This great little video from SimplyZesty, an agency specialising in Online PR and Social Media based in Dublin, contains some fascinating stats about social media usage in the UK. Check the website out because they have a free e-book too.

The secret of a good debate is to choose a motion controversial enough to attract along a sizeable audience, but with enough subtleties and ambiguities that top quality speakers can explore without resort to dogmatism or play acting. After last year’s clasically contentious “This house believes that the e-learning of today is essential for the important skills of tomorrow" (90 for, 144 against), it was always going to be hard for Epic, the organisers of The E-Learning Debate, to come up with something to grab the imagination as readily, particularly now that several hundred of us have been able to experience the novelty of a debate in the Oxford Union. So, how about this?

”This house believes that technology-based informal learning is more style than substance."

The E-Learning Debate 2010 will take place at 4pm on October 6th. A prestigious speaker list includes informal learning guru Jay Cross (speaking against), author and academic Dr Alison Rossett (speaking for) and, just announced, Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Some of the arguments are predictable:

• Most of what we learn is learned informally.
• Much of our work and social lives requires us to engage with technology.
• Therefore technology-based informal learning is very much of substance.
• On the other hand, informal and social learning is a fashionable topic.
• Yet it hardly appears on the radar of the average learning and development professional.
• Therefore it is all about style.

But it’s not as simple as that is it? Act fast if you want a place at the debate and a part in the outcome.

See my report on last year’s inaugural debate.

A recent posting on Mashable reports some interesting data from Resolve Market Research based on an online survey of potential purchasers and active users of iPads, smart phones, e-readers and portable video game devices in the USA. It provides some insights into the uses early adopters are finding for their iPads and the effect this is having on competitive devices:

The iPad was initially positioned as a device for reading, watching videos and web browsing. Only 28% of prospective purchasers said their main use would be playing games. However, having got hold of the iPad, 38% then said they no longer intended to buy a portable gaming device. True, even more (49%) said they would no longer be buying an e-book reader, but that was only to be expected. Owning an iPad had a much lower impact on people’s intentions to go on and buy a netbook (32%) or MP3 player (29%).

Surprising was that, for 37% of respondents, the iPad was their first Apple purchase. When you consider the ubiquity of the iPod and the number of iPhone and MacBook users out there, this is providing Apple with a host of new potential customers for their other products.

The early adopters of the iPad are young professionals, aged 22-45, which is hardly surprising. However, the group that’s following in their footsteps is not their kids but their parents, aged 45+. This gels with my own experience – the iPad gives you much of the functionality of a general purpose computer, but it doesn’t look or act like one. For many people it will be all they want.

It’s only fair to also say that 55% of prospective and actual users stated that they regarded the iPad as an expensive toy. In my view that’s not going to stop people buying them, and if the device continues to be used in more and more imaginative ways, it may well become as indispensable as all those other gadgets we now take for granted.

Recently I got an email from 'Sean, a fellow learning theory/tool fiend... I'm also a first year student at Harvard Medical School but I just launched my own tech-heavy learning project on the side. It's called Excel Everest (http://www.ExcelEverest.com), and it's a fully interactive "book" about Microsoft Excel, but written in an Excel file. It has 41 topics, 155 exercises, 339 buttons, and 87 embedded videos.'

There's a great introductory video on YouTube.

Well I tried it and it's a wonderful resource. Learning Excel within Excel is a great idea that works; you get to try out all sorts of fancy formulae and formatting right inside the tool - not by simulation but for real. Not only that, it's written in clear, friendly English with a heavy dose of humour. And did I mention that it's also challenging? Not patronisingly easy like so much IT training.

This would get my vote for a e-learning design award. If you're an IT trainer, get this and sit back while it does the job for you.

In his posting Depressing study of L&D, Donald Clark quotes research by Coleman and Parkes in Spring of this year, which involved interviews with 100 key decision-makers at major UK companies. Apparently this showed that:

• 70% see inadequate staff skills as a barrier to growth.
• 40% see a risk of employee skills being obsolete.
• 55% claim that l&d are failing to deliver necessary training.
• 46% doubt that l&d can deliver.
• Less than 18% agree that l&d is aligned with business

Now I haven't seen this research in any detail, so I don't know how objective these results really are. But let's suppose they're true and my instinct tells me that they probably are. I'd be inclined to point the finger of blame (not a nice thing to do but hey) at the key decision-makers themselves:

• What on earth are you doing tolerating such poor performance (at least as you perceive it)?

• Would you sit back and do nothing if other departments performed so poorly?

• What direction have you been giving to your l&d team?

• On what basis did you appoint your l&d manager?

• How much do you understand about the process of learning? If not very much, then what are you going to do about this?

The reality in my experience is that many major organisations do well in spite of themselves. Most departments have their fair share of hopeless cases and it's probable that l&d has exceeded its quota. But don't blame those on the shop floor, the trainers themselves, because they're simply doing what they're told and, to be fair, what has always been done. Most are extremely dedicated and hard-working. The majority do get results at the level of the individual learner, but probably not results that are strategically important.

