CivieBlog

At the Tim O'Reilly keynote at the DevLearn conference. His outline is very interesting in that he's promising to talk about the "new literacies." I'm hoping this is going to be similar to Work Literacy.

He uses the same quote I often use from William Gibson -

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Pattern recognition is key. What do these companies have in common:

• Google
• eBay
• Yahoo
• Amazon
• MapQuest
• Craigslist
• Wikipedia
• YouTube

Built on top of Linux (open source). Services. Not packaged apps. Data aggregators, not just software. Network effects are key to their market dominance.

Dell Ideastorm, Starbucks, Best Buy, SAP (Harmony), YattIt, BeingGirl (P&G) mentioned as examples. Allow people to share ideas. Social media in action.

At DevLearn - tend to equate Web 2.0 with Wiki, Blog, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, etc. - instead it's really systems that harness network effects. The lock in is data.

Eras - Hardware (IBM), Software (Microsoft), Network/Data (Google). Data is the Intel inside of next generation. He's explaining PageRank.

Wesabe - contributing credit card data. Allows us to see spending at particular stores, repeat at stores. Wow, very cool data. Wonder how we could get access to that?

Mentions Google putting testing over the toilet.

What do you need to teach people? Not about the tools. It's about how to use them. How to leverage the data? Core competency of information age - leveraging collective intelligence.

Get away from old model of data. Hadoop. Computer Science shifted to teaching Hadoop to freshman from teaching SQL. Deals with messy data better.

Statistics. Design. "Big part of the new literacies."

These new literacies are not unlike talking about visual thinking as a literacy, new kinds of synthesis. The level of these "literacies" is interesting to me. Much more challenging to develop these literacies.

Suggestion - study the people who don't need your help. Go find the people who are on the leading edge and study them. The "Alpha Geeks."

Turn the Alpha Geeks into the mentors. They would pair Alpha Geeks with good writers.

Provide self-starters with access to the best resources. Online reference tool - Safari.

Show, then do, with reinforcement from frequent small successes. Get people engaged with the process.

Watch someone doing something right can improve your own performance.

Read in reviews - people talk about themselves. Very cool concept from Kathy Sierra. She is awesome at those kind of ideas.

Importance of hands-on. Magazine - "Make" about playing with technology.

Cites Wikipedia the missing manual. Literally just bookmarked How Wikipedia Works this morning.

People are telling us about these technologies, not telling us how to change. Create peer learning opportunities.

Study success stories.

"Stop fondling the hammer and focus on the house." - It's not about technology. It's about what you are trying to accomplish.

I'm not sure that Tim connected the high level concepts with what each person needs to do. I'll try to do it at 1:30 at my presentation. :)

I received a good question from a reader:

Our school district uses Blackboard. We have recently been exploring putting more coursework online and have experimented with the Articulate line of products. Blackboard has done well for us although I am not pleased with their support of the SCORM standards.

I would like to be able to export SCORM test results by user/by question but all Blackboard seems to support is general pass/fail records. Now I can drill down to the individual results via the Bb gradebook but that just won't work for exams that are being giving to hundreds of students.

I have spent many hours researching this issue related to SCORM compliance and more specifically how to get the test results exported out of my LMS for more in depth analysis in Excel or perhaps some type of statistics package.

Would you be able to point in the right direction of a resource to help me get this done or please let me know if I am wasting my time. Perhaps the world has moved onto something else as most of the conversations online I am able to find regarding SCORM matters are 2-4 years old which in Net time as you know may as well be decades.

This brings up a bunch of initial thoughts. First, having worked on custom LMS, LCMS, Authoring projects and being pretty deeply familiar with SCORM, it's easy to blame the LMS for poor reporting on per-question reporting, but its very hard for an LMS to create generic reports that work well across all the variations that you run into. So, if the source of the statement "I'm not happy with their support for SCORM" is only the issues of reporting, that's a bit unfair.

I'd be curious what they are going to do with question level reporting. I've had a lot of clients initially say they want question level reporting. I always drill down on why they are going to do it. The most common answer is that they want to know if there are particular questions that lots of people are missing. But, in many cases (in corporate eLearning) there will be no attempt to go back and fix the course or update the test. So, if you really aren't going to do anything with the data, don't bother. It's a lot of work to get the data, look at it, decipher what it means and do something with it.

So let's get to the more helpful pieces of information. First, it appears that they are getting question level data in the LMS. That's good. And not always the case. In many cases, people will implement a SCORM course and/or LMS to only handle SCO / Module level reporting or even just course level reporting. But in this case, they have the data. Good job Articulate and Blackboard!

