By Stephen Downes
July 10, 2003
The Autism of Knowledge
Management
Today's longish issue has a theme of
sorts, though I don't know exactly what it is - something
to do with the nature of objects, games and the new
learner. And the futility of trying to move from the
physical world of artifacts to the virtual world of ideas
while keeping all your concepts, parasigms and practices
intact. Anyhow, this item - dug up by Scott Leslie
following up a reference in the Macromedia white paper - is
a nice lead-in to today's non-theme. Like Leslie, I am
uncomfortable with the autism analogy (people who are not
psychologists should stay well away from the field). The
point (completely ignored by today's learning object
evangelists): "That there is a qualitative difference
between the process of steelmaking and learning as a human
experience laden as it is with emotive colouring, and
nested in an intricate, ever-changing web of relationships,
is not noticed, or it is ignored." Like I said, just the
right note... By Patrick Lambe, December 31, 200-31 8:33
p.m.
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Final Version of Weblog
Definition
Jill Walker has polished off her
final version of a definition of weblogging for the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. And I think she
basically has it right: "A weblog, also known as a *blog,
is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries
arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader
sees the most recent post first. The style is typically
personal and informal..." By Jill Walker, jill/txt, June
28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The
Manhattan Virtual Classroom
Steven wrote in to
say that "your newsletter has mentioned several free, open
source course management systems. Here's another." From the
clipping: "The Manhattan Virtual Classroom has been
available under the GPL since October, 2000. In use at
Western New England College since 1997, Manhattan includes
a variety of discussion groups, live chat, areas to post
the syllabus, lectures, and other handouts/notices, a
module for organizing online assignments and exams, and a
self-contained module for private email. Developed entirely
in 'C', Manhattan is 100% database-free and is easy to
install on a Linux/FreeBSD server, is very fast, and has
very modest hardware requirements. A complete teacher's
reference manual is available." By Various Authors, July,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Open Source Takes on
Exchange
Microsoft's grip on the corporate and
academic market has always been anchored by the Exchange
Server, that bloated and generally useless piece of
software that combines email, calendar and file sharing
services. This dominance may now be challenged with the
launch today of OpenGroupWare, an open source tool that
performs the same enterprise functions. "OGo is important
because it's the missing link in the open source software
stack. It's the end of a decade-long effort to map all the
key infrastructure and standard desktop applications to
free software. OGo offers users a free solution for
collaboration and document management that, despite being
free of charge, will far surpass the quality and level of
collaboration found on Windows through integration of MS
Office, Exchange Server and Sharepoint. Today marks the
completion of the 'Open Stack.'" By Thor Olavsrud,
InternetNews.Com, July 10, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millennials:
Understanding the New Students
Readers of
OLDaily will have read much of this article before as the
author quotes at length from several key sources, including
the National Center for Educational Statistics, 'The
Digital Disconnect,' and others. Still, it's nice to see
this research assembled in one place, especially when we
begin to see what a consistent and compelling picture it
paints of today's connected learner. The implication,
writes the author, is a "disconnect" between what students
expect when they attend university, and what universities
actually, a disconnect that will have to be addressed with
a rethinking of what universities are and what they offer.
By Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE Review, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Building a Leadership Vision: Eleven
Strategic Challenges for Higher Education
Much
of this article is a rehash of 1990s CorpSpeak -
"Supporting Entrepreneurial Efforts and Technology",
"Building Strategic Alliances With Others" - stuff we've
heard over and over. The good bit is at the end, a nice
chart that compares the old approach to academia with the
new. Good call-out: "The modern system of education will
move to a post-modern perspective in which taking advantage
of context, collaborating, and constructing knowledge will
be valuable skills." By Donald E. Hanna, EDUCAUSE Review,
July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Next-Generation Educational Technology versus
the Lecture
Despite the fact that we should know
better, the lecture continues to dominate university
learning. With the potential offered by information
technology, though, we can think of alternative means of
deliveing learning. This author suggests that rising trend
exemplified by online games provides the answer. I don't
really like the examples provided - can't anyone stay away
from the military theme when talking about learning any
more? And the numbers are wrong - it would be very
difficult to sell a game for $100 a pop when the going
market is less than half that. But the idea is right.