If there is a problem, and this survey indicates that there probably is in more companies than is acceptable, then this is a problem of management. L&d requires strong and assertive leadership, like any other business function. And it needs to start by educating those above to understand the realities of adult learning in the workplace, not the business of processing employees through courses.

A recent article in The Economist, The evolving blogosphere, clarified for me how blogs have changed over the past five years and where they now sit amongst the panoply of social media applications. Not so long ago it was thought, almost assumed, that everyone would ultimately run their own blog - it was just a question of time before we all found something to say, gathered up the courage and started spouting off our opinions to those two billion or so internet users out there. It hasn't happened, and for several very good reasons:

1. Early adoption of blogs was dominated by simple status updates, published for the benefit of friends and family. This functionality is just as  popular now and even more widespread but has shifted almost entirely to social networking sites such as Facebook and microblogging sites like Twitter.
2. Those who wanted to express themselves in more depth on a topic soon discovered that (a) this was hard work requiring a fair amount of commitment, and that (b) you will be in competition for readers with many others around the world who may have more to say and more eloquent ways of saying it than you.

Blogging is a specialist form of journalism, typically but not always aimed at a niche audience, and usually a voluntary, unpaid additon to the day job. A blog is essentially a regular column, with the added advantage that it can generate responses and a degree of dialogue. That may not be all that blogging thought it could become but it's still a very valuable addition to our online existence.

It's fashionable to sneer at the idea that a particular technology is merely a solution looking desperately for a problem to justify its existence. But I'm not so sure that a rational process always has to start with a problem and move dispassionately to a solution - the process is more dynamic and interactive than that. At the eLearning Network's Showcase last week, I had time to reflect on a number of technologies that were under discussion - the iPad, interactive PDFs (if you haven't spotted these, then these are next generation Acrobat documents that can incorporate interactive multimedia elements) and good old Second Life. The advocates of each of these could be accused of hunting for problems to solve in the world of learning technologies. As I contemplated these three technologies, I scanned all those problems currently and historically faced by any of my colleagues and clients to see whether I could find an application. Essentially, I had a bunch of solutions and I was looking for problems.

You do not have to wait until you have a new problem to solve and then sift through each of the currently available technologies to find the most appropriate solution. What about all the current solutions you have in place? Would any of these new technologies do the job better? That's why it pays to take a keen interest in each new technology and to remain as open minded as possible. It doesn't matter that the technology is launched as a solution looking for problems. And vendors often seriously misjudge what the applications for their products will be - they need the collective wisdom of many thousands of customers to come up with ideas that really work. Of course, some solutions never find problems and they disappear from view. But don't be put off because applications aren't instantly obvious - it can take quite a while for the great ideas to come forward.

So, checking existing problems to see whether new solutions will fit is fine with me. But inventing or reshaping a problem to fit a fashionable solution, now that's another thing completely.

I finally got round to reading David Wilkins lengthy and emotive post A Defense of the LMS on his Social Enterprise Blog. What struck me was not his arguments for the continuing use of the learning management system in an increasingly social media age, but his apparent desperation to get this viewpoint taken seriously when it so obviously conflicts with the current fashionable viewpoint, i.e. that LMSs have had their day, largely because top down, formal learning is soon to be obsolete.

Where I sympathise with David is that popular opinion (by which I mean among commentators on l&d, not actual practitioners) is so black and white, so polarised: what's new and fashionable doesn't just build on current practice it completely invalidates it; everything we do currently is the work of misguided dummies who have their heads firmly planted in the sand.

So, we are supposed to believe that formal learning is always wrong and informal learning always right; similarly for face-to-face v online, top-down v bottom-up, discovery learning v structured instruction, training v performance support, passive v interactive content, 2D v 3D, static v animated and so on. Any practitioner who has to run a real-life l&d function for a large organisation would laugh at the suggestion that all learning should be driven by learners, informally, as and when needed. Not only would this not work in very many cases, it would break numerous laws.

I am of course a keen supporter of social media, informal learning et al, as is David Wilkins (as he pleads time and again in his posting). I'm keen to see the balance shift away from top-down, classroom-dominated, just-in-case learning interventions. But I use the word balance advisedly. The discriminating l&d strategist will realise that it all depends on the situation, as it always does. Absolute positions are fine if you don't have to act upon them or to suffer the consequences.

I suspect that many of us find it hard to concentrate when we really need to put in a sustained effort to prepare a report or a presentation, read a document, write a script, create or edit media assets, generate code or assemble an e-learning module - in fact, all the things that e-learning people do most of the time. These tasks require single-minded concentration, sometimes over many hours, even days. How unfortunate, then, that in those times when we are less busy, we choose to install a whole load of apps that focus almost entirely on interrupting us - email, Twitter, Facebook et al.

I was amused, therefore, to read in The Economist (Stay on target, June 10) that it is now possible to buy software to protect you from other bits of software:

"Some programs fill the whole screen to keep disturbing alerts hidden; others disable specific websites, such as Facebook, or even cut off internet access altogether. The idea is similar to parental-control programs that prevent children from accessing inappropriate content: but these are controls that grown-up users deliberately impose upon themselves."

