Confessions of an elearning skeptic

This is my last post for this class and its seems appropriate to look back on what I have got out of the experience:

• I’ve become an avatar four or five times over.
• I’ve strutted my stuff in second life (and walked into a lot of walls in the process).
• I’ve seen elearning from the outside and elearning from the inside.
• I’ve seen what’s been, what’s here, what’s to come and what’s really out there!
• I’ve caught the del.icio.us bug and even learned how to type del.icio.us without having to concentrate really hard
• I’ve sold JuJu beans (but I haven’t mastered typing JuJu with making at least one mistake - practice makes perfect!)
• I’ve had more emails in my home email than my work email (and that’s saying something!)
• I’ve posted essays in a pubic space (now that is nerve wracking!)
• I’ve seen the good the bad and the ugly of elearning
• I’ve felt old (there’s nothing like new technology to do that!)

Am I still an elearning skeptic? Sure, but I’m a much more enthusiastic, informed, experienced and even a little evangelical skeptic.  A little skepticism is a healthy thing I think. 

Thanks Anne, the JuJus and all my EMT 1 coleagues, its been fun.

The elearning skeptic.

I have been pondering the many advantages of elearning this week and stumbled across one I hadn’t considered before. Elearning is green learning. Given that its world environment day today, it seems appropriate to make this the topic of a blog entry. When selling elearning within an organisation the focus is on efficiency and effectiveness. What about the environment? Think of all the paper that an organisation can save by not priniting out class manuals and handouts. Think of all the greenhouse gasses that are saved by staff not having to travel to and from training. In an organisation like mine this could be huge.

This got me digging around and I came across an great UK site called www.learningfootprint.com.  On it you can determine your organisation’s ‘learning emissions’ and how to reduce your learning footprint.

In May 2008 the NSW government announced that it would be carbon neutral by 2020.  This is the way of the future for all organisations and elearning is another tool to make it happen.  But how many of us think about our learning footprint and what we can do the reduced carbon emissions?

We can all do our part.  Go forth and eGreen!

Just when I felt that I was strting to get my head around most of the current social networking technology along comes the idea of microblogging. Microblogging is like blogging, but the entries are restricted in length (no more then 140 characters in total).The main microblogging site is Twitter and I have included a great video overview of Twitter below:

So what’s the deal with twitter? I must admit that, being the skeptic that I am, my initial reaction was ‘here’s more of that quantity over quality that I spoke about in my last ponderings’. However, given my new open-mindedness to new technology, I thought I would give it a go and look a little more deeply to see if this can be put to some greater use than finding out my friends are have a coffee in front of the TV.

Well, after some digging around I did start to unearth some early uses of twitter for education, such the one shown below:

I also located this interesting video about when to use microblogging and when to use normal blogging in an educational setting:

There also an interesting site which oveviews the whole idea of microblogging that you might want to check out:

http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/10/30/microblogging-what-is-it-good-for

Given my initial diggings microblogging certainly seems to be gathering momentum and, given that it has generation Y written all over it, will need to be a consideration in the educational context when dealing with this audience. I will continue to resaerch and keep you all posted.

Do we live in a world where quantity is more important than quality?  This is something that I have been pondering this week, sparked mainly by the fact that I have started reading Ben Elton’s new book, ‘Blind Faith‘.  In this novel, Elton creates an Orwellian world where privacy is looked on as unnatural and all people are encourgaed to shared their every thought and action online with the rest of the community.  Meanwhile, the novel’s main character, Trafford, works for the government, gathering totally useless information about people to fill the national databanks.  Its hyperbole I know, but it does make you wonder where all this is headed.

Every day we hear or see things about how much more information is available on the internet, but what sort of information is it and is our life any better for its existence?  To quote a passage from Blind Faith, “The Internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and fith, and then beneath the cloak of police surveillance.”  Im not suggesting that we are headed towards the ‘police state’ laid out by Elton, but the obsession we seem to have with quantity over quality is concerning and something to bear in mind when taking students into the dark corners of the internet.  Its not all about how many comments you have, or how many hits you got, or even how many friends you have on Facebook.  It about quality too.  To quote the old proverb, “A man with two watches never knows what time it is!”

As part of my study of online communities I came across a journal article by Alexandre Ardichvili, Martin Maurer and Tim Wentling entitled “Knowledge Sharing Through Online Communities of Practice: The Impact of Cultural Variations”.  The article explores a side of online communities that I had not considered before, that of the impact of culture on participation in virtual communities of practice.  This is particulalry relevant to my study as both the community that I participated in, and the community my group is designing for assignment two, span international borders.  Why is culture important?

The research conducted by Ardichvili et al indicted that, for some cultures, the way participants engage with an online community will be quite different.  Their study points out that common design is based around the individualistic culture (eg most western cultures) that “place personal goals ahead of the goals of a larger social group”.  This style of design tends to disadvantage participants from more collectivist cultures (eg China, Brazil and Russia) who tend to ”give priority to the goals of the larger collective or group”. 

How does this impact design?

