eLearning Roadtrip

Dinner with @marciamarcia

Last Thursday evening, as scores of learning professionals clustered around their keyboards to participate in #Lrnchat, I was sitting down to dinner with the creative spark behind the popular social media event.  Marcia Conner, known in the Twitter-sphere as @marciamarcia, had been in San Francisco for a couple of days, engaging with various social media gurus at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I returned to SFO from Denver's EDUCAUSE conference a few hours before Marcia was to fly back to Virginia, so I was thrilled to be able to spend a couple of hours of quality face-to-face time with her. 

Marcia and I have been friends since back in the dot.com days when the possibilities for learning and technologies were starting to set the world on fire. I still have the copy of Dr. Seuss's If I Ran the Zoo that Marcia sent me as I was struggling to figure out enterprise decision-making. We have learned together, from each other, informally and formally, F2F and distributed, for more than a decade. 

It's been a great deal of fun for me watching Marcia's impact and influence on the learning and social media world grow and spread over the years. So in addition to catching up on the news of our mutual friends I had a chance to hear about her new work - including the social media book that she is doing with Tony Bingham - and perhaps best of all we had a chance to talk about some of the common misperceptions that social media can be constrained, now that the so-called cat is out of the bag.

We reflected on recent statistics reporting that more than 54% of today's enterprises limit employee access to social media while on the job. Marcia told me that one thing that EVERY enterprise executive needs to understand is that there is no way to block social media in the workplace. Unless, of course people are forbidden to use their personal mobile devices, their personal instant messenger account accounts, and the like. As if.

This was particularly amusing to me, having lived through the period of elearning history where Flash was a "bad" plug-in. Back in the day, one of the companies I worked for even forbade us from using Flash, even though our elearning customers asked for it.  Eventually Flash prevailed and the company I worked for vanished along with others that didn't give their customers what they wanted. (And yes, I thought it particular delicious that I ended up working at the "Flash company". But I digress...)

Marcia told me that social media in general and Twitter in particular are some of the best things to happen to learning in a long time. Watching how she gets groups of people to engage, interact and inspire each other using fewer than 140 characters, regardless of location, time of day and connecting device, I have to agree.

If you have never had a chance to see what happens when learning professions get their hands on Twitter technologies you owe it to yourself to check out a session of #Lrnchat. Thursday nights. 5:30 - 7:00 PST. If' you've never done this before....Go online, download a copy of Tweetgrid. Put in the search term #Lrnchat. Kick back and watch the tweets roll. When u get brave enough, jump on in and post a thought or two. (and remember to read the "drinking game" rules - it will explain why there are occasional moments of hilarity when certain phrases make their way across the screen......) 

Happy Birthday Internet

Happy 40th birthday, Internet!  In 1969 a UCLA team sent the first message over ARPANET, the computer network that later became known as the Internet. That event, which took place on 29 October 1969, is celebrated by many as the moment the Internet was born.  

I've embedded a link to the blogpost from Cathy Davidson, Duke University, that reflects on what this has meant for the world as we know it.

And for those of you who snickered at Al Gore for saying that *he* invented the internet, I have included a link to an ERIC document that describes the authorization of NREN, the National Research and Education Network. Let it be known that legislation authorizing the creation of what has been referred to as an electronic "information superhighway" was first introduced by Senator Albert Gore in 1988. 

The National Research and Education Network, signed into law in early 1991, was hailed as an expansion of the still private, mostly military Internet to educational researchers, teachers and students. I was still teaching at the time this happened, and remember that the prospects were quite exciting but the reality not so good - it was still a bit dicey to get email addresses for ourselves and for students. Huh. And now we're talking about farming student email services off to third party providers. My how time flies.

When Publishers Buy LMS Companies

I'm pleased about Sage Road's recent collaboration with the eLearning Guild on their new "Deep Analysis" Report on the Evolving LMS. You need to be an eLearning Guild member to get a copy of this report; Might I suggest that now is as good a time as any to join if you are not a member. 

The Report is a brief summary of top issues that eLearning practitioners are likely to encounter where LMSs are concerned in the next 18 months. It is not meant to size the LMS market  - or evaluate LMS platforms  - or to identify Moodle Service Providers. It IS meant to give people in the trenches a look at the biggest issues they will mostly likely encounter where LMSs are concerned, to get a head start on planning for how these trends are likely to affect their elearning business.

So, with this in mind, one of the trends we did NOT discuss in the recent LMS report was an observation from the world of educational publishing.  Educational publishers such as Pearson have acquired LMS companies such as eCollege (Pearson acquired eCollege in 2007) and Fronter (acquired by Pearson in 2009) and publishing houses like Thomson's Cengage forge LMS relationships with companies like Angel (now part of Blackboard). 