Examples include Freedom, Isolator and Think. As an example, Freedom cuts off your internet access for the number of hours that you plan to keep focussed. Once set up, the only way of over-riding this constraint is to re-boot.

Without the benefit of this software (and I'm not sure I would have the courage to turn it on, any more than an alcoholic would voluntarily go on holiday to Saudi Arabia) then there is an alternative, at least for me. I've always found trains to be the perfect places to concentrate and get things done - that's where I'm writing this post and probably a good half of all those that came before. The reason is that you tend to get really patchy cell phone coverage on a train journey, so even if you're armed with a smart phone and a 3G dongle, you'll be lucky to get more than a few periods of decent signal. Rather than let this bother you, it's easier to shut out the rest of the world and get your head down.

The Big Question for July on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog is “Does the discussion of ‘how the brain learns’ impact your elearning design?” To emphasise the extent of this discussion, Tony Karrer lists 32 blog postings, including two of mine:

Brain rules – where does that leave us?, June 22, 2009

The art of changing the brain, May 13, 2008

The answer in my case is a quite simple ‘yes’. I have gained a great deal of benefit from what I have read on this subject and I have made every effort to integrate this into any design work I have undertaken over the past couple of years. The answer for the design community as a whole should also be ‘yes’, because this stuff has relevant and practical application, but I rather suspect that a great many designers take little time to get themselves up-to-date in their own professional discipline and are still working on the basis of the old instructional design theories from the 1950s.

Neuroscience hasn’t caused a complete rewrite of learning psychology, because in many cases it has only confirmed existing good practice. What this new focus on objective and relatively unbiased research has done is to (1) help us to recognise the pop psychology for what it is and (2) to create a bridge between the opposing forces in learning and development (the behaviourist/cognitivists and the constructivists). That is progress enough.

I’ve just joined another Wetpaint site that seems to offer some interesting considerations of required shifts in communication strategies for educational institutions.  IN terms of communication, what can schools, teachers, administrators learn from students.  While the focus seems to be upon K-12 contexts at this stage, based on recent exprrience I think there is plenty [...]

It has been really interesting to watch Old Aunties attempts to embrace the possibilities of web2.0 and participatory culture. My favourite show on the one-way-box “Q&A” is an excellent example. It is very engaging to watch the video mash-ups submitted by pensioners and students alike, and hearing the challenging questions from the audience. Even just [...]

Are flash based Learning Objects dead?  They sure are expensive - since 2001 the Teaching & Learning Federation (TLF) has used “AUD$123 million ….. divided by 6300 curriculum items. That’s close to AUD$20,000 for each single (eg, Flash) TLF curriculum item,” observed Stephen Loosley (Member, Victorian Institute of Teaching) when he opened some excellent discussion [...]

Kim Flintoff drew the attention of readers of the fantastic West Australian eChalk email list to this video - eSN TechWatch: Preparing Kids for 21st-Century Success. Kim observed: Yet another smart person (Daniel Pink) recognises what needs to be done in education – why don’t things change? Interesting that embedded arts is identified as [...]

This public service campaign video was filmed at the CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) annual conference. The wisdom with which educational leaders like Alan November, Greg Whitby, and Stephen Heppell explicate the urgency of giving teachers the tools to connect with 21C learning and their students is poignant in this video. The massive task [...]

This Technology Integration Matrix is a very handy reference point for school administrators, especially those ready to take the plunge and give students the opportunity of 1:1 access the Digital Education Revolution funding offers. It is worthwhile clicking on the links under each indicator to see how the integration works in both shared and 1:1 learning [...]

As @dswaters pointed out at the recent ECAWA unconference I am not the most social creature online these days! I do engage with some discussions on email lists and a little bit more lately on Twitter but in general this year I have not really been joining in the dialogue of the blogosphere as [...]

Technology now dominates every area of our lives and educators need to make sure they are prepared for its inclusion into our schools. This may mean making a break from traditional teaching methods; but there is no denying the inevitability of technology being thrust into curricula around the country. Many teachers may be [...]

Paul Fuller was our special guest in a live Digital Chalkie webcast in this conversation around how one globally aware primary school got their one-to-one parent funded notebook program off the ground please tune-in. Paul explains about the students’ reactions, planning, financing, technical and pedagogical shifts. Below is a podcast of Digital Chalkie webcast #6: How [...]

Great - we finally have computers making their way into the hands of Australian students. But what if they don’t have access to the internet that will really equip then as 21C learners when they get home? (I’ve written more about the Meraki solution on my own blog here.) In this scenario, I have been [...]

I’ve been a tremendous fan of Flipcams, the $150 pocket-sized video cameras with an interface even a first grader can figure out. The one downside was sound. Audio is more important than picture when shooting video. Flipcams have no jack for an external microphone. Charles Jennings showed me an awesome Kodak mini-cam that solves the [...]

