Happy New Year from the E-Learning Curve Blog

May I wish all my readers a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year. I look forward to bringing you more informative and educational posts in 2009.
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A Christmas Message from the E-Learning Curve Blog

Nollaig Shona daoibh go léir agus Athbhliain faoi shéan is faoi mhaise daoibh, agus go mba seacht fearr sinn go léir ag an am seo ar an bhliain seo chugainn!

A peaceful Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year to you, and may we all be seven times better off at this time next year!
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The Winter Solstice at Newgrange - watch it live on the Web

5,000 years ago, an extraordinary people lived in Ireland. They were farmers, hunters and builders. Without the benefit of the wheel, and with tools made only of flint, they carved their culture into history. Along the banks of the River Boyne, they built houses to their dead, repositories to their spirit - monuments to immortality.

Brú na Boinne: Monument to Immortality

I don't spend all my time involved in learning and development.

No, no, no.

Among my more arcane, but nevertheless very satisfying interests is in the culture of the Neolithic (New Stone Age), and particularly the culture of the Beaker People of Western Europe. An event central to the lives of the people of this culture in Ireland (which resonates with us today) occurs this Sunday, 21st December on the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere.

At ten minutes to nine on the morning of the shortest day of the year, a pale and weak sun slowly rises above a ridge in the Boyne River valley. As its rays penetrate the dawn mist, a solitary building sits atop it hill... waiting. Waiting as it has every year for over fifty centuries to shine once again as a beacon to the Spirit Of Man - a place where people forever bound to the earth can, however briefly, capture the Fire of the Sun and touch the sky.

Newgrange is best known for the illumination of its passage and chamber by the winter solstice sun. Above the entrance to the passage at Newgrange there is a opening called a roof-box. Its purpose is to allow sunlight to penetrate the chamber on the shortest days of the year, around December 21, the Winter Solstice.

At dawn, from December 19th to 23rd, a narrow beam of light penetrates the roof-box and reaches the floor of the chamber, gradually extending to the rear of the passage. As the sun rises higher, the beam widens within the chamber so that the whole room becomes dramatically illuminated. This event lasts for 17 minutes, beginning around 9am.

Newgrange's accuracy as a time-telling device is all the more remarkable when you think that it was built 500 years before the Great Pyramids in Giza, and more than 1,000 years before Stonehenge.

Thanks to the Irish Office of Public Works (OPW) and facilitated by the good people at Servecast (yo! Julian, Declan, & Sinead!) you will have the opportunity to view this event live online on the morning of 21st December.

SlideShare makes PowerPoint a little more Web 2.0-friendly

If you’re a regular (and dedicated) reader of The E-Learning Curve Blog, you’ll recall that in did a compare / contrast between authorSTREAM and SlideShare some months back. At the time I concluded:

So which service is better? Well, I guess that comes down to WIIFM - what's in it for me. The broad sweep of features and functionality are pretty similar on both services: deficiencies in one are accommodated by lack of functionality in the other, so it really comes down to personal choice.

My user experience of authorSTREAM was slightly superior to that of SlideShare: upload and conversion times were lower on the former service, for example. Equally, the enhanced slide animation and transition support on authorSTREAM was a positive advantage, as was the ability to view presentations in full-screen mode via a third party environment (my blog in this case). I also prefer the extended functionality afforded by the desktop-based client client, as well as the better audio integration.

In the end... well, I recommend that you try both out yourself, and you decide which service meets your needs.

Since then, both services have been nice enough to keep me up-to-date with developments in their respective apps. As you can imagine, most of these updates are incremental changes in functionality, better app stability, and so on, but the latest update from SlideShare really excited me.

As an inveterate user of PowerPoint Add-ins (Camtasia, Presenter, PowerManual etc) I find the facility to generate e-learning content from within an authoring application to be an essential component of the Rapid E-Learning production process. As it happens, I’m presenting at an event tomorrow where my e-learning “wow factor” will be How to Create E-Learning Content in Four Mouse Clicks; and a PowerPoint add-in is an important part of that narrative.

You can now generate e-elearning objects in PowerPoint and publish them to the SlideShare website, using the new SS ribbon add-in. This looks like being a very cool tool indeed, and if I get all my shopping done, I’ll install and test over the next few days.

Meet the SlideShare Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007

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Economic downturn – a Systems Interpretation?