This week's announcement about Sungard and Epsilen's new partnership is raising a flag on the horizon that eLearning practitioners might want to observe over the next several months - specifically, keeping and eye on what publishers and LMS vendors are doing together related to strategic partnerships and market consolidation.  

Higher education publishers and administrative management systems companies appear to be exerting their influence in the area of higher education learning management services provision. In addition to helping to carve out a new learning resources management niche NOT completely dominated by Blackboard, publisher/LMS partnerships are looking for ways that make it easier to cluster, bundle and (eventually monetize) digital learning content assets, giving publishers a new digital revenue stream.  

eLearning content authors may find that they may be increasingly caught between a rock (commercial publishers who are deconstructing professionally produced content assets and buying LMS companies to help take that content to market in new ways) and a hard place (the user-generated content producers, who are creating "good enough" video, audio and apps that are relatively easy to find and share on the open web). 

MacArthur Funds Cal-Irvine Digital Media Learning Research Hub

A newly-created Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California-Irvine will provide a international center to nurture exploration of and build evidence around the impact of digital media on young people's learning and its potential for transforming education. Funded through a $2.97 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Center was announced on October 27th at a national forum at Google headquarter that brought together leading thinkers around the challenge of reasserting American global leadership in education.

Through study of how youth are using digital media, researchers will seek to understand the implications inherent in how this generation of youth - unlike any previous one - is embracing the online world to access information, socialize, and engage in public life. Research is expected to help schools, libraries, museums and other institutions engaged in teaching and learning better prepare students for the 21st century workforce.

With a physical office at UC Irvine and a new virtual destination -- www.dmlcentral.net -- the Center will support emerging research on digital media and learning by hosting international conferences, facilitating workshops and working groups, and bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, industry leaders and others working on related projects. It will also house related research initiatives of the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative.  Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the nonprofit research group FutureLab are partnering with UC Irvine on Hub activities.

More information about the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub can be found by clicking this active link.

For more about the  MacArthur Foundation please click this active link. These people are amazing.

New eLearning Guild LMS Report by Sage Road

On Monday October 19th, Sage Road Solutions and the eLearning Guild will be sending out an email blast announcing their newest research report entitled The Evolution of the LMS: From Management to Learning. This is Volume 1 in from the 4-volume series  Deep Analysis of Trends Shaping the Future of eLearning, where we explore issues that are going to have profound impact on elearning practitioners from the point of view of elearning professionals themselves.   

Topics we address in the report include:

• Home-grown LMSs are on the decline
• Moodle moves to the from of the LMS Adoption Pack
• Hosted Options for LMSs are Achieving Popularity
• Open Source, Open Applicatons and Open Education Resources are on the Rise
• Blackboard Gains Corporate Market Share
• Commercial LMS Customers: Less Formal, More Holistic
• Extensibility Matters
• Campuses and Businesses alike are slow to adopt Enterprise 2.0
• Revising Standards, Specifications and Structures

The Sage Road crew looking forward to seeing you at the upcoming eLearning Guild DevLearn conference in San Jose, CA. 3 of the 4 Sage Road research reports in this series will be featured among the program's concurrent sessions:

• The User Generated Content Revolution - Colleen Carmean, Beth Davis, Anne Derryberry 11/12, 10:45 AM
• The Learning Metaverse: Emerging Technologies that will Change e-Learning Forever - Ellen Wagner and Beth Davis 11/12/2009 3:00 PM

And of course....

• The Future of the LMS: A Software Lifecycle Perspective Beth David and Colleen Carmean 11/13 11:15 AM

Happy reading! We'll look forward to seeing you in San Jose.

Mobile Services Taxonomy

Here are several of the featured slides that were included in the deck uploaded in last night's blog post. These all have to do with making a case that (1) mobility is a way of life (2) the mobile internet is changing the way that we do just about everything and (3) it might be helpful to have a taxonomy for determining where in the mobile services value chain one might be at any given time. It's hard to get people interested in systemic mobile learning adoption if we can't connect learning to other mobile drivers at the enteprise level. 

First thing is to consider the current state of  network/equipment adoption. There are 6.7 billion people living on the planet. There are 1.6 billion people connected to the internet (Parenthetically - we conduct more than 635 million Google searches every day. More than 115 billion emails every day. The fact that 70% of the world's emails are spam is one of the true marvels of the world.

One of the other interesting statistics noted below is that more than 1.8 million cellular telephones were sold today. More than all the new book titles for all of last year. I know, that's like comparing apples to zebras. But it's still fascinating to think about that many phones.