CLO magazine Published June 2010 When you talk to businesspeople, you must speak as they do. Executives only care about training as it relates to execution. Their interest is in moving the corporation forward. You should share that interest. That is what they pay you for. A sponsor is the person who pays those bills. [...]

is hosting the European Premier of The Working Smarter Fieldbook | June 2010 Edition Authors Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, & Jay Cross will sign books 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Thursday, July 22, 2010 at the Guiness Storehouse

Bob Morris pointed me toward this article that appeared in Strategy+Business last November: What’s So Special about Special Ops? by Andrew Sobel The article describes how Green Berets, SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics units learn to do their extraordinary jobs. The story contains invaluable lessons for corporations. The training that SOF personnel go through [...]

Two weeks hence, I’ll be enjoying the west coast of Ireland, just me and my iPad for the better part of a week at the Dolphin Beach House on the Lower Sky Road, Clifden. The iPad aspect will be interesting. I have many ideas and doodles I want to capture. Will the iPad help or [...]

FOR SALE: Professional Library of Jay Cross Buy them all. I will throw in an afternoon on my back deck in Berkeley going over what I thought were the major messages of as many volumes as you wish. Shelves of inspiring books. Strong on instructional design, management, learning, eLearning, marketing & sales, and psychology.  Some [...]

Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s two-day intensive for geeks, takes place August 19-21 in Seattle. I’ve been to the last five — and I’ll be there again this year. Every time, I meet people who become movers and shakers in tech and move ahead of the curve for a while. Join me — it costs only $300 [...]

The performance of workers used to have bounds. The fastest bricklayer was maybe 20% faster than the average bricklayer. In conceptual work, the sky’s the limit. A superstar may generate $50 million in value while the average employee brings in a meager $50 thousand. Several things are going on here. For one, rates of production [...]

I am moving the My Documents folders from all of my computers to one Dropbox. Dropbox is the equivalent of a hard drive in the cloud. I’ve been using the free version (2 GB) for months without any hassles. Dropbox lets me work on files offline; it syncs when I’m back on the net. It [...]

Slashdot – hallowed ground for die-hard techies – is again tackling the question of experiences with online education. The general tone is negative – too much reading in online courses, discussions are too shallow, not enough time “doing”, too expensive, and so on. Most of the complaints (other than those relating to costs) are not [...]

Last year, I suggested we need a Technologically Externalized Knowledge and Learning device – i.e. a “learnometer” that tracks our interactions with content, information, technology, and people. Everything is recorded. Everything is analyzed. Everything is geared to extended and personalizing learning. Today, I encountered a device that mimics a bit of this: Hitachi’s Life Microscope. [...]

This is just a variation of the question that was discussed at length (without much conclusion) about the web and social media – Are iPads/Mobiles changing the way we think?: “Today’s technology may be determining not just how we spend our time: It actually may be “rewiring” the way we think, how we experience the [...]

A month ago or so, I was contacted by Xyleme voices to do a podcast on social learning networks: from theory to practice. The podcast is now available (runs 19 min). In a related post, Dawn Polous asks is there a better to social learning?

Huge congrats to George Veletsianos on the release of his text Emerging Technologies in Distance Education with AU Press. The text includes contributions from many of the leaders in the use of technologies in various educational settings. The text consists of four sections: foundations of emerging technologies in DE, learning designs for emerging tech, social, [...]

Carrying on with the discussion of web 3.0 and web eXtended, I’ve posted a few thoughts on the xWeb: “xWeb is the utilization of smart, structured data drawn from our physical and virtual interactions and identities to extend our capacity to be known by others and by systems.”

I’m delivering a presentation in a few weeks to a “large technology company that everyone knows but I can’t name because of onerous procedures for clearing name use” on Connectivism in the Enterprise: .doc file and Google docs version. The paper doesn’t really include anything new…but is an attempt to explore connectivist learning models in [...]

Steve Wheeler shares a presentation Web 3.0: The way forward?. Steve takes a three-fold view of web development: 1.0=linking, 2.0=participation, 3.0=existing data reconnected for smarter uses. Stephen Downes responds “let me be the first to name the new web: Web eXtended (or just Web X)…idea of Web X is that it combines web 2.0 (social [...]

Education, like news, journalism, and marketing, is undergoing a substantial shift. Essentially, the individual formerly known as “student” now has far greater control over information, conversation, and access to experts outside of the classroom. Broadcast lectures are giving way to interaction and learner control. A great example of a similar shift can be seen in [...]

I pay for apps on my mobile that I would not pay for in my browser. I’m not sure why. Convenience? Habit? The ease of purchasing an app on iTunes vs. entering credit card information for content in a browser? This past week, I encountered two articles that forecast the end of free content online [...]

This video is going round the web, but very interesting.

The message is that higher incentives lead to poorer performance on even basic cognitive tasks. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose lead to better performance, once you take the issue of money off the table.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

The main point is to think about how you can provide your team with more autonomy, more time to achieve mastery on specific skills, and provide everyone with a clear purpose.

UPDATE: Check out this long and interesting post from Michael Feldstein Sakai Conference: Kamenetz Keynote http://bit.ly/cNigzC He takes the ideas from a keynote from Anya Kamenetz at the Sakai Conference and compares them to Dan Pink's ideas.  There is a lot of information here, but some interesting things to consider if you are familiar or have time to go through them. 

