Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mashups

One of the really interesting things going on in Web 2.0 that has real impact for eLearning 2.0 is the ability to add Mashups or Add-ins as part of your learning environment or learning content. In other words, in the middle of my content, I can throw in some fun learning component that I've created through an online tool.

An example is shown below with a simple poll that I created using Bravenet MiniPoll. And, I've provided the code for it that you could easily add into your blog or course or whatever.

Some examples of this would be:

• Poll
  
  I can put in a poll that would be hosted elsewhere and would allow the student to see previous results of other students who have taken my courseware.
  


• Discussion
  
  I can add in a simple discussion inside of my course right on that learning page. Of course, I can have it also live elsewhere and beyond the course. This could allow me to have previous answers from students.
  


• Announcements / Updates
  
  I can put in an announcement or update place in my course that will automatically be updated with the latest information.
  


• Find & Add Assignment
  
  I can make students go find an interesting example and add it to that page in the course that will be a leave behind.
  
  


• Rating
  
  I can have students rate things and see other peoples ratings. I can also embed a question about how well we are doing on a particular topic within our company to spark thinking and hopefully discussion.
  
  


• Survey
  
  I can embed my end of course survey into the last page of the course.
  
  


• Leader Board
  
  I can have who is leading among those who have taken the quiz and/or based on other data.

If you have a chance, go ahead and add a link to this article and the poll code into your blog. The code is:

<!-- Start Bravenet.com Service Code --><br /><br /><!-- The following line of code must be on one line, it cannot wrap // --><br /><br /><div align="center"><script language="JavaScript" src="http://pub15.bravenet.com/minipoll/show.php?usernum=1208889399&cpv=2"><br /><br /></script></div><br /><br /><!-- End Bravenet.com Service Code -->


Keywords: eLearning Trends, eLearning 2.0, Web 2.0

Trendwatching 101

Want to become a trendwatcher and futurist in your organization, but don't know how to get started? The consumer trend monitoring firm Trendwatching.com has a tutorial or sorts on how to start a "Trend Unit" with minimal time and little or no startup costs.

Solo vs. Group, Aggregation - The Problem w/ Blogs

Yikes - this is a really messy stuff.

I want to thank Bill Bruck for his thoughts on my last post. And, he inspired me because our recent exchange highlighted the problem of Solo vs. Group that I wrote about in my last post.

Here's the quick scenario:

• I make a post about the problems I'm having getting various Web 2.0 tools to match my specific needs.
• Bill somehow finds my post - so at least part of this stuff is working. :)
• Bill wants to comment on the post. But he also wants to make the readers of his blog (http://q2learning.blogs.com) aware of the discussion because it may have interest. So he does the natural thing. He puts a brief comment with a link to my article on his blog and then he has to copy the comment onto my blog (because my readers would also be interested).
• I see the comment, its quite interesting, and I want to respond. So I add my own comment, only to realize that now I have to copy it in two places.

The bottom line problem is that a Blog is really aimed at linear presentation of material in a single location to a particular group (the readership). Bill and I just tried to do two things that Blogs really are not good at: combining information from multiple locations & handling groups in a more dynamic fashion. Ideally, we would have some mechanism to on this topic basis combine our readership groups, combine the discussion. When we were "done" with the discussion, the content would be owned by both groups.

This is some pretty basic stuff. Am I a fool to be writing a blog if I want to actually exchange ideas?

Keywords: eLearning 2.0, Web 2.0

Five Professions Face Worker Shortages

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Monthly Labor Review, five career paths in particular will face worker shortages over the coming years:

• Registered nurses
• Librarians
• Machinists
• Truck drivers
• Pharmacists

Reasons for shortages are a combination of increased demand, fewer young people entering the professions, unattractive wages and working conditions, and anticipated mass retirements. In response, employers in these professions are working to raise salaries and create additional incentives to attract new hires and retain current employees.