Massive PDF file (when oh when will EDUCAUSE learn to use
HTML?). By Joel Foreman, EDUCAUSE Review, July, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Stephen's Web - 1997
Speaking of
games, I had the happiest discovery the other day -
archive.org has captured my personal site from six years
ago, including a great deal of material I thought was long
lost. Included in this material is the full set of
background and discussion transcripts for a CADE seminar Jeff McLaughlin, Terry Anderson and I hosted on a MUD in
1996. If you follow some of the other links you can see the
genesis of what is Stephen's Web today - following the
Brandon link, for example, takes you to an early (1997)
version of what would now be called blog software. The
Certificate in Adult Education course from 1996 is present
in its entirety. Clicking on Old Home takes you to my
archives from 1997, displaying even earlier versions of my
web page. None of the backgrounds display through
archive.org but they can be retrieved, so I'm now in the
process of reconstructing this lost material.
Now when I talk about learning objects today, you should
always keep in mind my background. McLaughlin and I, along
with István Berkeley (who also shared with me
a passion for neural nets) and Wes Cooper, did a lot of work on MUDs in
the early 90s - 1992, 93 and 94. I ran a MUD called
Atahabsca MUD, which was removed from that university's
servers in 1995, and Jeff and I collaborated on the Painted
Porch MAUD, site of the CADE conference. When I
think of an object, it is always with this in the back of
my mind. On a MUD, everything is an object - the rooms are
objects, the people are objects, the goblets are objects.
They are things that are located in an
environment which can be explored, examined, read,
displayed, or whatever. This is still the mental
image I have of objects, and the MUD gaming environment is
still the model I keep in my mind for learning of the
future.
I wish I could take everybody back ten years, back to the
days when we were all virtual beings in a virtual world,
with what we know today, and then talk about the potential.
A lot has happened since then - people didn't want 'games'
they wanted courses (like the CAE course), then they wanted
course portals, then the concept of an 'object' was twisted
and bent out of shape so that it came more to represent a
chapter in a textbook than it did a next-generation
learning tool. I wish I could show you my I Ching guru, the
quests that I built, my simulation of Plato's Cave. Even
today, the projects I work on are quite literally
pulled back into the horse-and-buggy era of
educational design. I can't stop people from thinking that
learning is about universities, and that online is about
the LMS or LCMS, but I can cling to the vision and wait for
a more enlightened age. By Stephen's Web,
Stephen's Web, May, 1997
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Have Your Say On Your Rights
I've
mentioned this here before, but today's CETIS coverage
underscores the importance of this item. The IEEE-LTSC
Digital Rights Expression Language subcommittee is
collecting requirements. As the author correctly notes, the
IEEE effort may itself be encumbered by rights - you can be
sure people are submitting needs docuemnts that would
effectively require that IEEE adopt a protected or
encumbered expression language. various people on the DREL
committee have been asked point blank to state their
company's patents and encumberances with respect to digital
rights expression languages, but so far, have refused to do
so. This is not a good omen. And, in my view, the IEEE
project is in serious danger of being compromised as a
result. By Wilbert Kraan, CETIS, July 10, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
File Swappers Buy More Music
In an
article today called The Internet and other False Messiahs
author Alex Malik argues that, because of today's
demographic, file sharing cannot lead to increased music
sales. "Consumers over the age of 30 grew up with a
'collecting' mentality. We purchased music on the
prevailing medium of the day, and in many cases chose to
retain the medium for posterity. This is because they put a
value on music.... [but today] most popular music is not
being created for posterity or for the longevity of the
artists concerned - it is disposable, it is there for the
temporary "high", and it is being created for the "here and
now". This is reflected in the purchasing habits (where
there are any!) of music consumers under the age of 30."
Now Malik argues that "songs are available for download or
peer to peer transfer well in advance of being available
for sale at a local retailer, so by the time the track is
commercially released - again the listener has tired of the
track and lost interest in the product. As a result,
another sale is lost." Well, yeah, maybe. But maybe not.
If you believe that music publishers sell music, then you
will not believe the survey results cited in
this BBC article. You will think people want free
music. "That's just human nature." But if you believe, as I
do, that the music industry actually sells storage media -
the CDs on which music is prerecorded - then the pattern of
listening online and buying offline makes sense. People are
buying storage for the music they like. The recording of
the music on the CD isn't the product, it's the inducement
for people to buy the product, the CD itself.
It's not simply that, as Powel observes, "The music industry has
failed to change with the times." No, it runs deeper than
that. The music industry forget what it is that they
were selling. Or maybe, they deliberately changed
it.