Here is a great short movie by Dan Roam on the history of visual thinking. It is a great example of how we can improve learning.


SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

I would love to see more trainers put this type of thinking into their presentations. Specifically on ideas that can be abstract.  I wonder if we can convert the iPad into a tool to make these types of presentations. Does anyone know of a specific tool / app for presenting through the iPad?

I was thinking about a comment I heard on Rocketboom from an Intel employee discussing the release of their classmatePC designed for the classroom. His comment was something to the effect that since students have broadband and computers at home, they are set back 20 years when they enter the classroom. (I am paraphrasing). This is an interesting idea on a couple of levels.

At School

From Flickr

The school technology experience often looks like working on a document, creating a presentation, researching a planet, or maybe even blogging if you are lucky.  Most technology at school is limited to controlled weekly or maybe even daily time slots working in locked computing environments on very structured lessons.  All for seemingly good reasons - equal access, meeting learning standards, protection from harmful content. These types of situations are a good start, but they just don't support the kind of deeper learning that happens in a more open online environment.

Compare this to Home.

I think it is certainly true that the majority of our youth now has internet access at home. Many have multiple devices that are connected to broadband access, including the traditional desktop that is typically in the home office area, at least one parent as a laptop from work (if not both), they may have a netbook that maybe a grandparent got them for Christmas, an ipod touch for their birthday, many have iphones, and then many have game consoles like the xBox360, Wii, or Playstation that are connected. (not to mention the PSP and iPad).  Soon, we will be able to add AppleTV and GoogleTV connecting our TVs throughout the house.  So, while a few homes have all these things, most have at least one.


We are beginning to see that students have more open access to the web at home then they do in the school. With this in place, the home learning environment looks a little different then what kids see at school. This open learning platform is more like having a constant feedback loop with repeated opportunities for reading, listening, and watching content and on-going collaboration.

Of course, this more open approach can be in conflict with the more controlled school environment, particularly when access to technology is limited and lessons are focused on specific outcomes and I think some of that tension represents an important value that educators bring to the process.

When our youth are given more freedom to work through a reinforcement loop that happens when you surf the web, they are able to accelerate their own, self-driven learning.

Now I don't want to create a stereotype that somehow our youth are in this constant mode of multi-tasking and can somehow manage all these things simultaneously for hours on end, because that is not really what I am seeing.  What it looks like to me, is that my 11 year old is switching among these various activities, waiting for feedback from a particular activity and filling the down time with content consumption or some other engaging activity.

So, it might be that he is maintaining an on-going chat session with a couple of friends online, while he switches back and forth with the realtime stats feed of an NBA game that is on the TV. When the announcer mentions something that is happening in the sports world, he jumps over and reads an online article about that event. Then after the chat has ended or at least paused he will launch an online game and play for ten minutes or launch a YouTube video to checkout.  If it is funny or compelling in some way he will send the link to a friend.


Each of these activities are in their own way a feedback loop and must be compelling for the young learner to stay engaged or they will simply move on and try something different. If the activity is compelling enough they will engage at a deeper level, reading it completely, making a comment, sharing it with a friend.

The determination of what is compelling is made on the fly based on a variety of factors including the topic, who is involved, and the emotional component of the content. (think baby laughing on YouTube). My son is a frequent online visitor of a guy who makes up parody songs about the NFL and it is really an emotional connection with that content and he always wants to share the with me.  

Provided with enough "free time" learners will begin to build reading and collaboration skills and hopefully at some point start to take the role of creator. If you want to really help today's youth, encourage them to be creators on the web. Post a video, write a song and post it, blog, and even engage in Facebook and Twitter (Note: I won't let me 11 yr old on Facebook and his Twitter stream is private to friends).  These are great skills they will use for the rest of their life.

Some Early Programs

So there may be some interesting things with the way kids use technology at school vs the way the use them at home. I have been fortunate enough to have been involved in two programs that are changing this reality for school kids.

The Globaloria program that has been implemented throughout West Virginia (I was the Program Manager for a year) and promotes this more open exploration of learning and extend computer use.

The second program, is a program that I am involved in is a 1 to 1 computer to student program at a local elementary school that will be entering it's second year this fall. Students each have a netbook computer to use for the entire school day, everyday and get to take the technology home for homework assignments and hopefully to explore additional content.

What do you Think?

I think that next question is, if the above is actually happening at some level, what impact will that have on our youth?  Who will thrive in this new environment? Is a single computer with internet access equal to many devices, or does having a mobile device at an early age give you an advantage?  Maybe you completely disagree with this assessment of what is happening?

The new iPhone was announced today. Of course the hype is impressive. The phone will have Facetime (wifi-based video calling), a 960x640 display, multi-tasking, and HD video editing and playback, all on a new OS (details here).

Of course, it will take time to decide if it is open enough for those who value openness and I do at some level. No announcement on adding cellular carries that I saw or heard.

Over the next few days I will try to consider how the iPhone4 might be used as an educational tool. What type of learning can it enable?

What is your initial reaction to the announcement?