 

The fact that there are currently more than 4 BILLION mobile phone subscriptions speaks to the growing  ubiquity of mobile telephony. As mobile phone services attach themselves to the Internet, they are becoming today's Internet. The Mobile Web is becoming obvious and self evident.

 

The more I have reflected on the growing demand for mobile services, I keep thinking about how we have not yet really seen a dedicated rush to the market for  mobile learning (at least not in any systematized way, efforts of #HHL and #mlearn notwithstanding) I was reminded of a diagram I had sketched out to describe a mobile services taxonomy so we new-to-the-mobile-market types could get a better understand what the movitators for adopting mobile anything might be at the institutional level.

We know that people will respond to an emergency. The infrastructure required for providing emergency notifications uses the same basic foundation  as do other kinds of mobile services - weather and safety alerts to notifications, reminders learning services and social network services used by engaged communities of interest and practice.

Every time I hear innovators talk about the obvious self evident value of mobile learning I am reminded that it may take a few more steps in-between where most universities start with their institutional mobile services investments.

Mobile Web Statistics

Thanks to Dr. Kim Foreman and the crew from San Francisco State University's #ITEC830 class for the opportunity to spend last Thursday afternoon with them. 

Dr. Foreman had asked me to focus on the state of mobile learning and to share some of my views on the subject.  It was a great opportunity for organizing links and charts I've been collecting for the past several weeks in a somewhat cogent slide deck for the students to download. I've uploaded a PDF of the deck here. Help yourself. The materials contained in the deck include statistics from AdMob and ComScore, among others. Everything from stats on Twitter to the distribution of mobile operating systems in the US and India.

Download Mobile.SFSU10.08.09.final.

For anyone interested in some of my articles on the subject of mobile learning I invite you to click the Publications Tab in the right column of this blog. You will find several links to articles from the past few years.

It happened that we were meeting at the same time that #Lrnchat was scheduled. I generally try to sit in on #Lrnchat for at least part of the time so I fired up Tweetgrid while we were all talking in the classroom, and tried to follow along while sharing what was going on in the back-channel around us. But to be honest, I was busy with the face-to-face discussions. Are you kidding? Putting a former professor back in a classroom with students in it? I love the distance/virtual/distributed thing as much as anyone, but still...

Hope you enjoy the slides and articles.

Mobile Momentum

The past few weeks have represented a true watershed for the mobile Web, for the mobile networks/carriers/device ecosystem and for application developers who have been trying to figure out how to jump on the mobile content creation bandwagon. Still a bit of a stretch to make a direct positive correlation to mobile learning, per se. But the more that mobility is a no-brainer for everything else we do in our work and consumer lives, the more obvious and self-evident is the value of mobility for learning and performance support.

The Handheld Learning Conference (or #hhl, if you follow tweetstreams) concluded mid-week with reports of 1500 pleased attendees who are still churning over the ideas and debates that were shared while F2F. Adobe's MAX, the company's worldwide developer conference, featured lots of news for mobile developers: Flash on Blackberries, mobile Connect, Open Screen Project news  and, of course iPhone Flash compilers for CS5. Not exactly the Flash on iPhone that people have been hoping for, but at least Adobe is stepping up to the fact that Apple won't play with them. I saw a number of tweets from very excited elearning types who were speculating how great this will be for mlearning. Which of course is a whole other blog post. Stay tuned for that.

There were also more company announcements than usual, along with pointers to various industry reports and post. Here are links to just a few:

• Mobile Crunch reports that the mobile internet is experiencing a 34% jump this year, thanks to women, teens and seniors
• CTIA released its Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey results describing the telecommunications industry (e.g. number of subscribers, number of minutes - which exceeded 1 trillion for the first half of 2009). Here's a link to their research page. Lots of good, free info. While the full industry survey *is* for sale, there is a top-line, 10 page summary available with plenty of good info.
• AdMob's Mobile Metric Report provides a detailed look at statistics describing the relative mobile usage as reported from AdMob's network. They address things like worldwide operating system share. Top handsets and smartphones for the world markets.
• We're hearing about how Microsoft is going up against the iPhone and Android, Google's open source operating system. And seeing questions such as "Is Windows Mobile’s Relevance Gone Forever?" 
• We're reading about how AT&T Reverses Policy on iPhone Internet Calls - which is code for saying that you can now use Skype from your iPhone in certain markets
• The FCC is jumping into the dust-up with Apple, Google and AT&T regarding Google Voice.
• Verizon Wireless and Google ink a collaboration pact. Next up - Google Voice support. 
• Palm announces that they are offering review free app distribution for the Pre.
• Verizon is investing $1.3 billion USD in LTE. And yes u should know what that is.