Sadly, I don’t have much time to blog this week, as I’m facilitating a symposium later in the week. I’ll talk more about the event in the future, but today I just want to point you towards Donald ‘Plan B’ Clark’s article concerning the role of leadership training in our current economic troubles. Real soul food for thought, in my view.

The author discusses how

the cult of ‘leadership’ contributed to megalomaniac behaviour that ultimately led to the financial crisis… All of this leadership lark is quite recent. For years we got by with management training, good old sensible stuff about being nice, clear and organised. Then, around the Millennium, the training world went all evangelical about ‘Leadership’.
Now the last thing you want to do with a bloated ego is feed it a diet of hubris. These guys […] think they’re omniscient and omnipotent.

Mr. Clark provides a well-structured, comprehensive, and frequently hilarious analysis of the snake oil of “leadership” and those who subscribe to it.

While I don’t have time to discuss this in more detail, think about the subject in the context of Peter Senge’s notion of learning organisations and systems thinking.

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References:

Clark, D. (2008) Leadership training – cause of credit crunch? [Internet] Available from: http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2008/11/leadership-training-cause-of-credit.html Accessed 12 December 2008

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End-of-year Moodle-ings: a chance to review (a book)

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of the E-Learning Curve Blog, I strongly advocate the Constructivist approach to learning, and the use of open-source technologies to develop and distribute e-learning materials. You’ll also know that my Learning Management System of choice is Martin Dougiamas’ Modular Object-Orientated Learning Environment (Moodle), as this particular platform tick both those boxes.

As we come to the end of 2008, I have finally gotten around to do begin undertaking some essential housekeeping tasks on my website, michaelhanley.ie.

Among those activities is a long-overdue upgrade to Moodle 1.9 - I’ve been itching to get an opportunity to investigate and use these new features and enhancements:

• Social networking functionality (i.e. tagging)
• The user blogs facility
• The improved wiki

And most especially:

• Learning Outcomes

The enhanced backup and restore features and new DB module will also assist management of my implementation, as I’m the kind of person who feels like they’re performing open heart surgery – without anesthetic - on a patient, on those occasions when I have to perform some sort of customization on a production system.

By coincidence Packt Publishing recently contacted me and asked me to review Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development, by William Rice IV. The publishers describe the text as:

A complete guide to successful learning using Moodle, focused on course development and delivery and using the best educational practices. …Moodle E-Learning Course Development shows you how to use Moodle as a tool to enhance teaching.

In my view there are certain publishers – Packt, Friends of Ed, O’Reilly and so on, who can generally be trusted to provide hands-on expertise for IT professionals, so I already own a couple of Packt’s texts. But before I hear you shout “Canyonero!” I will undertake to review this text on it’s own merits, in an equitable manner. There’s no point in me saying that this book meets the needs of its potential audience if it doesn’t.

Since my reviewer’s copy of the text just arrived in the post today, I’ll be taking the opportunity to review the book in the very near future, so watch this space.

In the meantime if you’d like to take a look at the book yourself, Packt Publishing have given me Chapter 6, “Adding Interactive Course Material” as a 3.4MB PDF for you download.

• Click here to download the PDF from my website michaelhanley.ie

or

• click here to get the chapter from Packt Publishing.com

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References:

Rice, W.H. (2008) Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development Available online: http://www.packtpub.com/

Wikipedia contributors, The Last Temptation of Krust. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, [Internet] Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyonero [Accessed December 12, 2008]

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My Top 25 blogs for 2008

As discussed in yesterday's post, here are my Top 25 blogs for 2008. Hopefully there's enough detail, laid out in a usable fashion, to encourage you to try out a few of the links.

