e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Category: Ed Tech

The “Ed Tech” category includes posts about educational technology products themselves, including LMSs and other learning platforms, adaptive learning and other digital curricular materials products, learning analytics, and educational apps of all types. It also includes technical aspects of ed tech products, especially interoperability.

  • Groove, Sakai, and OKI

    Martin Terre Blanche has an interesting post (found via edu_rss) on why he won’t be using Groove and what he thinks will (and won’t) become a viable alternative. His strongest argument boils down to lock-in and data exchange problems. He believes this to be a fundamental problem that is common to the current crop of both desktop and web-based collaboration tools. Here’s a sample of his analysis:

    I doubt if there are other desktop products that do a better job than Groove and I don’t think web-based group collaboration systems such as yahoo groups are really the answer either. I think two things are now on the horizon that will make the sort of simple straight-forward collaboration so many people need possible:

    1. The development and wide acceptance of simple RSS-like standards for scenarios not currently properly catered for by RSS, such as identity, group membership, and events. This will hopefully make many more kinds of collaboration possible, patterned along the same lines as the open, distributed collaboration currently happening via blogs and RSS.
    2. The development of second-level tools that draw together granular collaboration services into coherent higher-order tools. There has recently been a flowering of wonderful new online collaboration tools (such as spurl, furl, flickr, bloglines and many others), and many of them (including Google itself) come with programmer interfaces that make it possible for developers to access some of their functionality and incorporate it into their own creations. Mostly the tools people have built so far have concentrated on creative ways of using the functionality provided by each separate service, but I think it is likely that soon tools that draw on several systems simultaneously will start to emerge.

    These two points sound roughly like what OKI and Sakai, respectively, are trying to do for world of course management systems. But are they going to be successful? How lightweight is OKI? (Certainly not as lightweight as RSS, is it?) Why is it necessary for OKI to be programming-language-specific (i.e., it requires Java)? How easy is it, really, to write a service that plugs into Sakai via OKI? Or is it really the uPortal standard rather than OKI where a lot of this plug-in-type work can happen?

    Honestly, I’m very confused. If anybody out there can clarify the situation, please post to the comments here. (Sam Ottenhoff, are you reading this?)

  • Great Review (well, condemnation, really) of Blackboard

    I love this.

    Here’s a taste:

    Last week I did a quick survey of how the Internet and web publishing can completely change the way students write – the Internet gives students a real audience for their writing, it expands the content of their writing (images!), allowing them to link and be-linked-to, while promoting continual revision throughout the semester. Does Blackboard, a web-based course management system, take advantage of any of these features? It does not. Blackboard lets faculty members share documents with students, but it does nothing to promote web publishing by students.

    Thank you, Laura Gibbs. It’s long past time for schools and other teaching institutions to stop counting bullet points in glossy brochures and start looking at which platforms have the features (and implementations of those features) to actually facilitate good teaching.

  • Book Recommendation: Common Knowledge

    I’ve read a lot of “practical” KM books (including a bunch by Laurence Prusak and whomever he happens to be collaborating with on a given week) and, frankly, most of them leave me cold. A little too theoretical to be useful, a little to mired in the details to provide a cogent theoretical framework. But Nancy Dixon’s Common Knowledge: How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know is different. This book manages to both be consistently practical and provide a strong theoretical framework.

    Dixon divides knowledge transfer challenges into five types:

    • Serial Transfer, in which “involves a team transferring the knowledge [it] has learned from doing its task in one setting to the next time that team does the task in a different setting”
    • Near Transfer, “when a team has learned something from its experience that the organization would like to replicate in other teams that are doing very similar work”
    • Far Transfer, when a team has acquired largely tacit knowledge from its experience with non-routine tasks that the organization would like to make available to other teams that are doing similar work
    • Strategic Transfer, “when a team has taken on a tast that happens only infrequently–a one-off project–and wants to benefit from others, in other parts of the organization, that have done a similar task”
    • Expert Transfer, “when teams facing an unusual technical problem beyond the scope of their own knowledge seek the expertise of others in the organization to help them address it”

    I’m condensing here, of course. Each type of transfer is described in detail with lots of examples, characteristic criteria for distinguishing one kind of transfer challenge from another, and guidelines for effective transfer strategies. Then she pulls it all together in the last two chapters to look at building a comprehensive knowledge transfer organizational plan.

    If I were allowed to recommend only one book on practical KM, this would be it.

  • Donald Cox, The Economics of "Believe-It-Or-Not": Library of Economics and Liberty

    This is a great piece on the utility and cost of belief. It sounds heavy, I know, but it is actually very well written and easy to follow. I found it while doing research on informational cascades, but the piece is about a much broader KM problem; namely, what is the cost of testing a belief versus the cost of not testing it?

  • eCornell Research Blog: UMassOnline Revenue Grows 47%

    Via eCornell, here’s a story in TMCnet about massive growth in UMass’ online learning program. What I’m interested in, though, is whether this growth leads to profit. It’s great to bring money into the institution, but it would be even better if some of that money stayed in the institution after paying for the program’s costs. While the article isn’t clear, it seems to say that profitability is even more impressive in these programs than revenues. Here’s what they say:

    More than 90 percent of the revenues are retained by the UMass campuses to support education and research programs.

    If I read this correctly, then UMass is seeing a 90% profit margin on $14 million in revenues. That’s pretty outrageous.

    If anybody has any info on e-learning profitability for higher ed programs, please share it in the comments section for this post.

  • Designing for Emergent Behaviors in Humans

    This post on a new kind of group performance art gives a good example of how emergence can work in groups of humans. Key here, again, is that the players have no clear sense of the larger emergent pattern, i.e., there is no “learning” on the part of individuals, though there may be adaptation by the group as a whole.

    How might this be useful? Imagine situations where the individuals can’t know what their counterparts are doing. The first (and scariest) example that springs to mind is al Qaida. We don’t know what their communications are like, but the typical structure of a guerilla or terrorist group is around cells that don’t know even about the existence of other cells. That protects the organization should one group get caught. The down-side, of course, is lack of the ability to coordinate. Unless, that is, you engineer in some behaviors that only require each cell to respond to simple cues from easily observable actions that other nearby cells are taking (e.g., terrorist attacks). I’m not sure what those rules would look like (and I’m not sure that I would post them on the Internet even if I did), but the idea is that emergence is a useful tool where coordinated global information sharing is not practical.

    Another more mundane example would be inside a modern large corporation or govermental agency. While global communication is often highly desireable, it rarely happens in a consistent and coordinated manner. If workers (and even workgroups and offices) follow rules that mandate behavior changes based on relatively simple and easily obtainable cues from their local environment about what their immediate neighbors within the organization are doing and experiencing, it’s possible that you can have the entire organization respond as if there were global communication and coordination.

    I realize this is all vague; I’m thinking out loud at the moment. But this idea of engineered emergence in communication-hostile environments is how I’m thinking that emergence will ultimately be a useful concept in knowledge management.

  • Decentralized Intelligence – What Toyota can teach the 9/11 commission about intelligence gathering.

    This piece on Slate by Duncan Watts (author of the outstanding book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age) captures both the Nirvana of decentralized intelligence that everybody seeks and its frustrating elusiveness. It’s a must-read for anybody interested in “emergent learning” or social learning or communities of practice or…you know…that stuff.

    Watts is a sociologist and an expert in the theory of networks, i.e., how that whole “six degrees of separation” thing happens. If you take that and add in a dash of distributed cognition, then you get something very close to the idea that everybody is sniffing around. It’s not emergence, but who cares? A rose by any other name smells as sweet.

    Now. If we can only figure out how to actually make it work….