UPDATE: A survey by the staffing firm Manpower shows that 40% of over 30,000 employers worldwide are having trouble finding qualified job candidates. Sales representatives, engineers, technicians and accountants lead the list of in-demand professions where openings are hard to fill. Manpower predicts that within 10 years, such labor shortages will cause many businesses to fail. Says Manpower CEO Jeffrey Joerres, "This is not a cyclical trend, as we have seen in the past, this time the talent crunch is for real, and it's going to last for decades."

Source: CNN.com

A Planet is a Planet is a Planet...

Planets are hot these days. But only figuratively speaking, as all the orbs in the news lately -- Pluto, a rocky planet discovered in a distant solar system, and the so-called 10th planet in our own solar system -- are all frozen wastelands.

Last year, astronomers discovered a "10th planet" in our solar system, orbiting nearly twice the distance from the sun as Pluto. Not much is known about this world, named UB313 until something more catchy can be assigned to it, other than it is larger than Pluto.

Pluto (L) and UB313 (R)

This, of course, forces astronomers to more closely define what is a planet and what is not. UB313 orbits in a zone filled with 1,000 known "trans-Neptunian objects," which might or might not be classified as planets. But if UB313 is larger than Pluto, doesn't it deserve planetary status? Could Pluto, moreover, face a demotion?

Astronomers must now agree on a set of standards for designating bodies as planets rather than asteroids or trans-Neptunian objects. Some have proposed making Pluto the lower threshold for planetary size, therefore preserving its status as a planet. Having moons might also qualify a body as a planet (Pluto has two that we know of).

As we expand our knowledge of space and learn more about what lies in the outer reaches of our solar system, we need to improve how we classify what we find. For we might be in for many more surprises.

Source: Scientific American

Big Problem with Web 2.0

What’s the problem? The solutions today never seem to do what I want, and I think there are some hard problems that we may be glossing over in all the hype.

Here’s an example of what I want to use Web 2.0 applications for:

I am often researching different topics either personally or as part of a group:

• For example, I’m researching eLearning 2.0 for articles, presentations and my blog? Who is actually doing stuff with this? What are they finding? What works? What doesn’t?
• I’m researching content management and Wiki software with a group of people in the office for an upcoming proposal.
• I’m researching learning object models in concert with a client.
• I’m researching vacation places with my wife.
  

What I would want Web 2.0 software to provide is the following:

• I need to be able to search every document I have, every site/document I’ve viewed or marked in the past. I want these to exist forever so that I don’t have to worry about them. Right now I use desktop search to hit all the documents I’ve got locally. Soon we’ll have a network search to search across all the many project files on the network. And, I’ve been looking at a couple of Web 2.0 applications to find something that will keep all the stuff that I mark out in the world.
  
• Of course, I shouldn’t have to think about which search to use in which case. And, I shouldn’t have to worry about where things are located.
  
• I also need to be able to control access to the information. I have various groups I belong to. These groups may be very long lived or may come together for very short bursts. While we are operating, we want to be able to work collectively. We want the stuff we share to be automatically available after we are done working together (under my search solution). I need to be able to communicate with these groups at the appropriate speed without need for worrying about how to actually reach them. I shouldn’t have to think about email, IM, phone, SMS, etc. And, if I’ve done it via some kind of text, it should save that correspondence along with the group and project.

With the Web 2.0 Software that exists, I find that I have to fight the different (but seemingly related) models. Blogs are great for the simple creation of information – but there is no sense of groups. Wikis definitely can have groups, but they are not nearly as easy to get setup and going as Blogs. And, of course, all the linking, adding comments, file sharing stuff seems to suggest the use of Social Bookmarking. But this really doesn’t seem to handle the grouping aspects at all.

I think some of this is going to naturally fall away, especially as people like Yahoo start to pull in all these separate pieces.

But there are two problems that I see looming: one is Solo vs. Group; the other is hierarchy, tagging vs. search.