What does this mean for learning and elearning professionals (remember, IMHO there *is* a difference, and there are a number of Roadtrip posts that have beaten that topic into the earth) who are trying to figure out how to integrate mobile learning into the toolset? 

Stay tuned for Part 2.

More on Upcoming Learning Tech Conferences

Even though one hears rumors that conferences are falling out of favor, the fact remains that learning technology types really do enjoy finding opportunities to get together, face to face, in real time. 

For those of you who like conferences and want to plan ahead, here is a great link - Clayton R. Wrights's "master calendar" of educational technology events for 2009 and 2010.  While not 100% complete for every single possible conference you can think of, this really is one of the best master conference lists I've ever found. 

The Sage Road crew will be participating in several upcoming events during the next several months. I mentioned the October events in the previous post. Here's a quick synopsis of where you are going to find us in November, early December and late January:

• We're off to Denver for the upcoming EDUCAUSE conference, Nov 3 – 6. EDUCAUSE continues to be a great place to catch up on what is happening in higher education IT circles. We'll be taking a look at LMSs, open education, ebooks, and what's keeping university CIOs up at night.
• Elliott Masie's Learning 2009 is scheduled in Orlando November 8 - 11. This has traditionally been a good event if you are interested in advice regarding learning and technology innovation in large enterprises. 
• Sage Road has a LOT going on at this year's eLearning Guild's DevLearn conference, not the least of which will be the release of new three industry reports we have developed with the Guild. Stay tuned for more about that in the next few weeks. The whole SRS gang will look forward to seeing you Nov 11 - 13  in San Jose (CA).
• I'm pleased to report that Sage Road is going to be involved in this year's Online EDUCA Berlin December 2 – 4, 2009.  I've participated in this event for 10 years now, and continue to be impressed at the strength of the program. Almost as good is catching up on all the gossip at Marlena's Bar at the InterContinental Hotel. In addition to serving as chair for Plenary Session C I will be a part of this year's “Battle of the Bloggers”. Stay tuned for more as things develop.
• Looking ahead to early 2010, Sage Road will  be a part of the ASTD TechKnowledge (TK10). January 28-30, 2010, Las Vegas, Rio Hotel.  I am a proud member of this year's program committee, and at least two of us from Sage Road will be on the program. We've put a lot of effort into developing a program that helps learning professionals connect - apply - transform, and are pleased that we'll be a part of it.

 Hope that we'll see you somewhere on the road.

Learning Tech Conferences in October

This is the time of year when learning technology innovators, administrators, end users and the companies that serve them turn to thoughts of... fall conferences. Everyone wants to get a jump on planning for next year. That means getting out and taking a look at what is going on. 

Here are a few of the events where the Sage Road crew will be getting smarter about what's happening in learning tech land:

Megan Stewart and the Adobe WW education team have done a nice job creating a program at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles next week that will give the learning technologies faithful a look at Adobe's upcoming lineup. Count on announcements - I'm betting on mobile, web video and collaboration.  Sadly, eLearning designers and developers aren't a part of MAX. But they do get their own day, Nov 9th, at the Adobe Learning Summit. ALS will be held in conjunction with the eLearning Guild'sDevLearn conference. DevLearn is scheduled for November 10-13, in San Jose CA.. More on that when we get to November dates.


The Handheld Learning Conference begins next week in London featuring a very interesting and impressive gathering of innovators and entrpreneurs. If you haven't already registered it will be too late for you to go this year - event kicks off next week and the organizers are not accepting on-site registrations. 


WCET, the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, is hosting their 21st annual meeting in Denver October 21-24. If you are looking for forward thinking solutions focused on getting things accomplished in higher ed learning tech circles this should be on your list. Definitely leans toward the higher ed side of things.


E-Learn, the World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education  is being held in Vancouver, BC on Oct 26-30.  IMHO, this has become a very good international event for elearning research in North America. It is very definitely a higher ed conference. It is very definitely a platform for some very innovative thinking. 


The Sloan Consortium is hosting its Fall international conference in Orlando October 26-28. With the recent release of their new benchmarking study conducted with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities called Online Learning as a Strategic Asset. you can expect a lot of discussion about online learning research.


The World Conference on Mobile Learning and Emerging Technology (mLearn), Orlando, Florida,is being hosted by the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation & Training. October 26-28, 2009 


And last but not least, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is hosting its annual meeting: Integrative Approaches – Meeting Challenges, Galt House Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky,USA. October 27-31, 2009