Social Bookmarking for Link Sharing

On TrDev, we've been discussing the sharing of links via forum posts vs. social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us. I've discussed this before:

• Social Bookmarking Tricks for Group Learning
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools

But it might be worth looking at how Nancy White has been doing this. See her recent post about Second Wave Adoption and her follow-up post on Time to Experiment. She lets folks know to use the del.icio.us tag "2ndWave" and then you can look at the list of links that she and others have collected.

The nice thing about doing it this way is that you have those list of links available to you later. Why is that important? Well how many of us will actually go through and read the links right now? With del.icio.us (and better yet Yahoo MyWeb), you can go back and find them later. Ever had the experience of going back and searching for the list of links?

Of course, the question is whether people will adopt this. Any thoughts?

Use of iPods and other Mobile Learning

Not sure if this came from the same person, but I saw a question posted on TrDev and was sent to me via Yahoo 360 that covered the same basic topic: How are iPods and PDAs being used in corporate learning applications?

The unfortunate answer is that it's doubtful that any numeric answer exists for this, but there are lots of examples out there. Some places I would suggest you look to get a sense of what's going on:

• Judy Brown's mLearnopedia or the associated content community for mobile learning.
  
• Blog summary of a recent presentation by Judy Brown
• Lucy Carter's presentation about Sales Training at Apple

Search under "mobile learning" and you'll find a ton of stuff.

If anyone knows a source that will give us an idea of "how much this is happening" - that would be great.

Facilitating Adoption of Web 2.0 Tools

Nancy White just posted Second Wave Adoption where she discusses various aspects of helping adoption of Web 2.0 type approaches. This is definitely an interesting question and something I've written about before:

• eLearning Technology: Adoption of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 Revisited
• Enterprise 2.0 - What's the PU?
• Web 2.0 Adoption in the Enterprise - It's Personal

These posts may be worth reading, but the basic gist is that adoption starts from the personal utility - actually its the perceived usefulness (PU), but that's roughly the personal utility.

Nancy's post has some ideas (slides) about how to facilitate adoption and she points to a few other posts: Focusing, Stimulate people's imagination, trigger inventiveness.

I simply wanted to add to what she is saying that adoption is going to be dependent on us first learning how to use these tools ourselves and then showing others. Maybe take a look at:

• Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective
• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools

Second Life and Learning

I just read through a great post by Rich Hoeg which talks about his learning around Second Life. A few of the things he points you to:

• Wikipedia article on Second Life
• Harvard Course that uses Second Life (prior post)
• Overview of course and link to intro Second Life
• Video Lectures
• Course Wiki
• A Second Education - A blog dedicated to education in a Second Life
• Educational Opportunities of Second Life - Educause
• How Not to Teach in Second Life - An interview with the Second Life founder

These are great resources and will likely open your eyes a bit. I think that Second Life is not going to turn out to be the winner because of technical issues, e.g., firewalls. However, I think that the next generation of Second Life will displace tools like WebEx for many online events. Once you add in presence audio (you hear people close to you) and whiteboarding tools, it will make for very interesting opportunities.

Will Richardson - Owning the Teaching…and the Learning

Must read post - Owning the Teaching…and the Learning. A few comments - but make sure you ask yourself if you fit into this yourself around use for corporate learning:

I hate to generalize, but the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.

Lots of teachers I talk to want blogs and podcasts and wikis. Without question, there are thousands of teachers, tens of thousands in fact, who are already using the tools with their students. I see new examples every day. But I’m still bothered by the fact that very, very rarely do I see new pedagogies to go along with them that prepare students for the creation of their own learning networks. That allow them to take some ownership (or at least envision the possibility of it) over their learning. That help them learn self-direction and get them to stop waiting for someone else to initiate the learning. And even rarer is to find one of those teachers exploring his or her own learning through the tools.

More than anything else, I think, teaching is modeling.

While his audience is a different audience, I think a lot of what he is saying applies to us. This is something that I've mentioned before:

• Do Learning Professionals Make the Worst Learners?
• More Questions on Making Learning for Learning Professionals More Effective
• Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools ...

but Will's post really crystalizes the thought. And challenges each of us to do more.

Stephen Downes is Wrong? Is It Really Cool?

After Stephen and I recently lamented in our blogs about the problems with comments getting buried (see How Do People Interact with Blogs and Stephen's comments) - now I'm completely throwing away all blog norms because I don't want my response to Stephen on a different topic to get lost.

My recent post - Incredibly Cool! Vision of Future of Application and eLearning Development - Stephen responded:

OK, I know why Tony Karrer is calling this "incredibly cool," but no, it's not, it's a mess. I know it seems really cool, because it brings so much stuff into a page. But I couldn't put my mouse down n it anywhere without clicking on something, windows would stay open, I have tabs piling up on each other, and through all of it I couldn't find anything useful, and there was no place to actually create anything. We're not there yet - Web 2.0 is going to be, more than anything, simple, not a horrendous desktop mess.

I just have to respond to the "it's a mess" comment. I agree with Stephen that right now this stuff is early stage and it's a mess. I'm not planning on using that particular tool anytime soon. It's more of a toy than anything else. Oh, I am using something similar to create my personalized home page. And, none of that is the point.

The point I want everyone to take away from doing the exercise in the original post is the ease with which you can pull together an application made up of services being provided by separate entities and the ease of doing this authoring of your home page through a web interface.

You need to use a bit of imagination, but picture the objects on the left as a series of Question Types and Interaction Types that you can drop onto your page. This is authoring 2010. And the components may come from places other than your authoring/LCMS vendor. And they can easily include interaction with your learners.

That's all I'm saying. :)

Beyond Search - REAP

via Jack Vinson's post Knowledge workers do more than search, found the article: Beyond Search is REAP. The point is that searching is really just the beginning for most activities. From the post:

Beyond Search is REAP - Retrieve, Extract, Arrange, Present. We’re still not there with the deeper tools and the whole experience we desire for truly reaping the value from all that’s available to us on the Internet.

Consider the typical information work flow of a professional:

• Retrieve — collect information from a variety of sources
• Extract — extract data, facts, examples
• Arrange — arrange documents and facts for use now or later
• Present — compose information into artifacts of value

Search is just about the retrieve and the -eaping is pretty much left to the person.

This is really on the mark and my only wish is that his article or Jack's had pointed to more help with the rest of the process. But the point made in comments was that the process becomes different quickly. On the other hand, I think there are some common techniques that we all use. I've pointed to a few in various posts probably the most notable are:

• Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools
• Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective

This feels like the most important battleground in learning how to learn.