eLearning Roadtrip

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.

Web Squared

I just finished reading a great report by Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle. Entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, it is a fascinating reflection on what has happened to the Web during the five years that have passed since O'Reilly Media's very first Web 2.0 conference in 2004. During this five years the authors contend that the case has been made over and over again that Web 2.0 is all about collective intelligence. They contend that new tools such as smart phones have unplugged us from our desks, "that sensors extend human capacity beyond keyboards, that phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications, motion and location sensors tell us where we are. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude."

But what I was struck by most was particular phrase in the report: "The Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it's growing exponentially. 1990-2004 was the match being struck; 2005-2009 was the fuse; and 2010 will be the explosion."

Wow. And to think, as a practice, we were just starting to get used to the idea that wikis and blogs and recommendations and tweets and micro-blogging and chats and twines might just might have a place in the learning ecosystem.

Wonder how long it will be until learning technology solution designers get their heads wrapped around the implications of explicit vs. implicit meaning, subjective metadata, information shadows, the Internet of Things and the collective mind.

Happy reading...

...And Internet for All

It has been great to lurk in the NMC Tweetchat this afternoon. What a fascinating bunch of very smart, well-integrated thinkers and doers. I'm biased, of course - I am a former member of the Board of Directors of the NMC, from during the time I worked at Macromedia. I already follow a number of the NMC illumerati (here's a shoutout to @BryanAlexander, @Alan_Wolf, @cogdog, @GardnerCampbell, to name a few), and have found several more people to follow today.

Bryan Alexander has been doing a particularly good job leading the tweeting on the session #nmcfear2009, the session describing big fears from educators about education. It would be foolish for me to say much more when you can click on the links and see for yourself. (Just in case you want a deeper dive, here is the link to the Fears Wiki that has been set up following this session.)

It's still kind of amazing to me that I am telling you about my afternoon at the NMC conference as I am working in my office, a 3 hour drive north of the gathering at CSU- Monterey Bay. Tweetchat and Twitter and Tweetdeck are definitely my friends!!!

No doubt, having ready access to the Internet is no longer a "nice to have", it's something I require. Just last week I checked out of a hotel at 7 pm at night when the hotel Internet went down and nobody could guarantee a time when they would be back online. Perhaps even more telling was the fact that the hotel did NOT charge me for the extra day when I checked out that night, because they knew just how unacceptable the situation was. As my friend Colleen Carmean has observed, "No Internet is called camping." Very bad juju for a hotel to make their customers camp.

This is not just me being obsessive compulsive about checking my email, or simply being a west-coast uber-geek. Today I saw a piece of news noting that a French court has declared  access to the Internet is a basic human right. I also read in today's Chronicle of Higher Education that a new Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition, made up of 28 commercial and not-for-profit groups including the American Library Association, Internet2, and EDUCAUSE, have just announced an initiative where they are working to provide broadband Internet access to the public.

Seems to me that those of us who are blessed with propensities toward learning, design, creativity and technology are being presented with an almost unlimited array of golden opportunities to apply our unique knowledge and skills where we really truly can make the world a better place just by doing what we love to do.

Call me crazy, but I just can't find a lot wrong with this.

Perfect Storm? or Perfect Opportunity?

There's nothing like a good flurry of tweets to help crystalize some new insights.

I've been reading lots of tweets, retweets, replies and even a few direct messages from people I follow commenting on today's sessions from #ASTD, otherwise known as the American Society for Training and Development International Conference and Expo.

I saw a number of comments (@jarche, @bschlenker, @raetanner) that gave me a pretty clear indication that the technologically savvy crowd was disappointed at how very "behind the 2.0 curve" the general ASTD assembly seemed to be. I saw complaints about the backwardness regarding social media and informal learning. I saw other comments that acknowledged how frustrating it is that learning innovations are being "gated" by IT departments.

It was in that moment that I had several insights.

When I envision the quintessential eLearning professional, that individual typically possesses two defining professional attributes. (1) We design interventions to maximize the probably that learning will occur, and (2) we depend upon Internet technologies to achieve our goals.

One might even suggest a fairly simplistic formulaic representation:

eLEARNING = INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN + INTERNET (content/network/distribution/mgmt) TECHNOLOGY.

Anyone who has read this blog in the past few months knows that I have been on a tear about the kinds of skills I think IDs are going to need to be successful in the emerging professional worlds of enterprise learning. I think about this stuff all the time.

So my first insight was that it's self-defeating to think about getting rid of ID altogether when it is one of the two things that makes people like us unique in our market place.

My second insight was that enterprise learning professionals clearly need us more than ever before, because WE are the ones who know how to transform intangible information assets into things of great business or epistemological value.

IDs design programs that bring about a change in learning and performance.  We have to remember that no human being can do "learning" to another. What we CAN do is create experiences that maximize the probability that intentional learning is going to occur. And then we have to be able to determine of anything happened. And that is what IDs do.

