A Compound of Alchymie

Green Learning

Recently I was at an event going through the business case for e-learning, and comparing a typical classroom event with an online programme and the following thought struck me:

'E-learning is the greenest form of learning'.

No travelling across the country....spending time in jams....pouring more carbon monoxide into the environment. OK I know that this is pretty obvious, but with the recent Stern Report in the UK maybe it's time that we took more notice of the green credentials of e-learning.  We are all becoming more aware of the damage we are doing to our environment and it's time to make our own individual actions count - let's do a little more learning at our desks, or even better at home (so we even cut out the commute).

This ties in nicely with the cool book I bought recently: 'I Count; Your step-by-step guide to climate bliss'. Buy it and help save the planet....(and do some e-learning too).

Links:
Stern Key Points
www.icount.org.uk

IDeA sell LearningPool

Yesterday I was at an e-learning showcase event in deepest darkest Devon ( I am lucky enough to live in this beautiful part of the UK) organised by LearningPool. Until recently LearningPool were the e-learning arm of the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) but they have been cast adrift to make their own way in the world.  I think this is probably good for LearningPool but I'm not sure why IDeA gave up on e-learning (I guess because they never really got it - most of their high value stuff is face-to-face). There is an interesting quote in the press release regarding the sale however:

"The local government sector currently spends in the region of £300 million annually on training and it is estimated that by 2008 over 50 per cent of learning in the UK will be done electronically or on the internet."

That is an optimistic figure...but if it's true then LearningPool and all of us e-learning activists will be extremely busy in 2007!

Links:
IDeA Press Release
LearningPool

e-Learning Masterclass

I attended the e-Learning Network's 'The Whole Show' last week. The single day event was designed to take the participants through the complete online instructional design process from defining learning objectives to actually building an e-learning module. The first half of the day up up until lunchtime each 'team' developed a storyboard for their particular learning programme. Before lunch the designers and developers were briefed and in the following three hours they slaved away in a valiant attempt to turn the storyboard into a working programme.  Each team of developers worked with a different authoring tool - one brave lone developer worked directly in Flash. At the end of the day it was impressive to see how much had been done - but as far as the tools go my vote was with Content Point from Atlantic Link - they had achieved the most in the short amount of time available.

It became clear during the day that there are widely varying opinions on how to go about creating a storyboard framework. There was even less agreement on what tools could be used - most people seemed to be happy with Word. I'm a big fan of PowerPoint (or similar) but the I've used this tool for lots of tasks that require easy control of visuals (everything from mind maps to web site visualisations).  Since then I have been searching for a specialised storyboarding tool but have yet to find anything better than good old PowerPoint.

All in all though a useful and pretty fun day excellently facilitated by  Clive Shepherd (Clive writes a great e-learning blog), Phil Green, Robin Hoyle (ebc),  Howard Hills, and Bryan Hopkins.
 

Real Learners at a Virtual College

At the recent Plymouth e-Learning conference Bill McNeill delivered an interesting session on supporting virtual learners. Bill works for the College of Estate Management - an educational establishment that it is entirely virtual. Using Blackboard as their VLE the college delivers accredited programmes to surveyors worldwide. Bill talked about their approach to e-tutoring and the practical steps they have taken to encourage participation. This was a good real life case study and clearly there are some key lessons for practitioners – especially those in the work based learning space. The college awards extra credits for participation and has found the approach successful in promoting participation. Bill refered more than once to practice informed by the work of Gilly Salmon, e.g. max 15 learner’s for best participation, tutors stimulation activity online (effectively acting as a catalyst – speeding up the interaction without actually directying or controlling it), and leaving footprints (a useful concept to encourage engagement and participation).

e-Learning Land

This is a quick entry on Gilly Salmon's 'e-Learning Land'.  She spoke at the Plymouth e-Learning conference and also at Online Educa in Berlin in December 2005.  Check out her website for lots more stuff on e-Learning (in an educational context).