Blog Name	Author	Description
Brain Rules	John Medina	12 Principles for Surviving at Work, Home, and School
Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies	Jane Hart	Knowledge, Skills and Tools for the Learning 2.0 Age
Clive on Learning	Clive Shepherd	Clive Shepherd has spent the past 25 years working with computers trying to make learning things happen electronically. He's still trying to figure it out.
Connecting 2 the World	Virginia Yonkers	Connecting ideas, cultures, and disciplines
Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development	Brent Schlenker	Corporate Learning Blogger, Strategist, Consultant exploring the crossroads of Technology and Learning.
Elearning Technology	Tony Karrer	Tony Karrer's blog on Elearning trends
elearningpost	Maish R Nichani	elearningpost provides news and views into the process and practice of e- learning.
Elearnspace	George Siemens	Explores elearning, knowledge management, networks, technology, and community.
Experiencing E-Learning	Christy Tucker	Technology Skills for Instructional Designers
Internet Time	Jay Cross	Internet Time Group helps organizations improve the performance of their people by speeding up their learning.
Learning Circuits Blog	ASTD	Home of the LCB Big Question
Learning Visions	Cammy Bean	Musings on e-Learning, instructional design and other tidbits
Leisurely Theorems	Bill Brandon	Notes about learning and performance.
liquid elearning	Michelle Gallen	Thoughts on e-learning – what's new, what works and what's plain daft
Off Course - On Target	Wayne Hodgins	Perspectives on human performance improvement, knowledge management, learning, and the general nature of design.
OLDaily	Stephen Downes	Covers the world of online learning, and as a daily there is an expectation that it will be fresh, that it will contain the news of the day.
Plan B	Donald Clark	What is Plan B? Not Plan A!
Rapid Elearning	Tom Kuhlmann	Practical, real-world tips for e-learning success
Rapid Elearning News	Ted Cocheu	Where common sense is spoken about workplace learning
rElearn	Eamon Costello	reuse repurpose rElearn
The Bamboo Project	Michele Martin	Career Development, Technology and Learning Strategies for Personal and Professional Growth
Weblogg-ed	Will Richardson	Insights into blogs, wikis and podcasts for learning
Workplace Learning Today	Brandon Hall Research	Daily summary of news and articles about all aspects of employee training

... and my favorite e-learning blog:

The E-Learning Curve Blog

Michael Hanley

An elearning blog about enhancing performance, knowledge, and expertise through technology in learning.

...of course!

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Concerning EduBlogs’ Nominations, or How NOT to Win Friends…

Earlier this week, I posted on the topic of the EduBlogs’ nominations for 2008. I indicated my surprise at the lack of the blogs that I would consider to be deserving nominees for the awards. Brandon Hall’s Gary Woodill took the time to comment on my post, and rightly highlighted that I had perhaps been too extreme asserting that

none of what I would consider the ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs received a mention.

I subsequently modified my position and highlighted some of the blogs that were in (some of) the categories’ lists that I would subscribe to / reference / admire, including C4LPT, the Bamboo Project, and OLDaily – for I did not have the leisure to peruse all the lists in all the categories… so of course I omitted some other candidates that would be among the e-learning blogs I regularly read, and naturally Workplace Learning Today was among them (as I said in the title of this post– How Not to Win Friends, eh?).

However, upon reflection I have to say that I stand by my initial (modified) position on this topic, and here’s why...

In my view, the primary issue I encountered with this year’s list of categories was that it’s not very usable for voters. As an e-learning professional, usability – the ease with which learners can assimilate content in order to achieve a particular learning objective – is a key factor in developing effective, easily-transferable courseware, as well as informational deliverables generally.

As a result, I found it difficult to engage with the “great wall of links” I encountered when I navigated to each category. The outcome was that I wasn’t motivated to review many of the nominated blogs: I don’t have the time at my disposal to carefully review each nominee and weigh them against each other as carefully as I would have liked.

If, for example, a blog* is called “Seán’s Blog”, “Siobhan’s Thoughts”, or “Y(outh) Zone” it’s nigh-well impossible to decipher what topics it covers without some textual descriptors or justification for their appearance on the list - apart from “Best [what ever the category is] Blog”, of course. This isn’t enough detail (for me) to carry out an informed judgment on the relative merits or otherwise of a candidate for an EduBlogs Award.

In the context of the EduBlogs Awards site, the development of an informationally sound content framework should have been a consideration for the authors, to enable them to create an environment conducive to the requirements of voters. At the same time, the content model must make effective use of available technologies, with the express purpose of countering the effects of cognitive overload (there is an imbalance of text to other media types).

The outcome? A lost opportunity to introduce a substantial number of blogs to a wide audience, and a whole lot of frustration at having to work hard to vote.

Just as well there’s no hanging chads online.

Tomorrow: It’s easy to be critical, but I feel that there’s no point in it unless it’s constructive criticism and supports learning.

Gary Woodill asked me to highlight my ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs. I’m not going to do that, I’ll cover twenty of them, but I would be interested to see if you, dear reader, consider the approach I take to distributing the information to be usable and effective.

FÓGRA: I’ll come back to Chris Argyris anon.

* The blogs depicted in this post are fictitious. Any similarity to any person’s blog living or dead is merely coincidental.