(1) Expectations in relation to participation in online discussion may need to be modified for different countries as participants from some cultures will not be as forward with their ideas as those from other cultures.

(2) One size does not necessarily fit all and the look and feel of a site may need to be varied from one country to the next.

(3) Guidelines for usage, netiquette etc need to be very clear and not make any assumptions about the users underlying knowledge of the rule for social interaction as these may not be consistent across countries.

(4) In some countries it may be necessary to run a local community beside the global community and use ‘knowledge intermediaries’ to bridge the gap between the two.

After the success of my presentation to staff in relation to Web 2.0, I was invited to conduct the same presentation to a broader forum, comprising staff from learning and development functions across the organisation.  Due to this broader audience I took the oppportunity to present my ‘bold vision’ for elearning within our context, giving a practical example of how everyday events would be be ‘better’ once elearning was implemented. This presentation went well and has generated a lot of interest in elearning and how it can benefit the entire organisation. There is also still a lot of apprehension about how educators will engage with the technology and whether or not they have the skills to be able to create elearning.  This is something that will have to feature strongly in the future selling of this concept and in implementation plans. 

 The seend continues to grow and all indications are that a broad range of areas are looking to capitalise on this new opportunity which will make the process of gaining organisational commitment that much easier. 

As I have got into blogging one question has crossed my mind on a number of occasions: does the time that you do a post have any impact on how many people read it?  Jake Luciani took a particular interest in this very question  has undertaken an analsyis to determine the answer.  According to Luciani’s analysis Tues - Friday between 10am - 2pm (Pacific Standard Time) are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.   This means that to maximise the readership of my posts I need to post between 3am and 7am Wednesday to Saturday (thanks to www.timeconverter.com for your assistance with this calculation).  I’m not totally convinced that the added readership justifies staying up all night for, but it is yet another thing to consider when operating in the global commnity that is web 2.0. You can read the full analysis on Luciani’s site, 3rd rail.

Just a quick update on the presentation I gave to my colleagues in relation to the elearning and web 2.0 technologies (see Ponderings Eight).  Despite the small audience the presentation has started a lot of healthy discussion within my workplace, with people starting to think about how they can use elearning and web 2.0 to broaden the impact of their training.  There is also a great deal of support for the del.icio.us trial.  So, all told, things are progressing very well.  The next step will be to broaden the audience for my presentation and get some individual areas coming up with some concrete ideas for how they are exploit the benefits on offer with web 2.0.  As always, watch this space.

As promised in Ponderings Nine here is my report on day two of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) conference in Sydney.

The second day was certainly focussed more on ‘convential’ types of classroom/face-to-face learning with the key session of the day a presentation by Dr Michael Marquardt on Action Learning. With my current focus on elearning I spent a lot of time pondering the significance of Action Learning to the elearning sphere, as most information about Action Learning implied a face-to-face activity rather than something done digitally. During my trip home on the train I started to draw some threads between Action Learning and Learning Communities that I think are valuable in my study of online Learning Communities. Like Action Learning, online Learning Communities:

• Place more value on the questions than on the answers. Most threads start with a question and the better the question the better the outcome of the thread.
• Place learning as a key outcome of the process. True learning communities are not about showing-up your knowledge, but on contributing and learning from others.
• Require participants to ‘listen’ and treat each other with respect.

With this in mind I’m keen to read further about action learning and see how it can inform my study of learning communities.  I bought Dr Marquardt’s book ‘Leading with questions‘ so I will be studing that closely too to see how I can apply it to my learning and my context.

Well, the conference is over for another year and I’m keen to exploit my post-conference enthusiasm and try and implement a few of the key things I have learned. Fingers crossed.

In the spirit of my own continuous learning I attended the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) national conference in Sydney today.  Given this I thought I would dedicare a couple of posts to sharing my learning with you all.

Given my study of elearning, and my desire to introduce it into my workplace, my selection of workshops for today was focussed on elearning and its effective use and introduction.  Here is a summary of the key things that I learned today:

• It is important to distinguish between elearning as a product and learning as a process and to not confuse the two.  Good elearning creates learning but not all elearning does this.
• The importance of informal learning cannot be downplayed and we, as learning and development professionals, must learn how to harness it.  This requires us to move from being learning deliverers to being learning enablers (hence the title of this post).
• Elearning can assit us to be learning enablers when it is used to make knowledge accessible and encourage the creation of knowledge.  Many web 2.0 technologies are directed towards these aims.

Thanks to conference presenters Martyn Wild and Cheryle Walker for sharing their knowledge and expertise in relation to the above points.

A couple of interesting resources were also used during the conference that I thought would be worth sharing.  The first is an excellent presentation about change and preparing people for the world of the future.  The presentation is called Shift Happens and I highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it:

| View | Upload your own

The second resource comes from Jane McGonigal a games designer and researcher who has defined the “10 collaborative Superpowers“.  This is an interesting set of new skills that will be vital in the world of the learning enabler:

That’s enough food for thought for one day. The conference is on again tomorrow so I’ll post again then.  I better make sure I give an accurate account as my lecturer is one of the workshop presenters (g’day Anne ;-)).