Part of the beauty of Blogs is the incredible ease - you can just create it and go. Literally, this blog took 10 minutes to setup. Blogs are primarily a linear activity (generally with one owner or a small group of owners). Aggregation then becomes the problem. How do you turn all of these separate unrelated linear streams of activity into a meaningful collection. Do you just search? Do you enforce structure? Sure there’s software (even myYahoo) that can aggregate the RSS feeds, right? But it doesn’t really pull them together in any meaningful way. And, people can go on their merry way saying what they want in their Blog without every really participating in the aggregated group. They may even be unaware of other blogs talking about the same topic. It becomes the responsibility of the reader to make sense of the many streams of information. And, there is inherently little structure.

Wikis come at it from an explicit group standpoint. I think this group modeling is very important and some of the Wiki tools have it right where you can define groups and then define what they can do and what they see. Of course, there’s still mental overhead to set this up for each group. And, there’s even more overhead in thinking about how the group will work together. A wiki generally also forces you to face the question of how do you organize the information.

And both Wikis and Blogs today are really bad at supporting the collection of documents and links, tagging those.

The structure part is also really interesting. I love the idea of tagging. It frees me from having to think about the hierarchy. Certainly now that I have desktop search, I’m less concerned about where files get place and my inbox doesn’t get sorted into a whole bunch of project specific folders anymore. At the same time, I’ve not found tagging to be very helpful to me. It’s too random. I find that I’m missing things. I end up having to go back to search and retag.

Yeah, I know that Web 2.0 is all about having software in small chunks that you can compose together. But, it sure doesn’t feel easy right now having all these separate pieces running around.

Worse yet, what would I recommend a client adopt who wants to do the same kind of thing internally?

I’m really excited about where this is going, but I feel like we are actually at Web 2.0 pre-alpha release right now.

Or am I missing it?

Keywords: eLearning Trends, eLearning 2.0, Web 2.0

Mobile 2.0

Those who follow the development of mobile technology have already seen its impact, especially in the developing world. Says Oliver Starr of Mobhappy, "The poorer a region is - both technologically and economically, the greater the impact mobile phones have on society... In a place where the fastest means of transportation is on foot most of the time, the ability to transmit or receive a message from someone miles away is life altering."

To that end, Starr envisions the evolution of Mobile 2.0, which is distinct from the Web 2.0 discussions that have been going on for the past year:

Mobile 2.0 is not device dependent. There is no measuring stick of functionality that is a determinant as to whether or not a mobile phone is or is not a Mobile 2.0 device. All functioning phones today are Mobile 2.0. It isn’t what the phone does, so much as what is being done with the phone that has lead us to Mobile 2.0. This definition has the advantage of extensibility - a developing country experiences Mobile 2.0 by virtue of the changing socio economic status of those that own phones. In Japan or Korea Mobile 2.0 can be seen in the development of entirely new forms of entertainment oriented content for display on mobile devices and in the US we can see the birth of Mobile 2.0 in the roll-out of presence enabled services and phone-based navigational services.

Starr includes pervasive computing elements in his vision of Mobile 2.0, such as "smart dust" integrated into clothing or elsewhere in the environment, keeping us connected and informed at all times. "I’d seriously consider having the ability to instantaneously communicate with people on the other side of the globe physically implanted in my body just as I would love IR visual capabilities or super-acute hearing," he writes.

Naturally, such a scenario is rife with unintended consequences. A Mobile 2.0 environment built out to its logical conclusion (Mobile 3.0, 4.0, 5.0...) would effectively be able to track everyone and everything on a global scale. Who would do the tracking, and why? Who could hack it, and what would happen if it broke down? The Mobile X.0 endgame would be a purely transparent society; we would all interact on very different levels than we do now, as privacy as we now know it would case to exist.

According to his post, Oliver Starr will continue to write about Mobile 2.0 in the coming days.