something relatively basic. But I can see Customer Service training being done in the same way; the computer reacting to your tone and mannerisms. And the Xbox as a platform is interesting. If we are serious about playing games for eLearning, we should surely be developing on the most popular gaming platforms.
But the two concepts, Wave versus Natal, represent polar opposites in terms of the future of eLearning.
Wave represents an opportunity to harness informal learning, its low cost, it’s got “2.0″ appeal and it’s perhaps easier to envisage in the work place.
But Natal opens doors to bring more “play” into eLearning and it provides a captivating and hugely rich user experience. It will also cost a bomb unless some clever authoring techniques can be used.
So which is the future? Commercially speaking, it will be Wave that I rush to invest my time in first. But I wish it was Natal.
Will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
Yesterday I ran a workshop in-house at the learning HQ of an international professional services firm. The basis of the session was to intro people to the web 2.0 and the underlying theories and philosophy which mass-media so often fails to document.
The audience was very good and they took to the new ideas I was presenting them with relative ease. I wrapped up the session with a Q&A and I was asked this question:
Will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
Good question – one that I believe needs to be answered in three parts…
Firstly, organisations need to understand that there are actually dangers in trying to adopt every web 2.0 tool out in the marketplace. This is the “paedophiles in the playground” effect; the idea that companies end up chasing around youngsters with promises of their new web 2.0 tools. Companies still need to make rational business cases for the adoption of web 2.0 tools. They are not the answer to every problem, don’t force it!
Secondly, the tools of web 2.0 aren’t nearly as important as some of the underlying philosophies of the subject. Web 2.0 tools come and go at an unbelievable rate. Thinking one new invention will be so significant as to make businesses who do not adopt it go bust, is probably unrealistic and is a once in a generation occurrence.
I summarise the core philosophies of the Web 2.0 in 3 C’s.
Content – which is mostly, if not all, user generated.
Context – the web as a platform where the medium adds significantly to the message.
Collaboration – the idea that you can never have too many chefs!
I do think there are potentially important changes to working cultures in adopting this sort of approach, one which promotes vastly more openness amongst other aspects. But this is a rather soft statement, one so sweeping as to perhaps be unrealistic in the majority of corporate cultures.
Which brings me to my third point in answering the question, which is a more tangible aspect - Generation Y.
Most people see the link between Generation Y and the Web 2.0. Organisations can see that this next generation of workforce is going to expect these sorts of tools to be available to them when they get to the workplace. And it’s not a bad point, perhaps some will. But not every member of Generation Y is on Twitter (in fact there is evidence that Twitter actually appeals to older generations). And people who are entering the workplace for the first time have no idea what to expect; if you tell them that Facebook is for home, not for work, they are going to believe you.
Far more significant for business is an underlying trait that actually defines Generation Y. And that’s Loyalty. Or rather, a total lack of it.
The habits of employment amongst Gen Y are vastly different to their predecessors. Gen Y don’t want to work at one company for life. They want to explore, to succeed, to earn more, to experience different environments, to broaden their horizons. To put it short, they are brazen careerists. And thanks to the socio-economic environment of countries like the UK, this lack of loyalty suits their lifestyle perfectly.
Gen Y can’t afford a mortgage. Gen Y typically has to move to the city to get a good job. Here they will more than likely rent as they will not have the funding to take on a mortgage (and of course, this new life might not work out, so who wants a house right away). It’s likely the house they rent is actually worth more than the house they grew up in, the one that their parents worked at the same company for 30 years to pay for, so where is the incentive? Gen Y probably won’t get married and have kids until they reach their mid-thirties. And so we have this 10 year plus gap where Gen Y intends to live life whilst grabbing as much money and experience as is humanly possible.
And it’s in this time that your company will suffer. You will train these people up to know your industry, to innovate and excel and to become little pillars of knowledge and skill in their own right. And then they are going to leave. You can offer them more money, it probably won’t matter. And this is going to have an enormous impact on your organisations collective knowledge as it walks out the door every year.
Which means you need to relocate the knowledge to somewhere it won’t disappear.
The web 2.0 philosophy is offering organisations a chance to move closer to the holy grail of becoming “Learning Organisations”, where collective knowledge is not a function of the tacit knowledge individuals carry with them, but of the explicit knowledge available on systems. It makes knowledge part of the walls. And if Gen Y are really as keen as people think they will be on web 2.0 tools, then they will be willing participants in taking knowledge and making it explicit in the form of wiki’s, blogs, podcasts, videos, bookmarking tools and everything else.
So, to answer the question, will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 tools?
The answer is no. Your company will not wither and die if you fail to adopt these tools, but that’s because the tools themselves aren’t that important.
If we change that question around and ask, will my company die if it fails to adopt web 2.0 philosophies? The answer is yes. And that’s a much bigger problem to address than installing a few new bits of software.
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