New Blogger - Tony O'Driscoll - and Beer Reminder

One of the bigger thinkers organization learning, knowledge management and the use of technology - Tony O'Driscoll - has finally bit the bullet and started a blog: Learning Matters!

Tony will be on a panel around the what's coming next in eLearning at the eLearningGuild in Boston.

Hint - several of us bloggers are still waiting for a vendor to invite us for beer (or wine) tasting in Boston - see Beer Tasting at ASTD TechKnowledge - Look Out eLearningGuild Annual Gathering in Boston.

Wikipatterns - A Pattern to Emulate

Found this via a post on EdTechPost: Wikipatterns

It provides patterns for various roles and adoption patterns. What's great beyond just finding out about Wikis is the beauty of how the information is presented - as patterns. FAQs are a great tool, patterns applied like this is also a good tool.

Blogging and Collaboration

Great post by Tom Haskins says - among other things:

If a blog post does not feed back into the blogosphere, that's not blogging. That's merely informative -- or it's the formal learning we did before blogging took hold. If the value of your blogging is not endlessly recursive, then you can conceive of your value like before. If a blog post goes nowhere, that's a web log: an online personal diary.

Blogging is the repercussions and the reciprocities from responding to responses. That circularity transforms how you are valuable and how you learn. That's what emerges naturally by blogging among us.

I agree with Tom that the intent of blogging is dialog. If you don't plan to engage with others, then you really aren't having a dialog. On the other hand, you don't necessarily need lots of readers or commentors to get the value. Forcing yourself to formulate thoughts and capture those into written form for public consumption is a great learning vehicle. See some of the dialog in - Top Ten Reasons to Blog and Not to Blog.

Dave Lee expresses some concern that he may not be a blogger because of lack of comments that he receives. But I think you should look at his conclusions, among them:

i've learned more than i'd ever image i could, my writing has improved (it still needs work), and i've connected with some great people i would have never met if it weren't for blogging.

Dave's still not broke down and tried capital letters at the start of his sentences, but, hey, ...

Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning

I blogged about this before on LCB - The Innovator's Dilemma of Learning, but the recent discussion in Product Vendor Blogs - Where are They? suggests to me that we still are not getting the fact that we are likely facing exactly the kind of situation that is known as the Innovator's Dilemma - in other words, incremental improvements won't get us to what is needed. A leap is needed. And most leaps don't come from within large, established players.

If you look at what's happening with Web 2.0, the information explosion, needed changes to education, etc., etc., ... we all are hearing about the need for something different. Yet, we are seeing mostly incremental improvements. If anything, I would expect right now that the biggest shift will be towards more free, open-source solutions that provide roughly the same functionality that are in the commercial tools today. That's what happens when you start to stagnate and there's feature parity.

The fact that the discussion around Product Vendor Blogs and Innovation came back that it may be there but is hidden suggests that they aren't going to be the source. Does anyone from Saba, SumTotal, Adobe/Macromedia/eHelp, Lectora, etc. disagree? What will be the source?

Product Vendor Blogs - Where are They?

Another thought just occurred to me based on my last post Innovation Geography Based and Innovation in eLearning. Ben Werdmuller posted his comments on this Does location matter for web startups? and asked about innovation in eLearning, especially innovation that leads to products. I've done a lot of start-up development over the past few years.

One thing that just dawned on me is how few product vendor blogs there are in eLearning. If you look on my link roll, there's one from Articulate, elgg, ummm ... I'm already running out. Where's a blog from Saba, SumTotal? Do they not have anything interesting to say about where things are going? How about Lectora? Others?

In other industries, you see authentic conversation coming from vendors (from people inside the vendor) - where are they in eLearning?

Innovation Geography Based and Innovation in eLearning

I ran across a post in Read/Write Web - Does Location Matter in Web Innovation? that talked about a recent NY Times article When It Comes to Innovation, Geography Is Destiny. I also saw that Ben Werdmuller posted his comments on this Does location matter for web startups?

Reading the articles and the comments is probably worth it, but I personally think that the NY Times is overstating the advantage of being in Silicon Valley.

I've personally been involved in the start-up world in Los Angeles for about 15 years, and have had the opportunity to work doing startup software development on many early-stage companies (e.g., eHarmony) as an acting CTO. LA is a vibrant community with a rich network of LA angels that fund early stage companies, lots of LA VCs, easy access to big media, lots of innovation in media, mobile content, games, green, health care, and many, many others. Networking in Los Angeles is a little difficult because of how spread out LA is and the traffic, but there's still enough innovation happening that how do get enough conversations with interesting people. My only other complaint is that right now it's very hard to find good technical people at all levels (but it's still easier than in SV).

Ben then asked an interesting question:

Where is the real innovation happening in e-learning? (And by innovation I mean the type that leads to products that can actually be used, as opposed to blue skies thinking.)

First - Ben - if you see my post - can I suggest that you submit your question to the LCB Big Question for February as something like: What will the next generation of eLearning tools look like? That's a great question!

Interestingly, I used to be involved in many more projects that indicated where next generation tools would be coming from (lots of us built authoring tools and LMS products from scratch before the right tools were available). I also used to be involved in start-ups working on interesting aspects of e-learning. However, I'm seeing fewer of these. Why? Because I believe that innovation in classic eLearning (courseware based) is lessening and the opportunities are going to fall to providing open-source, free-hosted and other commodity type solutions.

Instead, real innovation is happening at the edges. I'm personally spending more time building interesting tools like things that help people work on improving their customer satisfaction scores, or an online contest, or personal tracking systems, or personal knowledge management, or ... What's interesting in each of these projects/companies is that they are not selling to the classic eLearning buyer (training organizations).

So part of what is at issue is who is the buyer now? Will innovation come in eLearning? The answer may be "No" - because we are all still so focused on courseware that we can cross the chasm over to more innovative solutions.

Jay's Learning Mixer

I just ran across a post by Jay Cross that included his picture of sliders that represent some of the choices we have:

It's great to see something very similar to my discussion of eLearning 1.0, 1.3 and 2.0. I've been talking about this issue as an evolution of our responsibilities, but I actually prefer Jay's take on it where we have choices within any solution.

In fact, solutions we construct these days often involve multiple sets of decisions. For example, we might still do some introductory training with most switches on the left, but follow it with support for informal follow-up with all switches on the right.