Blogs, Automated Translations, and a Better Site Feed

I ran into a little utility this morning - Snap - that let's you add previews of any link on your site as a quick little pop-up. It's kinda cool. You'll have to visit my blog to see this in action.

While you are there, definitely check out the new translation capability that can be found at the bottom of each post. This is provided by Yahoo's, AltaVista's, BabelFish - aren't acquisitions fun? Since I've found that about 30% of the links to my posts come from blogs in other languages, maybe this will be of value. I've certainly been using it to translate from other languages to English so I can see what people are saying relative to the topics in my blog. I'm actually surprised at how much you can understand from automated translation. It makes me wonder if this isn't something that we should all be doing with our content whenever we have a multilingual workforce?

Of course, this then raised the question - can't I add this to my feeds? Well, I blew it a long time ago and didn't point everyone to my feedburner feed. Using FeedBurner, I can add lots of fun stuff to the feed and I've turned on publishing a daily summary of my del.icio.us links.

I would suggest that readers of this blog might want to change over to the FeedBurner feed to get these added functions: http://feeds.feedburner.com/eLearningTechnology

Web 3.0 - eLearning 3.0?

First let me apologize for talking about Web 3.0 and eLearning 3.0 when we don't really understand much less have digested eLearning 2.0, but there's so much buzz, I can't help myself.

Will Thalheimer posted about Web 3.0 and Learning where he is discussing what is being called Web 3.0. In particular he cites a recent NY Times article. But Web 3.0 has been getting lots of attention for a while now. The basic idea is to use the knowledge embedded within the web and include possible semantic web elements on top to begin to extract greater meaning so that we would be able to answer questions like:

"I'm looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child."

Will (and I would agree) says that there will be big impact on learning if the web could answer these kinds of queries. However, Stephen Downes says:

OK, now, think about that. Do we ask questions like that? Well - no. First of all, we tend to forget to add the qualifiers (such as the budget and the child) when we ask. But even more importantly, we don't want to include some of this information in the question. It's an old rule - never tell the sales person what you're willing to spend. But also - I don't want to limit what I'm looking for. I'll spend more than $3000 if the trip is worth it, and I'll find a sitter for the child if I have to. What this means, then, is that whatever we're looking at, it won't be set up like a search or a query. It has to be much more subtle, much more interpretive, much more dynamic, much more immersive. The Web 3.0 people are talking about is the old Web 1.0 - we deliver content, you listen. But the next generation web will be more like Web 2.0 on steroids - the web itself will warp according my needs, my interests, my contributions.

I'm in the middle of grappling with similar questions for a particular client. They have very rich information with lots of meta-data and the question is not only what can we answer with the information, but what questions can we help to formulate. How much structure do we want to provide?

I think Stephen is onto something when he says that the web will warp itself to "my needs", "my interests" - but that's exactly the contextual stuff that he's saying that people often forget to add themselves. The web of the future will know that I'm not rich or poor (so $3000 is probably an okay number) and that I have an 11 year old. I shouldn't need to tell it again.

But there's also an aspect of the web providing suggestions that you wouldn't have thought to ask for ... and that's where I'm finding value today. Suggest potentially related results. Like more expensive vacations that are a little better. Or, if you'd only leave your child home you could go here.

I agree completely with Stephen that we are generally pretty bad about formulating questions. And I still believe this is a bigger stumbling block than formulating answers. See: finding answers and power of questions, better questions for learning professionals, and be an insanely great professional conference attendee. Because we aren't good at formulating questions, a big part of Web 3.0 has to be helping to:

find the right question to ask!

Web 2.0 Tool - Great Collaboration Example

Andrew McAfee has posted about Avenue A Razorfish's (AARF) Intranet that uses Web 2.0 tools as part of information sharing:

AARF has built interfaces to the bookmarking site del.icio.us, the photo sharing site Flickr, and Digg, a site where members vote on the importance of news stories. All three use tags, or something close.

AARF employees have learned to add the tag 'AARF' when they come across a web page (using del.icio.us), a photo (Flickr), or a news story (Digg) that they think will be of interest to their colleagues. Shortly after they add this tag, the bookmark (look at the top of the box), thumbnail of the photo (middle) or headline and description of the story (bottom) show up within the AARF E2.0 Intranet. So AARF has found a fast and low-overhead way to let its employees share Internet content with each other. It's also free; these interfaces with del.icio.us, Flickr, and Digg require no fees and no permissions. I find this simply brilliant.

This is similar to what I suggested in eLearning Technology: Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools and eLearning Technology: Social Bookmarking Tricks for Group Learning

Andrew has followed up on his original post with some concerns around security. Because the tags are visible globally, then other folks can see what is being tagged with AARF. This can be problematic. With some tools, e.g., Yahoo MyWeb, you can limit the visibility of your pages (or your tags) and I'd expect that to start happening with other tools as well. This is something I've discussed before: Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning.