As Internet technologies have becomes more sophisticated IDs have had to become increasingly more technologically proficient. In fact, in same parts of the world, ID is more oriented toward activities like content authoring than toward developing learning scaffolding and assessments. But whether we are IDs who are technically proficient, or technologists who understand ID principles, what makes us unique is that we design technology-based solutions to improve learning and performance.

eLearning professionals serve stakeholders in a variety of settings and vertical markets, working in a wide range of organizational roles: HR. Training and Development. Human Capital Management. Talent Management. Succession Planning. Sales Training. Customer Education. Product Training. Human Performance Technology.

My third insight was that sometimes we do our jobs with these constituencies so well that sometimes we look just like them. Sometimes we may specialize in understanding our customers' needs and requirements so well that we see ourselves as having dual citizenship. But that doesn't necessarily mean the we ARE them.

In other words, maybe we instructional design and learning technology types, we elearning professionals, need to understand that all those learning professionals at ASTD who come from Training and Education and HR and Sales and Compliance are as much our customers as they are our colleagues. We have a great opportunity to help these people see the value that learning technologies from interactive digital documents to web conferences to social media bring to THEIR practices.

I mention this subtle distinction because I think it helps provide a more positive point of view about what's going on at ASTD. It's not that our ASTD HR and T&D et al colleagues are dumb or resistant. It's simply that we have an opportunity  - the responsibility - to demonstrate the value of what these emerging solutions mean to our enterprises.

Just think of all the good that we ID and technology specialists, we eLearning professionals, can do. What great opportunities we have for engaging and empowering our stakeholders. Why complain about THAT???

New Rules for Engagement

While at the Virtual School Society's LearnNowBC conference in Vancouver, British Columbia last week, I had the opportunity to speak to conference attendees during Thursday morning's general session. I shared my "New Rules for Engagement" - things to consider when thinking of ways to make learning experiences more engaging for learners of all ages. It's been a topic of interest for me for several years now.  I've included a link to a 300-word summary on the subject here  Download Top 10.Campus Computing 2007.  I understand that the LearnNowBC conference organizers are going to make my slides available to conference attendees; if you want the full presentation deck you should check their website. I will be posting an abbreviated version of the preso here on the blog in the next few days. If you are feeling brave, you can sign up for a free LearnNowBC account to watch a webcast of my presentation here.

What I didn't talk about in the presentation was some of the technical background for my interest - the fact that web designers and developers are coming up with remarkable ways to engage consumers with content, services and experiences. Web applications have come a long way from the first hard-coded unchanging Web pages and CGI Web server scripts. We've all come to understand that experience (alternatively UX, for user experience) is a hugely important variable used with Web 2.0 schemes and beyond. In some cases experience refers to some fairly explicit things that RIA (Rich Internet Applications) developers need to think about, including a view of what it takes to enable a high-quality, interactive online experience:

• It must use a ubiquitous client to maximize the audience reach.
• It must run unchanged across the Internet on multiple platforms.
• It must execute well across low- or high-bandwidth connections.
• It needs to restore processing power (not just rendering capabilities) to the client.
• It must deliver engaging user interfaces with high degrees of interactivity.
• It needs to represent processes, data configuration, sale, and feedback complexity.
• It must use audio, video images, and text in a seamless manner.
• It must support the mobile work flow by allowing users to work on and offline.
• It must allow the client to determine for itself what content or data to access and when.
• It must access multiple middle-tier services (both .NET or Java) and back-end data stores.
• It must provide a dynamic and powerful front end for the evolving Web services–based network using emerging standards such as XML, Ajax.
• It must integrate with legacy applications and systems.
• It must allow the incremental addition of new functions to existing Web applications and environments to get the most out of existing Web application investments.

(NOTE: I learned all this stuff when I was at Macromedia during the early 2000s -when Macromedia was working on what Beth Davis, Tom Hale and others had started calling "Rich Internet Applications". Whoda thunk they were going to end up naming a new category of web applications. Way to go you guys.)

But experience is also a subjective construct. And I did talk about this part in the session last week. I suggested that educators could learn some important lessons from the "experience economy", and pointed to some very specific and well know examples of experience extending the value of a brand. Specifically:

• Starbucks is more than a cup of coffee (e.g., expectation of a place to hang out; WiFi; consistent expectations for coffee, snacks, all over the world)
• iTunes is more than music (micro-economic exchange model for content authors, demonstrated with iTunes, iTunesU, and now with the App Center)
• Amazon is more than books (gift recommendations; purchase recommendations)
• Why shouldn't learning be more than good pedagogy and effective instructional design? 

In the new eLearning, engagement and experience really do matter.

I also suggested that that we needed to look to other disciplines to see how they are dealing with life in the "Age of Engage". I offered some examples specifically from advertising, and summarized empirical evidence describing what it takes to bring about a sustained change perception, opinion, affect and ability.

So, from all that, I boiled my research and readings, stories and experiences on this topic down into eight heuristics, New Rules for Engagement for teaching and learning stakeholders to consider every time they think about what it takes to enable learning experiences that engage and inspire.