ExLink: e-Learning Land Presentation
ExLink: All Things in Moderation (Gilly's Web Site)

Physical Learning Structures

More from the Plymouth e-Learning Conference

In a physical educational environment times and methods of access to books and teachers is controlled. This is a concept worthy of further investigation. The physical structures limit access and I guess in some way come about more as a result of the education business model rather than as a specific attempt to deny wider access or participation. The fact that the conference itself took place in a physical space (a brand new multi-million space) demonstrated the lack of access. Plymouth is pretty hard to get to if you live in the North of the country and due to an uncharacteristically early fall of snow even those who were physically close struggled to join in. Clearly there is a lot more to concrete structures than ease of access – new buildings make strong statements about identity and permanence is ways that a virtual space could never do. The dean of the Oxford can show you around physical spaces that underpin the status of his institution – that’s hard to do if you run a virtual university.

Plymouth e-learning Conference

I gave up a valuable Saturday Christmas shopping day recently to attend a one day e-learning conference at the University of Plymouth. The conference definitely had an academic slant both in the sense that it focussed on areas of e-learning research and in that it was primarily concerned with e-learning in education, and specifically in further and higher education. This isn’t my normal market space but it’s always good to jump silo and see things from a different perspective. In any case the education market has a very different take on e-learning – they see it much more as an enabling technology rather than an alternative to the classroom.

The conference was opened with a short introduction from Professor Peter John (University of Plymouth). He focussed on some key areas of research into the psychology of online communities. Much of this was new to me though some of the references linked into my interest in social computing and also human computer interfaces. Peter’s main theme was affordances.

"An affordance is the property of an object that suggests its possible uses. For example, a person viewing a chair automatically sees that it affords sitting. So does a large rock and a railing. If your goal is to sit, then the sitting affordances offer a simple means for achieving the goal. J. J. Gibson, the eminent perceptual psychologist, first suggested the notion 50 years ago. He said that when a person looks at an object, he directly perceives properties such as its shape, color, size, etc. Further, people perceive its affordances, the things that a person can do with it. Affordances are as much a perceptual property of an object as its color and shape. Gibson's insight was that that perception and action are closely and automatically tied. "
The above extract from Visual Expert Human Factors

Clearly this is an interesting concept in relation to design generally but specifically in relation to the design of user interfaces. See also:

Don Norman (of Neilson Normam Group) on Affordances
Wikilpedia on Affordance

The conference keynote was delivered by Gilly Salmon – currently with the University of Leicester but formerly of the Open University. Gilly has ‘published widely’ (a phrase academics use to indicate status) on e-moderating. Gilly is a lively and interesting speaker and over the course of 40 minutes touched on much from current e-learning research. See the following separate blog entries for a flavour of her ideas:

Physical versus virtual structures
e-learning land
m-learning

The main conference sessions were much less thought provoking for me but a few highlights of the sessions I attended (the conference was a multi-track event) are covered in the following separate entries:

Information or Knowledge?
Real Learners at a Virtual College

Other useful references:

Duke Center for Instructional Technology
VLEs

Finally my neat quote of the day:

“Can you hear me at the back? I’m a distance educator so sometimes the back of my class is thousands of miles away.”

e-Learning 2.0

Came across this interesting article entitled E-Learning 2.0 by Stephen Downes from the National Research Council of Canada today while researching some stuff on e-learning. It takes a whirlwind tour through the lanscape of e-learning and touches on a wide range of related ideas (and especially those in the social computing space) before looking at how e-learning will look in the context of Web 2.0.  E-learning is definitely evolving and with the massed array of social computing tools is likley to become much more collaborative, flexible, adaptable and even chaotic. The question is can we as learners accept this new learner centric approach? It certainly feels different but also really empowering - roll on Learners 2.0.

Learning Technologies 2005, London,

I managed to get to Learning Technologies this year – wanted to see what aspects of e-learning are currently being marketed to corporates. The exhibition was a little disappointing, especially in comparison with the much more lively BETT Show (see BETT entry). Strangely, it also attracts a completely different set of vendors. The only key companies to exhibit at both were Macromedia and the BBC.