So, the easiest thing to do is to get a data extract from the LMS into a CSV that then you can manipulate in Excel. You should absolutely start with this to figure out what you really want to do with the data. You can do this in Blackboard by using the the "Download Results" with the "By Question and User" option. Here's a good plage showing this:

http://kb.blackboard.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=14551263

Once you've done this a few times and have figured out what you want your reports to do, then you can define a custom report using Crystal. Sometimes it's a bit hard to get at the data on a per-question basis, but I'm pretty sure there's a good view in Blackboard.

Let me say again, do not bother to try to define your custom report until you've done this manually across several courses/tests that will expose all the different ways that the data may come out. Then you will likely begin to appreciate the complexity. You may end up deciding to just look at the data via CSVs.

With all that, I'd love to hear your thoughts/ideas around:

* Do you use question level data / reports? If so, what do you do with it?
* Generic LMS reports that you have found useful for reporting at the question level?

Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future contains a description of new age - the Conceptual Age.



He describes how our society has gone from agricultural to industrial to the information age. But then he describes how we've really moved on past that to a new age where the dominant value for most organizations are created by high-end knowledge workers working on concepts. He calls them creators and empathizers. That is to make emphasis on his focus on the right-brain aspects. But, I actually think we should be focused on the emphasis on the type of knowledge work and the type of workers. In other words...

Concept Work
and
Concept Worker

I've often been a little bothered by the fact that we categorize the a person working in a call center handling customer service requests in the same category as an engineer working in R&D - they are both called knowledge workers. That's not as helpful as it should be. The person in the call center does quite a bit of routine knowledge work. They will occasionally encounter unusual situations and then need to do more conceptual knowledge work. To me it's all about how easy it is to obtain the answers. The harder it is, the more conceptual. Certainly our work around Work Literacy is all about concept work and concept workers.

I'm sure that if I went back and looked at Davenport's Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances And Results from Knowledge Workers and the various categorizations of knowledge workers he would have several ways to describe the difference between someone in a call center and the engineer and the doctor. And while these are more granular, I'm not sure I hear much of it being discussed. That's why I'm liking the idea of referring to work that involves figuring out unknowns as concept work and the people doing this work as concept workers. This more succinctly and clearly differentiates the issue for me.

I'm happy to announce the launch of eLearning Learning. This is the beginning of a community portal where the community will help to collect and organize the best content from blogs and web sites. The goal is to create a place where it's relatively easy to find current content and highly relevant content surrounding eLearning.

To be clear eLearning Learning is a jump off point. The content comes from other places. Right now these are mostly posts from bloggers, but you will soon see other kinds of content appearing. The bottom line is that eLearning Learning is trying to help find and navigate the world of eLearning.

I've selected bloggers who I've been reading and felt provide value on interesting topics.

The following blogs are helping me today to launch this and I've listed a few unsolicited comments on their experience so far.

• Tracy Hamilton - Discovery through eLearning

"simple"

• Collin Kromke - Web 2.0 Work

"I'm LOVING the way the label widget works!"

• Kevin Jones - Engaged Learning

"I like your widget a lot. Kind of a linear tag cloud."

• Wendy Wickham - In The Middle of the Curve

"looks pretty cool"

You will see that these bloggers and soon other bloggers listed as Featured in their blogs. They will show the following badge:



You will also see that most featured bloggers are including the eLearning Learning Organizer Widget. This widget is in my sidebar and it shows the topics that I blog about. As a blogger, this helps me keep my content organized, which has always been a bit challenging.

You might visit a few of the blogs listed above to see the topics they are writing about. For example, looking at top tools:

Wendy

• Moodle (45)
• Captivate (40)
• LMS (33)

Tracy

• LMS (23)
• Second Life (6)
• Twitter (6)

Mine are:

• Wiki (108)
• LMS (83)
• Social Network (57)

Boy, I talk about Wikis a lot.

I hope that you will find eLearning Learning to be a valuable resource. I welcome any thoughts or feedback on the system.

I've just found this very useful tool that allows you to compare words and phrases and how they are used online. It works very simply by taking the two words or phrases that you type in and searching through Google to give you the results for each word. It tells you which is the most popular and how many pages each one appears in.
There are a few other tools around which can do a similar thing, but I prefer Google Battle, (an alternative is Google Fight) because it shows you a nice graphic of a smiling face and a sad face for the winner and loser, and because it also supplies links to the Google results, which means you can have a look at the context in which each word or phrase appears. This can supply valuable information about the way we use words in different contexts and their lexical grammar.
Here's an example comparing 'operate on' with 'operate in'

The very first result for 'operate on' shows that it is being used in a medical context.
If you compare this with the first result for 'operate in' you can see the context is quite different and in this context it has a different meaning.
By extracting these 'real' examples of the way the language is used and helping students to analyse and make deductions about the language we can help students to develop valuable autonomous learning skills.