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The EduBlogs Awards - ‘Edding in the wrong direction?

[Edited 8th December 2008 - see Gary Woodill's comment below]

So anyway I opened my Google Reader this morning only to find that there’s plenty of what the intelligence community call ‘chatter’ – apparently there’s doin’s-a-transpiring about the EduBlogs Awards.

Some of my favourite bloggers, Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk Blog), Tony Karrer (eLearning Technology) and Stephen Downes (Stephen’s Web) are discussing the EduBlogs Awards – and they’re not being complimentary.

Doug Johnson points out that (any) awards in the blogosphere are seen as an “extrinsic reward” for the author of a particular blog so honoured, and entirely separate from the intrinsic motivations most bloggers have for creating and maintaining their space on the Web. He posits the question: do blog awards actually have some value? I’ll come back to this.

Regarding the EduBlogs ‘Eddies,’ Stephen Downes notes that some awards seem to have up to twenty nominations per category and that the nominations system seems to be unnecessarily convoluted. Tony Karrer picks up this theme and expands it as he muses upon the merits of page rank, (Technorati-style) authority, and other social Web measures of ‘interestingness.’

Now I’m a (relative) newbie at this blogging business, and there wasn’t a snowball’s that The E-Learning Curve Blog was going to emerge as a nominee for an Eddie, so I have no axe to grind in this matter, but I really have to say that I recognised very few of the nominated blogs. I put it down to my ignorance of blogs in categories like Best Class Blog and so forth, but I didn’t recognise too many of the blogs in any of the categories.

But the blogosphere is a big place: so I had a look at some of the blogs just to see what they were about. And… well, they were alright – not my cup of tea I suppose. (I am aware that my view is one man’s outlook and you, dear reader, take it for that). It amazed me that none very few of what I would consider the ‘Top 50’ e-learning blogs received a mention: what’s more I suspect that this is the concern of very credible learning professionals like Messers Johnson, Downes and Karrer.

My conclusion? That the Eddies’ Nominees are like the voting in the last Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone is voting for their buddy, regardless of the quality, value, or merit of the material their blogs’ contain.

A wise man (Kent Brockman) once said: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – democracy just doesn’t work.”

So, have a good weekend, and don’t forget:

VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN.

Teaching organizations how to learn. Part 2 – Conditions for learning

As discussed in a previous post, Driscoll (1994) outlines five conditions for learning (p.382-3). Very much like the multiple approaches and interpretations that exist in constructivism, a number of conditions must be met for the approach to be implemented. The conditions are:

1. Providing complex learning environments that incorporate authentic activity. Constructivists argue that learners should learn to solve the types of complex problem they will face in real life. Learning how to do this is difficult unless complex and authentic learning environments are available to the learners.
2. Providing for social negotiation as an integral part of learning. Bruner (1986) explains that learning is a cultural interchange between group members. Collaboration creates an opportunity for learners to share their understandings with others and to have others do the same with them. This provides multiple perspectives to each learner, and this negotiation process between peers should lead to enhanced understanding.
3. Support multiple perspectives and the use of multiple modes of representation. Because learning skills, behaviors and knowledge can be diverse and complex, constructivists believe that to achieve complete understanding the learner must examine the material from multiple perspectives. If they are not supported in this endeavor, the learner will achieve only a partial understanding of the material. Multiple modes of representation allow the learner to view the same content through different sensory modes.
4. Nurture reflexivity. Duffy and Cunningham (1996) characterize reflexivity as “the ability of students to be aware of their own role in the knowledge construction process.” (p.172). It could also be described as the learner taking ownership of their own thinking and learning processes. Driscoll (1994) assets that reflexivity and by extension critical thinking are central attributes in the constructivist methodology, as it enables learners to understand how and why cognition creates meaning. This enables learners to attain goals such as reasoning, understanding multiple perspectives, and expressing and defending their own beliefs.
5. The last condition Driscoll describes is to “emphasize student-centred instruction.” Bruner (1966) calls this “discovery learning”. By obtaining knowledge by themselves, learners select and transform information, construct knowledge, and make decisions in the context of a cognitive structure that provides meaning and organization to experiences and allows the individual to “go beyond the information given”. Students are actively engaged in determining what and how they will study or gain understanding.