It included the usual mix of enterprise systems (LMS, LCMS etc), authoring solutions, content developers and off-the-shelf providers. Nothing really new but I did hear the term ‘rapid e-learning development’ more than once – I guess primarily as a defence against the sometimes extended time that it can actually take to get a good bespoke e-learning course developed. Most of these rapid development tools though are simply variations on the Power Point theme – with the addition of self-test functionality. It’s hard to imagine that ‘anyone’ can produce engaging e-learning courses ‘at the touch of a button’ using these tools especially when you consider that most users’ PowerPoint skills are pretty poor. However, Macromedia’s Breeze product does integrate neatly with Power Point (Breeze gets it’s own menu within the application) and though not a fully featured learning content development tool it does allow basic e-courses to be put together relatively quickly.

I shall be trying Breeze out soon and hopefully using it both to support my own learning programs, and those of my clients. 

Not a lot else to report. Saba weren’t there. Blackboard was also missing. Docent merged last year with Click2Learn and are re-branded as SumTotal (www.sumtotalsystems.com). Tata Interactive were showing some neat bespoke induction programmes developed for Orange, Vodafone and also NTL. I asked them about the development costs of such programmes – between £15k and £20k per hour for the first hour - which is a fairly standard figure for the industry, but don’t forget that Tata send most of their development work to Mumbai. Bespoke development costs – even when you offshore it to India.

If you missed Learning Technologies then you didn’t miss much. Maybe HRD 2005 (www.cipd.co.uk/hrd) will be better for those of us interested in using technology to improve the way organisations train and develop their employees.

BETT Show, Olympia, 12-15 January 2005

The British Educational Technology and Trade (BETT) show is targeted at the education market and specifically the primary and secondary sector (5-18). This isn’t my normal client base but the show is useful because after substantial government investment the education sector is ahead of industry in innovative use of ICT to support learning.

There is an eclectic mix of companies and organisations exhibiting at the show. Centre stage are the government funded bodies themselves - the DfES, Teacher Training Agency, Becta (the Government agency for ICT in education) and the National Council for School Leadership (NCSL). Key players in ICT such as Apple and Microsoft were also there - Apple promoting it’s user friendly machines and software - Microsoft it’s office applications plus it’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) product Class Server. Macromedia was also there showing its creative development tools (including Dreamweaver and Flash) and also its Virtual Classroom product Breeze.

Interactive whiteboards are clearly big business in the education market with products from a variety of companies and accompanying software applications which make the most of the format’s advantages. I have used these interactive whiteboards at a number of venues and though they take a little getting used to, if used thoughtfully, they can really improve interaction in a presentation or workshop. Crucially, like most technologies, you have to try them to really understand how to get the most from them.

“Interactive whiteboards are the most common method of interacting with large visual displays, a key benefit being the ease of manipulation of texts and images. This kinaesthetic motion of dragging images and text into correct positions can assist in embedding learning and understanding of concepts and links to pedagogical approaches based upon visual, auditory and kinaesthetic approaches to learning.” www.nestafuturelab.org

Some highlights at BETT 2005:

Microsoft Class Server
Although late to market with their VLE product Class Server Microsoft appear to have developed a tool that nicely supports the conventional classroom based approach. Based on a range of existing Microsoft technologies (including SharePoint and IIS) Class Server provides an integrated schools portal aimed at teachers, students and parents. Though it’s targeted at the education market I can also see it having potential within a corporate learning environment or as an added value service from a dedicated training provider.

Virtual Classrooms
Virtual classrooms are going to grow in popularity as pressure grows to train people more quickly and more cheaply. One of the most polished is Macromedia’s Breeze which combines video, VOIP, IM and presentation facilities to provide a virtual learning experience that is the next best thing to actually being in a classroom together. None of the individual elements of Breeze are new but the way it combines them and runs on Flash technology within a standard web browser makes it a product that has enormous potential.

NESTA Futurelab
“NESTA Futurelab is helping to transform the way people learn. We're using new and emerging technologies to create rich learning resources that are involving, interactive and imaginative.”

NESTA Futurelab is an initiative of NESTA (the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) and is funded from National Lottery cash. They fund projects which break new ground in using technology to support learning. If you think e-learning or virtual classrooms were cutting edge check out their upcoming workshop on ‘artificial emotion technology’.

ExLink: www.nestafuturelab.org
ExLink: Microsoft Class Server
ExLink: Macromedia Breeze