Thought for the day

Yesterday I spent most of the day writing the narrative text for an online course I am developing about electrical wiring. This course is on the fast track--the whole rapid elearning process--so I had already interviewed my SME and he is on travel and unavailable for the rest of the week.
Heck I even found myself examining the electrical wiring in my own home, studying the junction boxes, examining the different types of cable employed and for what purposes. I was even itching to take the cover off of my circuit breaker box, but I thought better of it. I don't think my wife would be amused if I accidentally electrocuted myself.
That is when it dawned on me. Here I was practicing informal learning, gathering data, consulting various online resources, and searching out answers for gaps in my understanding without any formal structure. And I was doing it to achieve a work goal: the creation of a formal learning program. And that is what every instructional designer worth his or her salt does day in and day out.
And that is what informal learning is all about. It's about gathering information when you need it. My father-in-law, a brilliant engineer, has been trying to teach me about electrical wiring for years. Unfortunately without a pressing need to know the information I allowed his lectures to go in one ear and out the other. All of us have so much information coming at us during every minute of every day it is impossible to absorb and apply it all. We naturally filter out what at the moment is perceived as unnecessary. It is only when we truly need knowledge in order to use it that we internalize what we see, hear, or read.
The question is how do we develop formal learning processes that are more informal in nature and hence more likely to stay in the learner's mind.

Online Foreign language courses

Here's a great example of the learning capabilities offered by the web. The FSI Language Courses is a site that offers language courses, originally developed for the United States government and are "...now in the public domain."
Each lesson contains a downloadable mp3 audio file as well as a .pdf lesson. They currently offer courses in:

• Chinese
• Cantonese
• French
• German
• Greek
• Portuguese
• Serbo-Croatian
• Spanish
• Turkish

Hat tip: Lifehacker

Learning and Net Neutrality

When I restarted my blog I vowed to myself that I would not get involved in politics. I tried focusing on politics in my first attempt at blogging (inspired by Instapundit), but I found that, while I enjoyed reading about it and discussing it with other people, it became rather tedious from a writing perspective. That said...
I am going to break my vow temporarily to reflect on the Net Neutrality bill that is before Congress currently. I just read a terrific synopsis of the issue by Mike Godwin, titled: Taxi! -- How Net Neutrality Imitates New York Cabs which got me thinking about its impact on the concept of just-in-time learning. The core of Godwin's argument is the following:

For me, the helpful metaphor is to think about taxicabs in the Big Apple. Anyone who has frequently used taxicabs in New York City is aware that there are some kinds of tiered pricing in some of these services. For example, fares during peak commuting hours may be higher, and there may particular charges associated with using toll bridges and tunnels. But one can imagine what riding in taxicabs might be like if taxicab operators had freedom to discriminate based on where a passenger was going or what he or she planned to do after getting there. Taxicab companies might be tempted under such a circumstances to cut special deals — to provide better rates and/or service to someone traveling to Radio City Music Hall rather than to the Museum of Modern Art simply because the former had a commercial partnership with the taxicab company.

That got me to thinking about the darker side of this concept. If Godwin's take on the net neutrality argument is true, then a taxicab company may also opt to exclude venturing into certain sections of the city because of crime rate. Why risk your driver and/or his/her fares earned when you don't have to?
From a learning perspective, the idea of just-in-time learning is the ability to search the web for information you need. You can then post this information (with links and proper refernce) to your blog, wiki, or other internet means. But if the likes of SBC were to have the ability to require payment from sites to allow SBC's customers to access that site then you are limiting learning capabilities. It's creating a bottleneck that shouldn't exist, but would definitely turn the whole concept of the internet, as it was orginally formulated, on its head.
I for one am going to get off my duff and research this some more to make sure my facts are straight and then contact my congressional representatives to voice my opinion.

The future of elearning

So after a hiatus of about 12 months I am reawakening my blog. This time I have a purpose. Inspired by what I have read about the next wave of elearning here and here I have decided that I need to enter the world of Web 2.0.

What has become apparent to me is that when classroom-based training in the corporate world opted to fire the "sage-on-the-stage" and replace him with the "guide-on-the-side", the former found refuge in the elearning world.

The top-down style of the old sage thrived and continues to thrive in the elearning world where the learners cannot talk back because there is no one to talk back to, except the computer terminal. This is a double-edged sword because while the sage unencumbered by learners interrupting his dissertation, he does not have the feedback loop that lets him know when he might have failed to offer salient information.

This may have been acceptable for the past 20 years because the workforce he was addressing was unaccustomed to two-way communication on the computer screen. But a generation that has been raised with computers linked by the Internet, cellular telephones equipped with instant messaging, and sophisticated gaming consoles are entering the workforce and I don't believe they will stand for this. They will want and create electronic networks and the corporate world will need to grasp and get out in front of this. Stephen Downes in his article, eLearning 2.0, for eLearn Magazine, writes:

One trend that has captured the attention of numerous pundits is the changing nature of Internet users themselves. Sometimes called "digital natives" and sometimes called "n-gen," these new users approach work, learning and play in new ways [2].

They absorb information quickly, in images and video as well as text, from multiple sources simultaneously. They operate at "twitch speed," expecting instant responses and feedback. They prefer random "on-demand" access to media, expect to be in constant communication with their friends (who may be next door or around the world), and they are as likely to create their own media (or download someone else's) as to purchase a book or a CD [3].

This is the world my industry and corporations everywhere need to join. We don't necessarily need to retire the sage-on-the-stage, but we do need to give him new responsibilities, duties that require him to appear at a moment's notice in a variety of venues. This new world is what I wish to explore.

Entering Web 2.0

Testing the capabilities of my blogger site.