So how can we use this with our students?

• This is a great way for students to search and compare the use of prepositions when they aren't sure which is the correct one to use.

• Likewise it can be really useful for checking collocations and the way they the different words and phrase are used, as in the 'operate' example I gave above.
• You could also use it to check word forms when checking the different parts of speech of a word. With word like 'economic' and 'economical' which are both adjectives, students can check to see how the different forms are used and when to use the correct one.
• Students could also use this to check different spellings of words to find out which is correct.
• When learning or teaching new vocabulary we could use this tool to extract examples of similar words being used in context. We could use these to create gap-fil sentences, cloze texts and other learning materials for students.
• We could get students to find real examples sentences which use the new words they are learning especially words with synonyms (slim, skinny) or words that have gradients, to see how the different words are used and when to use each one.
• We can get students to compare British and American words to see which is most popular.
• Students can compare the popularity of idomatic expressions like 'Raining cats and dogs' vs 'Storm in a tea cup'.
  
• Students can search the results for two different words to find out which one has the most uses / different meanings.
  
• We can also use this tool for discussion warmers comparing popularity of things. Which of these do you think is most popular?
  Dogs or cats?
  Madonna or Britney Spears?
  Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?
  cook or chef?
  Students can vote on which they think will win and why they think it will be most popular.
  

What I like about it?

• Simplicity.
• This is a free and easy tool to use which gives you much of the power of a concordancer.
• Because it links in to Google it gives you access to vast amounts of information about the words.

What I'm not so sure about?

• Because it links into Google to search examples from the internet, you can't control what your students see in the results, so some of the results may link to inappropriate materials.
• It searches words within text, so it gives youy limited information about how the words are used in spoken language.

Well I hope you enjoy Google Battle and find it useful and if you have any other ideas for using it please do post a comment.

Related links:

• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases

Best

Nik Peachey

Over on the Big Question, we are discussing Network Feedback which is basically how can you reach out and get help around a question. Almost the same time I posted the question, I received a question from a reader around Language Learning.

The person works in a corporation in Turkey and is looking to find eLearning to teach employees English. I know there's a lot going on in online language training. In our brief exchange, I mentioned EduFire and Myngle - but the response is that these are more aimed at consumer rather than corporate.

Any suggested solutions?

And, if you have thoughts on how you would go about finding answers to this inquiry, you can use that as your answer to the Big Question. :)

As a result of my recent change in my Approach to LinkedIn Connections, I've actually met quite a few people who read my blog, but I don't believe had ever commented. They were comfortable connecting with me via LinkedIn and since it offers mutual value it was worth the effort. It truly does feel like a (virtual) networking event.

Interestingly, one of the people who connected to me suggested we might want to do the same on Facebook and Twitter. This really got me thinking. I described my approach to LinkedIn only having recently changed where I view my connections now as really being more of a combination of:

• PANs = Potentially Active Network
• CANs = Currently Active Network
• FANs = Formerly Active Network

I used to think of LinkedIn (and LinkedIn themselves suggest this is how to think of it) as containing only people who I have a deeper relationship with (CANs and FANs). However, for some of my primary uses Finding Expertise via LinkedIn and LinkedIn Answers to Get Help, it makes more sense to connect to people who it will be good to be connected with in the future (PANs).

However, this is not really the case with the way I use Facebook and Twitter. Both of these tools are much more conversational tools for me.

In Twitter, I have people that I follow in order to listen into their conversation. If you try to listen to too many, or if you listen to people who you don't really have a relationship with, you will experience what I describe in Twitter Mass Follow - Nevermind - basically it feels like noise.

In Facebook, it's much the same. I have my friends who I want to get together with, see what they are doing, have conversations with.

Both Twitter and Facebook really are my CANs and FANs. In some ways, the goal on both is to stay more closely connected with FANs to keep the relationship alive. Something I must say that I'm not good at. I can think of a bunch of folks who I really like, get along really well with and who I won't talk to unless something unusual happens. It's nice when we can get a bit of that ongoing conversation via Facebook or Twitter.

Yes, I could theoretically open up to a much larger network and somewhat ignore the noise. This would get the advantage of being able to broadcast. But, it's really not the way I use these tools today.

Now, it took me 2-3 years to change my thinking about LinkedIn. So, with all fairness, it could be that I've not evolved my thinking about Twitter and Facebook.

When I step back and see the message, I'm sending, I'm a bit worried:

If we are connecting on LinkedIn based on a very loose relationship, maybe we'll have more conversations and get to the point where it makes sense to connect on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Does that sound bad?