These principles and conditions position the constructivist approach to learning as an appropriate orientation for learning sans frontiers; using technologies like the Internet, websites and virtual learning environments, applying collaborative learning, problem-based learning and goal-based mechanisms, making Open Source Software and Course- and Content Management Systems accessible to learners, and using e-learning applications like online conferencing and collaboration tools could be the foundation for these multiple constructivist conditions for learning. (Duffy & Cunningham 1996, Driscoll 1994, Schank 1994)

These characteristics provide an appropriate framework for knowledge workers to learn (and for the learning intervention), given that their ongoing development is based in the context of already-established cognitive schemata (from the learners’ perspective), the knowledge and skills are applied to solve real-world problems, and their expertise (behaviors) are typically used in collaboration with their peers to enhance the performance of organizations.

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References:

Bruner, J. S. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston, MA. Allyn & Bacon.

Duffy, T. M. & Cunningham, D. J. (1996) Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. IN: Jonassen D. H. (Ed) Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp.170- 198). New York: Simon & Shuster Macmillan.

Schank, R. (1994) Active Learning Through Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, 1(1), pp.69-78.

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Learning Circuits Blog Big Question for December

A short post today: this month's LCBBQ is "What did you learn about learning in 2008?"

By a coincidence, I covered this query in my November post "A Year in E-Learning: One Blog’s Progress"

It’s definitely worthwhile heading over the the Learning Circuits Blog to check out what the other contributors have to say. There’s usually a good mix of conventional opinions, outlandlish views, and even the occasional inspired comment.

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Teaching organizations how to learn. Part 1

Chris Argyris, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, has made significant contributions to the development of organizational learning theory and experiential learning.

Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment ...must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it.

(Argyris, C. 1991)

Over the next couple of weeks (taking digressions where appropriate) I will examine the significance of his work (focusing in particular on single-loop and double-loop learning) on organizational learning systems.

Today however, I will begin by reminding you of the basis for Chris Argyris’ work: Constructivism.

In her comprehensive reference text Psychology of learning for instruction, Marcy Driscoll describes constructivism as having

…multiple roots in psychology and philosophy, among which are the cognitive and developmental perspectives of Piaget, the interactional and cultural emphases of Vygotsky and Bruner, the contextual nature of learning, the active learning of Dewey, the epistemological discussions of von Glasersfeld and the paradigm and scientific revolutions of Thomas Kuhn.

(1994, p.375)

Constructivism is an approach to learning based on the premise that cognition, or learning, is the result of mental construction: it is an active process in which learners construct new ideas, skills and behaviors based upon their prior and current knowledge, behavior and skill assets. The learner transforms information, constructs knowledge, and makes decisions based upon extant cognitive structures or mental models. These cognitive structures - what Roger Schank calls “scripts” in his Dynamic Memory Model (1982) - provide meaning and organization to experiences and allow the individual to go “beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1974). Even though there are numerous interpretations of constructivism, several central concepts inhabit all constructivist theories. Cunningham and Duffy (1996) identified two major similarities that are the foundation of all constructivist thought. They are that “learning is an active process of constructing rather than acquiring knowledge” and “instruction is a process of supporting that construction rather that communicating knowledge” (1996, p.172).

Bruner’s 1966 text Toward a Theory of Instruction described the key principles of constructivism (p.225):

Table 1 Principles of constructivism

Principle		Definition
Readiness		Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn
Spiral organization	Structure.	The content must be structured so that it can be grasped by the learner.
	Sequence.	Material must be presented in the most effective sequences.
Generation		“Going beyond the information given” - Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps

Extending from these basic constructivist principles as well as from the work of other key figures in the constructivist school, Driscoll (1994) outlines five conditions for learning (p.382-3). Very much like the multiple approaches and interpretations that exist in constructivism, a number of conditions must be met for the approach to be implemented. It is useful to elaborate briefly on these conditions, as they are relevant to the learning approach discussed in the rest of this series of posts.

…and I will do this tomorrow.

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References:

Argyris, C. (1991) Teaching Smart People How to Learn. Harvard Business Review Reflections 4(2). [Internet]. Available from: http://www.velinperformance.com/downloads/chris_argyris_learning.pdf [Accessed 12 November 2008]

Bruner, J. S. (1974) Going Beyond the Information Given. New York: Norton.

Cunningham, D. J. & Duffy, T. M. (1996) Constructivism: Implications for the design and delivery of instruction. IN: Jonassen. D. H. (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology (pp. 170- 198). New York: Simon & Shuster Macmillan.

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction. Boston, MA. Allyn & Bacon.

Schank, R. (1982) Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge University Press.

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