Adobe's new software is designed to build content for the iPad. I think it was a great idea for Adobe to come back with an ipad solution. A great example of bringing something positive to the market amid negative discussions with the HTML5 vs Flash issue.



In addition to bringing something positive to the market, they came with very specific influencers, Wired and Toy Story. I am not sure I am ready to pay $5 an issue, but it does show that Adobe wants to story top-of-mind in the new digital space of mobile computing.

So I have had the idea that I think would be a great service to allow people to tweet when they are being asked to wait on hold on the telephone, or at the doctor or dentist office. Something like #onhold or #waiting and then the company that you are waiting #onhold ATT or #onhold Frontier or #waiting Walmart.  It would be important to really think about how to handle the formatting of the tags and support information. I realize you could just start doing it on twitter and see it would take off, but it might be interesting to build a site designed to aggregate the data and provide the Zeitgeist in a human readable way.    If you could add an estimated time, that would be great as well.

I haven't thought it through, but it seems the service would be valuable to consumers if linked to Yelp or other consumer services and it could provide insight into customer service for many companies.  It might also be more of a mobile app, but I think there wouldn't be strong adoption if people had to download an app.

Is there anything out there already?  I haven't looked.

One positive angle would be to allow people to log something productive or positive they were able to do while waiting.

#waiting dentist 10min brainstormed new twitter service

UPDATE: Bob Coffield twitter stream reveals something along these lines in healthcare...

@iHealthBeat new web-based tool called @MedWaitTime
 to check wait times at hospitals and doctor's office: http://bit.ly/9r56Lo#health20

My daughter and I have had fun creating four layered beats with BeatWave. I free iPad app that allows you to select a series or patterns of tones to make a cool collection beats. The really cool part was when we started experiment with the patterns that make the visual representation of the beat. It did have a feature to email the beat, but I am not sure how it worked once you received the email.

If you want to have some fun find a friend when you might check it out!

The web is starting to bring on new sensors that will change the way that we interact with the internet, data, and the world. By connecting the items of the world to the web, we will be immersed in a (insert really big metaphor like sea or galaxy) of data and information. This will change things once again. To get a grasp on what that looks like and to make a case that we will have to rethink how we build technical infrastructure and design user interfaces, the folks at MAYA Design created this video.


Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

I really like to the simple approach in the video, showing how big a trillion things are and how they begin to consider where we will probably have to look for our own design inspirations. It is interesting to think about how this will impact science, education, marketing, collaboration, etc.  These changes also once again underscore the need to improve content aggregation tools. We will have to have better ways to handle this data. Finally, for the first time, I think it has made me think about how cloud computing will become a real necessity for leveraging all the data of the future. This is going to be interesting.

Earlier, Google showed their new Google TV solution. Some pundits dismissed it due to the fact that much of this technology exists, but I think that Google has a pretty good feel for timing. I think the timing feels right for integrating television programming with web-browsing. There are so many factors that play into how TV is consumed and how people use the Internet in that same environment. The Google solution may address that many people are trying to find a comfortable way to jump between the internet and TV in a simple way.  In addition the physical considerations, Google has taken a search-centric approach to content. I think that this represents a shift in culture that many won't "get" for some time, but eventually, they will really come to appreciate the simplicity of the Google approach. True, Microsoft Media Center tried to pull this off and was able to do some cool things, but it just seems to be a completely different environment from the web, that it just doesn't always feel right.

Of course for me, I immediately started thinking about the learning implications of GoogleTV.  Can you imagine every student with a tablet at their desk and the teacher controlling the large flat panel TV at the front of the room? Then have the students push their work to the front of the room or the teacher by selecting it.  Seth Godin's Blog post: iPad killer app #2: fixing meetings  talks about making meetings better by suppling every attendee with an tablet with certain functionality, most of these ideas would work in the classroom as well. Then, having GoogleTV integrated in for the instructor would be awesome. The ability to search for rich video content, bookmark it, and pull it just at the right time during the lesson or presentation. Have students respond to the video by answering the 10 questions on their Google Site.

I know, there is a lot of infrastructure required for such a scenario, but it is a lot closer then it was before.  Google continues to work to bring things to consumers to drive technology use. Yes, they want to sell advertising and we have to monitor what our learners are exposed to, but if GoogleTV turns out to serve as a centralized search tool connecting content on television with content on the web, our world probably just got a little more integrated.

If you are not familiar with what Google is proposing, check it out here.

There are nine, but this is my favorite. -Lee

Pay by the word.

Here's the deal: You should have to put $5 into the coffee fund for every single word on the wordiest slide in your deck. 400 words costs $2000. If that were true, would you use fewer words? A lot fewer? I've said this before, but I need to try again: words belong in memos. Powerpoint is for ideas. If you have bullets, please, please, please only use one word in each bullet. Two if you have to. Three never.

-Seth Godin
http://bit.ly/b07syq

Thursday at the Oklahoma Multimedia Teachers workshop in Norman, I asked our participants to discuss and share stories they wish they had recorded or could record. Most of these were family stories, and many were about relatives who had lived amazing and interesting lives. I recorded these using the iPadio application on my iPhone, to [...]