Here are my 8 Simple Rules for Engaging Learners:

• Capture your learners' attention - With everything going on out there, you need them to focus.
• Convince them to care - What difference will this new information make? Don't keep it a secret.
• Motivate them to change - Can you articulate the WIIFM ("What's in it for ME?") for stakeholders?
• Give them choices - Engagement comes from finding ones own way, with guidance to make it happen.
• Connect them with community - everyone likes reinforcement from others who think the same way.
• Induce them to participate - Make it seem like it's THEIR idea.
• Enable opportunities to contribute - See Point 4, above.
• Make it an experience to remember.

Enough said.

Learning and the Internet of Things

The more I see regarding developments in the world of interactive networked technologies, the more I am convinced that the future of learning is inextricably tied to the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things has been discussed in computing circles for years. It refers to the wireless, self-configuring network that can be established between and among objects of all kinds using wireless technologies including WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID and GPS. It parallels the current network of addressable web pages while also including addressable inanimate objects that could be anything from your home's refrigerator to the shoes on your feet .

Perhaps the easiest way to think of the Internet of Things is as an increasingly smart network that links objects with other objects (including personal, portable computing devices carried by people just like you and me.).

It is a different model than building a “smart” Internet using the Semantic Web.  The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined. That makes it possible for the Web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines for finding and using web content. The Semantic Web is being built using existing naming protocols, such as URI, as well as smart, more meaningful metadata. In the Semantic Web, objects themselves do not converse, but now be referred to by other agents, such as servers acting on behalf of human owners.

The Internet of Things is based on the idea that any object can be tagged and tracked as easily as we now think of tagging (digital information) objects. One tagged, objects can searched for, charged for, managed, indexed and distributed.  Another way to think about this is that the Internet of Things depends on the addressability of each object or item in the network.

The implications of the Internet of Things are huge. "If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post.”  

These all seem like such futuristic ways of thinking about the world. Until one realizes that the Internet of Things may be here right now. Almost.

Rob Salkowitz recently suggested that the Internet of Things is ready to take off. “The enabling technologies -- RFID, ubiquitous wireless and GPRS networks, Bluetooth, and other short-range transmission channels -- have become so cheap, small, and mundane as to be nearly invisible. Appliances increasingly integrate wireless connections, IP addresses, and Web interfaces as part of their basic design. GPS services are becoming standard on mobile devices.”

Further, he noted that the storage and processing capabilities needed to churn through the data generated by all this “smart stuff” have become commodities that any business can rent from utility providers like Amazon Web Services LLC . 

I wonder how many learning professionals have The Internet of Things on his or her own radar. The more I see what is happening in the healthcare, inventory and logistics worlds the more I am convinced that smarter tools and better services are going to have a significant impact on the ALL industries as we know them.  I predict that the learning industries are going to be shocked at the speed with which the Internet of Things is going to be upon us. Not just on content publishing and distribution for digital assets and devices of all kinds, but for things like location based performance support services that activate at the point of need, a true learning and performance support personalization, and enterprise systems that help realize the strategic power of information and technology on people and performance.

Killing Themselves Softly: Newspapers and the Internet

One of the best things about my analyst job is that I "need" to subscribe to a wide variety of news services and feeds so that I can stay on top of what various luminaries, innovators and thought leaders are luminating, innovating and thinking about. I really enjoy sorting my way through the steady push of information nuggets.

Two such disparate nuggets came across my desktop in the last 24 hours, offering an ironic reminder of just how much transformational impact the broad adoption of a disruptive innovative technology can carry over (not very much) time.

My January 29 2009 Daily Stat from the Harvard Business School Press noted that 2008 was the year that the Internet overtook newspapers as a source for news. It referenced data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press noting that for the first time ever, more Americans relied on the Internet for national and international news than on newspapers. In December 2008, 40% of those surveyed said they get most of their news on the Internet, up from 24% in September 2007. 35% still mainly read newspapers, and 70% say television is their primary source of news.

Then, just this afternoon I saw a tweet from etaygafni in which he pointed to what he called a "1981 primitive Internet report". I thought it was so good that I replied and "retweeted" (which means that I referenced his tweet in a new one of mine.) You can follow the links from the Twitter summaries posted on the upper right front page of eLearning Roadtrip.

Take a look at the YouTube video that Etay found: Tinyurl.com/ctt4jr. It is a 1981 news report from one of our local San Francisco news channels talking about the "science fiction" of someday being able to get up in the morning, get your coffee, turn on your computer, and read your news. Shocking. The reporter then takes us to the San Fran Examiner and SF Chronicle for their report on how they were starting to computerize the newsroom.

Etay said  - LOL - that it made him feel old. Kinda did for me, too. I remember when this kind of thing WAS science fiction. And now it's something I do every day.

I still go back for the second cup and pick up the papers, but those of us at my house have been wondering for how much longer. The papers keep getting get smaller, and smaller, and smaller...

Does this mean that we are really sliding down the backside of the newspaper adoption curve?

Sorta makes me miss my slide rule.