Both of Andrew's posts are definitely worth reading.

Great Example of Group Collaboration - e-Book: E-learning Concepts and Techniques

I found this via Eric Tremblay - e-Learning Acupuncture: Q: Does group collaboration online work?

E-Learning Concepts and Techniques is a collaborative e-book project by Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania's Department of Instructional Technology students and guest authors. It was a project-based assignment for the online class, E-Learning Concepts and Techniques Spring 2006.

As an example - look at the section on Instructional Design Models. Quite well done. This is both a great reference piece and a great introduction to eLearning.

A link to the assignment.

Great stuff.

Guy Kawasaki - Art of Panels

Good post by Guy - The Art of Panels. He points to some other good resources:

• Guidelines for Great Panel Moderation
  
• How to Be a Great Moderator
  
• How to Kick Butt on a Panel
  
• 10 Rules for Being a Great Panel Moderator
  
• Panels, in moderation
  
• How to Moderate a Lively Panel Discussion (PDF)

I generally agree with everything presented with one exception - preparation and PowerPoint. Panels where the speakers just show up and answer questions often end up rambling and not nearly as effective as panels where speakers are prepared for introductory discussions and context setting. As a moderator I always have speakers prepare a few context setting slides and have them prepared for the topics we'll be covering.

At the same time, I agree with the suggestion that you don't want too much preparation. Instead the point is to drill into key issues and show parallels and contrasts in view among the panelists. So, from a more prepared context setting (often with PowerPoint slides to support) you go into a back-and-forth as discussed in the above pieces.

Clark Aldrich - "Second Life is not a teaching tool"

Clark Aldrich's recent post on LCB - The Learning Circuits Blog: Second Life is not a teaching tool - has me wondering what he thinks a "teaching tool" is?

Having said all of that, Second Life, as is, is not a teaching tool. It is content free. It is closer to a virtual classroom tool, or even a real-world meeting room or water cooler (without the actual water). Any content has to either bubble up from spontaneous conversations (great when they happen, but not predictable or scalable enough to provide an intellectual payoff), or be "brought in."

Ummm ... but aren't virtual classroom tools or meeting room tools a "teaching tool" if used correctly? And, if you are able to enhance these with persistent content, doesn't that become a teaching tool.

How about the ability to fly around the solar system? Could you maybe learn about the solar system that way? That's in there?

I think maybe Clark is more worried about distinquishing something from something:

mostly, I worry that educational simulations will be lumped together with Second Life

Not sure the point he's making. If someone scripts a simulation in Second Life, does that not count or something?

No matter what Clark says - Second Life is a teaching tool.

I personally believe that the next generation of Second Life that gets around some of the current technical issues and provides presence audio is going to have adoption patterns similar to virtual classroom / virtual meeting tools.

Knowledge Management Core Issues

Great post by Denham Grey - Perennial KM issues that are very similar to the core problems that we deal with in eLearning:

• How to speed learning, increase awareness and share experiences.
  
  With an ever deceasing half-life of knowledge , just keeping up has become a major corporate imperative. Sure we have improved search engines, more stuff on the web and many ways to make connections, but the difficulty is making sense and finding people really 'in-the-know'. We need practical ways to build personal informal networks.
  Helping groups learn from mistakes and errors, practices to carry over learnings from project to project and improve corporate memory. We have made little progress in preventing those repeating errors, as firms grow in size and complexity, building relationships that enable knowledge flows, keeping in the loop and finding stuff becomes a huge issue. Could we improve the situation by adopting some emergent mindsets & web2.0 practices?


• Discovering opportunities and gaps in knowledge flows, improving personal networking and finding experts (in larger firms).
  
  This requires ethnographic digging, an understanding of the organization, a deep appreciation of knowledge practices and emergent affordances. Not many firms recognize or care about sub-optimal performance in this area - the results you see, are diffuse, obtuse and difficult to fit into classic ROI models.
  


• Providing environments, tools and processes that encourage informal learning, knowledge sharing of effective practices and stimulate innovation.
  
  Communities of practice, incentives & recognition for personal mentoring, story collection and telling, cross-domain and silo sharing can be useful, but there needs to sustained executive drive and support for this to have an impact.
  


• Improving competitive advantage, agility and adaption by making staff more aware, sharing the small insights, building on incremental improvements.
  
  Open space methods, creating forums and 'Ba' for trusted exchanges, blogging and informal wikis may help. Once again top level support, legitimization and walking the talk - leading via example is the key.
  


• Finding tacit knowledge sources and helping to put these to work.
  
  Tacit knowledge discovery is tedious, slow and difficult - most firms shy away from allocating resources to projects dealing with intangibles, where outcomes are unknown and ROI is hard to prove. As knowledge retention becomes an issue due to workforce transitions, this problem is not going away soon.

Great stuff Denham.