Earlier this week, Iain requested a set of instructions to show to create a Google form like the one I made in the post, "How important are these digital skills for you as an educator? (poll)" Here they are! STEP 1: LOG IN TO GOOGLE DOCS If you do not have a Google account already, [...]

This afternoon I'm learning with educators participating in the week long "Oklahoma Multimedia Teachers" workshop on convergence journalism at OU's Gaylord College of Journalism. This is the third year of the workshop here in Oklahoma, which is part of the High School Broadcast Journalism (HSBJ) Project. Earlier in the week, Mike Koehler shared a host [...]

Cross-posted to the Storychasers blog. In preparation for next week's inaugural "Celebrate Kansas Voices" (CKV) oral history and digital storytelling workshop, we've created a new two-page guide explaining how to publish videos to YouTube and embed videos in our CKV learning community / Ning site. This is included in our 24 page participant handout. (PDF) [...]

Do you consider yourself a passionate person? What are the things about which you are passionate? Are you passionate about kids and helping kids learn? Are you passionate about opening up new vistas of experiences and understanding for others which - absent your intervention - they might never experience? Are you passionate about creating moments [...]

I attended a meeting today which raised my blood pressure a bit. I'll elaborate later, but for now I'll invite you to take thirty seconds and answer the following five question poll. I've created this with Google Docs, and am embedding it below. Loading... Thanks for your participation! After submitting your answers, you'll be able [...]

This podcast is a fortuitous interview recording with Stacia Reddish, who was the US Air Force Public Affairs officer in charge of the "NORAD Tracks Santa" program for five years. Stacia was responsible for getting Google involved with NORAD Tracks Santa and taking the program (which dates from the 1950s) to the next level with [...]

This weekend I was pleased to learn the social bookmarking web service Diigo now supports the capture of browser-based screenshots. Had I been able to attend ISTE 2010 this year in Denver, I might have learned this at the beginning of July when this new capability was announced during the conference. Diigo's screenshot capture options [...]

I LOVE reading news and blog posts on my iPad. Back in May 2010, I used Appolicious to create a "curated list" of the best news apps for the iPad and posted them here. This evening I tried to update that list and was not able to, so I renamed it "Favorite iPad News Apps [...]

Earlier this month, I had the privilege to accompany my son and his scout troop to summer camp in Colorado. Our group for the week included about 40 boys and 10 parents. Shortly after arriving at the church before our departure by charter bus, one of the other parents approached me and asked if I'd [...]

If you want some heady reading for the weekend, this post on cognition and representation is the ticket. It offers a good development of the physical symbol system hypothesis and "the attempt to identify the code, or the codes, in which knowledge is supposedly represented." In particular, "What all of them appeared to have in common is the idea that mental representations are coded symbolically and are structured and computable." This is a view with which I disagree. To the extent that I am willing to countenance representations at all (and I'm sceptical here) I am more inclined to Searle's line of reasoning, "the most radical criticism of the classical view is the claim that the mind/brain is indeed a representational organ, but that the nature of representations is not that of a formal code." It's not a long paper, but it will keep you working for a while. Maurizio Tirassa and Marianna Vallana, Cogprints, July 30, 2010 4:26 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

David T. Jones makes the good argument that the very people calling academics Luddites are themselves Luddites. He argues that they employ an old-style top-down methodology that takes no account of the context of application. "Rather than tell academics what to do, you need to create contextualised experiences for academics that enable appropriation of new models of teaching and learning. What most senior managers at universities and many of the commentators don't see, is that the environment at most universities is preventing academics from having these experiences and then preventing them from appropriating the new models of teaching." David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, July 30, 2010 4:19 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Randall Munroe, XKCD, July 30, 2010 4:13 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

If alternative data storage systems geeks you out, you'll enjoy this discussion of non-SQL databases. "Brian Aker lists the features found in No-SQL, as well as the method of organizing and creating data within it. He also describes the general use of schemas and correlational systems in everyday language. His critical analysis of SQL as a whole encompasses several faults, too, including limitations on efficiency, organization, and the encoding language; it quite possibly has an element of satire to it. In this lecture, there is also a glimpse into data collection as a whole." Brian Aker, IT Conversations, July 30, 2010 4:11 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Nice video explanation of Metaweb. "If you are interested, you can join the freebase community that is part of Metaweb. Through Freebase users can add content to the open database, creating entities. Although I signed up as a member, the registering process had a glitch in Firefox at first, I could access it through Internet Explorer. When I tried a bit later, Firefox was working ok as well for accessing Freebase.
" Inge de Waard, Ignatia, July 30, 2010 4:09 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Wow, CoSN may have set a new record for claiming to lead while trailing badly. Ian Quillen writes of a new CoSN report released Wednesday "pushing for the educational use of new Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)." Or, writes Quillen, "or the acronym literate among us, a better summary might be: LMS + CMS = LCMS (FTW!)." Those of us who have been around long enough will recall Maish Nichani's article of almost exactly that name, LCMS = LMS + CMS [RLOs], first published May 02, 2001. That leaves CoSN just under ten years late in calling this "new." As for "FTW" (For The Win)? Well, your call. Ian Quillen, Education Week, July 29, 2010 4:16 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Have eBooks really come of age, or are bloggers just jumping on a recent media bandwagon. There's no question perceptions of eBooks are being helped along by advertising for the Kindle, Nook and iPad. But I think overall sales of these devices are still quite low - three million iPads sounds like a lot (I can't find Kindle sales figures) but in a world of seven billion people, and one billion internet users, it's a drop in the bucket. Christine Cupaiuolo, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, July 29, 2010 3:56 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley provides readers with a full summer of afternoon reading as most of his papers are now available. "My blog contains over 600 posts, but my longer writing typically goes to more academic outlets like journals. Thanks to the help of the amazing folks at BYU's Scholar's Archive (our institutional repository), much of my peer-reviewed work now has a stable home online, too. I've gathered up links to these peer-reviewed articles as well as whitepapers and other long pieces on a new page called Articles." David Wiley, iterating toward openness, July 29, 2010 3:40 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

