e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Yahoo! News – Social Issues Surround Social Software

    (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1738&ncid=738&e=11&u=/zd/20040625/tc_zd/130244 by way of elearnspace)

    OK, there’s a lot that’s interesting here, but what really caught my eye was the bit about trackbacks:

    Six Apart last month introduced a new pricing model for Movable Type, a move sure to draw some negative reaction, Trott said. But Six Apart decided to use trackback when sharing its pricing news through the company’s blog because it provides more pertinent feedback than a blog comment section or customer e-mails, Trott said.

    “If we had had open comments then it would have been a thousand times worse because it would breed anonymity,” Trott said. “The accountability of Weblogs is that they are your online personality.”

    Six Apart recorded between 800 to 900 trackbacks from its original posting about the pricing changes and another 300 to 400 when it asked for more feedback in a later blog posting, Trott said. Bloggers often wrote essaylike responses and provided insight that helped shape a revamped pricing structure for Movable Type announced last week, she said.

    This fascinates me. I have an article draft buried somewhere on my hard drive that explores the differences between what I consider to be the best UI features of a discussion board and the modern weblog, how these change the shape of the conversations, and how to design a hybrid system that guides the moderator on how to set up the UI based on the desired characteristics of the conversation. But I must admit that I’m still trying to wrap my head around the full implications of the whole trackback thing.

    If anybody has insight into this topic, please ping me with your trackback or, if you don’t have a trackback-enabled weblog, email me.

  • HTML-in-RSS Challenges

    My apologies to those of you who have been getting my content by RSS feed; I’m aware that you have been receiving unformatted paragraphs smushed together in one long graph. This is a problem with Expression Engine’s RSS generation template. Basically, in order to use HTML in an RSS feed you have to specifically escape out to it. There’s some debate on whether this is a good idea, but most of the feeds to which I subscribe do it because they can put bullet points, URLs, etc., directly into their feeds. I like this because it means I can easily read the whole post without having to visit the web site itself; all of the info comes to me. Failing that, I like to have an elipse at the end of the last sentence of the feed entry to let me know that the the thought continues on the web page…

  • Portals and KM: Blog as Filing Cabinet

    This post on using weblogs as a personal organizing tool is a rare example of the “Gee, aren’t blogs swell?!” genre of weblog posts that actually manages to touch the elusive certain something that makes blogs work. What’s nice here is the resonance between personal needs and knowledge management value. The fact that the blog is public tends to force the user to annotate with more detail. I can’t tell you how many times I have written down or bookmarked a URL only to forget why I marked it. Both the act and the fact of annotation help me remember why I cared about the web page (or, as KM-heads would put it, the “context”).

    Software developers, take…er…note. Add the blogger API to something like Circus Ponies Notebook and you’ll have something truly useful.

  • Great Piece on the Flaws in Kirkpatrick and ISD

    This nice piece (which comes by way of eCornell Research Blog) sums up the problem with these archaic methodologies nicely:

    As the table above indicates, although there are four levels of evaluation in the Kirkpatrick model, none of the levels captures business feedback or business reaction to the training or e-Learning product. Level I captures the reaction of the student. Level II tests the student and accesses if the student has learned because of the training. The provider of the feedback is the student. Level III attempts to determine if the student is applying this newfound skill or knowledge in the workplace. This is accomplished by interviewing either the student or his supervisor. Level IV, which is where the impact that the training product has on the business is supposed to be identified, is contingent on an analysis of the data collected in the first three levels (none of which by the way even attempted to capture the voice of the business). The provider of feedback for level four tends to be the training department or the training manager who frequently (unilaterally) attempts to derive a correlation between the results of the first three levels of evaluation and business impact.

    It should now be obvious that the current e-Learning development and evaluation methodologies are not equipped with the tools required to capture and measure business requirements. ISD as the name implies does a good job of identifying instructional requirements, but does not possess the means to detect business needs. The Kirkpatrick method of evaluation is designed to measure the effectiveness of instruction, and thus does not include tools that are vital to calculating business impact.

    There’s also some nice stuff here about substituting Six Sigma’s DFSS (Design for Six Sigma) method instead of ADDIE. It’s a little vague, but it’s a start.

  • Thoughts About ChatterBots

    I’ve always been fascinated with chatterbot technology and the possibilities of using it for online learning. (If you don’t know what a chatterbot is, it’s easier to experience than to explain. Try talking to Brian, Ella or, if you’re in the mood for the bizarre and macabre, a simulation of John Lennon’s personality.) Basically, a big part of the magic that makes a chatterbot work is a scripting language that parse natural language and identifies ways of asking the same questions (e.g., “How much does it cost? is the same as “What’s the price?”). You build up a library of questions that it can answer and then try to set up the conversational situation such that the person interacting with the “bot” is unlikely to ask questions that you haven’t thought of. This last piece is critical; unless you want to spend your whole life debugging and fine-tuning, or unless you don’t care if your simulation is highly unconvincing (which is what inevitably happens with the “ask me anything”-type demos like the ones linked above) then you absolutely must create a situation in which you’re pretty confident that you know what kinds of questions the user (or learner) is likely to ask.

    I tried to use a chatterbot in about 1998 to create a simulation of a client who needs retirement planning for a financial planning course, but the technology at the time wasn’t quite up to it and the customer wasn’t patient enough (read: lacked funding) to let us work our way through the problem. I still think it’s a good idea, though; if anybody out there has tried this, please email me and tell me about it. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about chatterbots, then here’s a good place to start.

  • Interesting Challenge For Ideas to Improve the Browser

    Blake Ross, one of the guys on the Mozilla Firefox team, is calling for ideas on how to use machine learning to improve future versions of Firefox. Be creative!

  • Supporting Student Autonomy Online

    This (which comes by way of Stephen Downes’ excellent blog), is a nice little outline that argues in favor of promoting collaborative online learning (as opposed to self-paced with learning objects that have no social interaction associated with them) and promoting student autonomy within that model. All of this is worth saying over and over again, as loudly as possible. One complimentary point that the author misses is that, in an online learning environment, students have autonomy whether we design for it or not. There is no instructor looking over their shoulder or making eye contact. Unfortunately, if we don’t plan for student autonomy, then their only real choice for exercising it is to tune out. Better to give them more constructive choices.

    There’s also a bit about emergence in here. I have to get around to writing an article about this; it is very much in the air but so far nobody has really pinned down exactly what we think it can do for online communities and, even harder, how we think we can make it work. There are some fairly specific mechanisms by which self organization works (at least in biology); I’m going to have to spend some time looking at what we actually know about how emergence works in groups of organisms. Stay tuned.