Like many people, I have LPs (vinyl analog recordings) and
CDs purchased in my youth. I remember rushing home from the
record store (the place that sold LPs), unwrapping the
cellophane, reading the liner notes, following the lyrics
as it played on the turntable (a device for playing back
vinyl LPs). These albums (another name for LPs) were
artifacts: I would listen to this one when Luc and I
filled the room with smoke, I listened to that one in the
basement in Calgary, I saw that band three times in 1973.
The music I could get anywhere - it was, after all, free
for the taping from the radio. But the album is what
carried the memory.
Somewhere along the line, the music industry tired of
selling artifacts - they cost too much to produce, I
suppose - and decided to start selling ideas. Ideas are not
durable - at least, not these ideas - they churn, so
you pump them out, you make them disposable. Sell something
without lasting value, and so sell more. In so
doing, the industry gutted music, removing from the sale
anything that I would actually want to buy. It is
the music itself that turned music from something concrete
to something aetherial, and idea. And now they want to sell
the idea, not the artifact. But to do that, you have to
control the ideas. And that's what the copyright debate is
about.
Dictatorships through history have tried to control ideas,
and from the Roman repression of Christianity (everybody
should read Gibbon at least once in their lives) to
the Ayatollah's repression of rock music they have failed,
every one of them. An idea is stored as a pattern of neural
activity in a brain, and encoded and transmitted as a
series of sound waves or digital transmissions. It slips
across borders, it eludes radar, it flits from mind to
mind. It cannot be controlled, except through control of
the mind.
Oh, they have tried. But as their failure becomes more
apparent, the remedies sought become harsher and harsher -
jail for decoding DVDs, billion dollar fines for indexing a
file system - and the appearance of repression becomes more
evident (with tens, maybe hundreds of millions of file
sharers - 48 percent of all music, according to Malik -
this is surely no outgrowth of a democratic
movement).
When you devalue what you sell, when you take away from it
anything that would actually induce someone to buy
it, when you substitute something of no value in place of
something of intrinsic value and expect to charge the same
money, you have sown the seeds of your own demise as
an industry. This is as true for publishing, for learning,
as it is for music. Lambe (remember? from four hours ago)
suggests that what we need is the disposable learning
object. That would be, I guess, the Brittany Spears of
learning. Bubblegum. Disposable. Valueless.
Learning should endure. It should endure, not by trying to
capture and sell ideas, not by transforming the artifacts
of learning into a wisp of nothingness, but by creating
artifacts toward which the learner will be attracted by the
ideas. Let the ideas, as they always have, flow free! Let
them stir a child's mind the way Abbey Road (LP by a
musical group called the Beatles) once stirred mine. You
want to sell, you want to make money? Sell something real.
A learning object is an abstract. It is not a thing. It is
virtual, not concrete. When you think of it as though it
were a document, a page in a book, an artifact, you are not
only headed down the wrong road economically (and even
politically), you are misrepresenting just what it is that
a learning object is. And you get, not just the economics,
but the system as a whole, wrong. You start to think you
can define learning objects, when they are undefinable. You
start to think you can line learning objects into leat
courses, when they are unorderable. You start to think that
you can contextualize learning objects, when learning
objects are things that fit into contexts.
The university, historically, sold time, sold place, and
service. It cannot remove all of these from what it sells,
and expect the business to remain the same.
Education, as we know it, now flows into the aether,
where it has - really - always belonged. The university,
the school, after an airy ride, must now look back and ask,
what, really, do people value? And sell that. Or
die. By Unknown, BBC, July 9, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
E-learning Coming of
Age
E-learning gets an endorsement from the
mainstream press as the author quotes staff from Mr. Lube
regarding that company's training program. "And we're
pretty darn sure it's working," report executives, citing
observable improvements in performance after e-learning was
introduced. By Kevin Marron, Globe and Mail, July 10, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Let's Get Small
The author
advocates the development of small learning modules - not
learning objects, just shorter lessons. Longer courses are
"great for grandma who just began developing her computer
skills, but what I really need to know is how to create an
Excel pivot table. I don't want to waste my time searching
through the table of contents of e-learning modules to find
the topic. I certainly do not want to pay for an entire
Excel module when I only need a specific topic. What I want
is a short module on pivot tables." This is right,
obviously, and if what the author describes are not
learning objects, then so much for learning objects. By
John Talanca, e-Learning Guru, Juky, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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