The first post in the new iPad Curriculum blog covers the topic of Go Sky Watch Planetarium (it's a bit revealing that there are no links in the article to the application; you don't get to link to it unless you're Apple). The new blog, writes the author, "I will post app and web app reviews, highlight educational tools that work seamlessly on the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, and give tips and tricks for using the iPad/iPod Touch in the classroom." I personally wouldn't dedicate a blog to a single platform, but I'm sure some people will find this new blog useful. Kelly Tenkely, don't forget to put your name on your new blog somewhere; I had to go back to your old blog to find it. Kelly Tenkely, iPad Curriculum, July 29, 2010 6:17 a.m. [Link] [Comment]

There is such an irony in getting a lagging group, teachers, to change so that they can lead the change. The expectation that the adoption of new technology will be led by the teachers, once we get them to adopt this new technology, seems absurd. What we are seeing is that students (and the people who will eventually employ students) are adopting new technology, and teachers (followed, even more slowly, by administrators and professors) are scrambling to adapt. Jim Shimabukuro, educational technology & change, July 29, 2010 6:06 a.m. [Link] [Comment]

Kermit the Frog might have sung that it wasn’t easy being green, but we at The Knowledge Tree wanted to find out if he was wrong! But, of course, the ‘e’ in our ‘easy’ stands for e-learning. In what way can it help make it easy for Australia to be green? Edition 20 explores various ways [...]

The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework) is now calling for contributions relating to current research in learning innovation for Edition 20 which is due for publication on 20 July, 2010.  To submit an article or have an idea for a theme or item please contact the editorial team via email:  e-events@flexiblelearning.net.au. Edition 20 focuses on: E-learning [...]

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Likewise, you can lead students to computers, but you can’t offer them engaging courses – unless VET practitioners have developed and honed the skill sets required to effectively implement e-learning. In this edition of The Knowledge Tree we expose the vital skill sets [...]

As anyone who has a teenager will attest, putting a first time learner in the driver’s seat of a car is a scary proposition.  Edition 18 of The Knowledge Tree looks at how web 2.0 technologies, particularly e-portfolios and point of view (POV) technologies, are allowing learners to ‘take the wheel’ in the learning process. Highlights: Lead [...]

The Australian Flexible Learning Framework (Framework) is now calling for contributions relating to current research in learning innovation for Edition 19 of The Knowledge Tree: an E-journal of Learning Innovation. This edition is due for publication on 13 October, 2009.  To submit an article or to have an idea for an item, please contact the [...]

Dear Knowledge Tree readers We are planning two editions of The Knowledge Tree in 2009. Edition 18 is likely to be published in July and Edition 19 in October. The theme for Edition 18 is likely to be about e-assessment, RPL and e-portfolios. The theme for Edition 19 is likely to focus on case studies for mainstreaming [...]

Dear Knowledge Tree readers Registrations and now OPEN for a free online mini-conference on some of the latest e-learning developments and innovations from around the Australian VET sector. You can register and find out more at - http://flexiblelearning.net.au/networksevents And at the e-events website - http://flexiblelearning.net.au/e-events Knowledge Tree editorial team

Edition 17 of The Knowledge Tree focuses on youth and e-learning: due for release on Monday 27 October 2008! Highlights Lead article: The lead writer is Bill Wade of Charles Darwin University, NT who writes about ‘Everything I Need to Learn: Engaging Youth in Online Learning’. Article: A case study on a successful partnership between Hunter Institute [...]

This posting is designed to alert you to: • Where you can find all the archives of ‘live conversations’ with lead writers • A correction and change to RSS feed For all recordings of live conversations go to http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/archive-of-live-conversations/ The latest recorded live conversation is with Barb McPherson on her ‘Facing the Future’ article which explores the implications of [...]

A ‘live conversation’ (web-conferencing session) with Barb McPherson, the lead writer of Edition 16 of The Knowledge Tree is scheduled for: Tuesday 12 August 2.00- 3.00pm AEST TOPIC: ‘Facing the Future’ - How can businesses and RTOs respond innovatively to the challenge of declining national productivity? What business and training (including e-learning) strategies need to be adopted? [...]