Day: October 31, 2008

Barack Obama: Sí se puede

Obama and Clinton in Florida
Obama and Clinton in Florida

The day before yesterday I had the extraordinary privilege to see and hear an ex-president and the next president of the United States speak at an rally in Kissimmee, Florida.

We were taken to the venue by a Haitian cab driver, who not only is the best domino player of the US (by his own estimation), but also kindly let us listen to some of the Republican radio stations. He loves listening to those stations because of their extreme and ridiculous viewpoints.

We arrived at a big sports field around 17:30 where a very orderly line had already formed. During the wait we could buy all kinds of Obama buttons and T-shirts (my favourite: a Matrix spoof with Obama as “The One” and Biden, Michelle and Powell in the background). There was a heart warming amount of optimism and camaraderie in the line. The doors opened at 20:30 and we were quickly searched at a security checkpoint. Multiple helicopters circled the air, another security measure.

The field slowly filled up with everybody walking to the catheter. When we reached, we were pleasantly surprised to be only about 20 yards away from the speakers. At 22:00 congresswoman Brown, the senator of Florida and Jimmy Smith urged everybody to vote early. A lawyer ensured us that this time the Democratic party has five thousand lawyers in Florida alone, making sure that every vote counts and suing as soon as problems emerge. “They won’t steal the election this time.”

Right on time (23:00) president Clinton and senator Obama appeared. Clinton spoke first with Obama sitting next to him on a stool and smiling. Clinton said that there were four reasons why Obama is the president that the country needs:

  • He has the best philosophy
  • He has the best policy
  • He is capable of making a decision
  • He is capable of executing on the decision

According to Clinton both candidates had to make two presidential decisions during this campaign. The first is the choice of a vice president (no need to dwell on this point), the second was acting on the economic crisis. Clinton explained that Obama has had a lot of criticism for taking a while to respond, but that during that time Obama was calling his economic advisers, Clinton’s advisers, Warren buffet and other specialists realising that this was a complex situation that needed to be understood well. This is exactly what a president does according to Clinton.

Next it was Obama’s turn. He looked relaxed and spoke with an incredible clarity and purpose (without using a tele-prompter). The presence of the hugely popular Clinton gave Obama the opportunity to refer to those prosperous Clinton years in which the average yearly income rose by 7500 dollars as opposed to the Bush administration where the average income fell with 2000 dollars.

What struck me was the honesty of what he said and his willingness to also talk about the difficult issues. The US needs to tighten its belt. He will have to go through the budget “line by line” and scrap the things that we might like, but do not need. He spoke about investing 15 billion dollars in green technology and creating 5 million green jobs. He addressed the accusation of being a communist (“Yes, I shared my peanut butter sandwich in school, I am a redistributionist”). He praised McCain for his stand against torture but also pointed out the fact that McCain’s voting record has been with Bush on all economic matters. “Bush has been digging a hole for eight years and McCain is ready to take over the shovel.”

Finally he urged everybody to not think that the race has run. Everybody has to go out and vote.

It was an amazing experience being at a historic event like this.

Only a couple more days…

Learning 2008: Wrap up of day 3, the final day

These are my last notes on Learning 2008:

  • During the conference six students from Champlain College designed a game on teleworking. This was a very fascinating process to watch. At first they had no idea about the topic, so they had to crowdsource the conference participants and ask them for their input of issues around teleworking. This gave them enough materials to built the game. Champlain has three game design curricula: graphic design, game design and programming. Each of the three streams were represented by two students. The final result, Teletrust, is a great game in which you have to act on what happens with your teleworking colleagues and with you. By playing well you can keep the trust of your co-workers. If you lose trust, you lose the game. I especially like three things about the game:
    • The fact that the flash source code and the graphics will all be released under an open source license and should become available for download.
    • The way that they created random looks for the co-workers by combining different shirts, hair styles, eyes, skin colours and hair colours.
    • The event editor which can be used to add new events on which the player needs to act. This is an excellent feature because it will allow any company to customise the game and keep it relevant.

    Kudos to the students and to Ann deMarle and Raymond McCarthy Bergeron for coaching them to a great result! It was interesting to see how quickly a relevant game can materialise. This is something that Stoas would also like to do. A quick calculation reveals that the cost is not as low as it initially might seem: the students probably worked a total of 34 hours each in the three and a half days. 34 times 6 = 204 hours. This is 25.5 days of work (without counting any of the project management). Not cheap, but certainly an alternative to a standard web based training.

  • Dale's Cone of Experience
    Dale

    Charles Fadel of Cisco always thought that the classic thoughts on how reading has less retention than seeing, which has less than hearing, which has less than seeing and hearing, which has less than collaborating, which has less retention than doing (all based on Edward Dale‘s Cone of Experience) were a bit too convenient. He has done some research on the impact of multimodal learning in comparison to traditional unimodal learning. His findings were as follows:

    Basic Skills
    Increase in retention    		 Higher Order skills
    Increase in retention
    Interactive (active)
    Multimodal learning    		 +9% +32%
    Non-interactive (passive)
    Multimodal learning    		 +21% +20%

    These findings should be taken into account when we are designing learning.

  • The final keynote interviewee was Stephen M.R. Covey who has just written the The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. His book has three key ideas:
    • Trust is economic, because it affects speed and costs (the underlying cause of the current economic crisis is a lack of trust).
    • Trust is the new currency in today’s world.
    • Trust is a learnable competency.

    According to Covey transparency is vital to trust: people do not trust what they don’t see. Companies (and probably people too) shouldn’t fight the trend towards more transparency. Instead they should use it to their advantage.

Learning 2008 was the best conference I have ever been to. It was a joy to share the experience with the others in my group and I would thank Stoas for investing in me and allowing me to go.

Learning 2008: Mashups & Widgets are the Future of the LMS

“Mashups & Widgets are the Future of the LMS” was the title of the talk by Bryan Polivka of the Laureate Higher Education Group. This is a group that runs 36 universities over the world. All of these universities have different methodologies, styles and cultures. It is Bryan’s challenge to find solutions that work for all of these universities.

Bryan outlined his problem for us: The learning model is determined by how content connects to students connect to faculty connect to assessment. Their universities are still in the traditional LMS paradigm. This is a problem because we now have all these new things like podcasts, mobile phones, 3D worlds, social sites, etc.

His solution to this problem is to go back to the basics. What is the core of what they want to do with learning technology? According to Bryan they decided that Content – Students – Assessments form the core interaction. This is what should be supported by the LMS, the rest can be flexible and can be set up in multiple ways.

He then went on to highlight the widgetisation of the web (his example was Pageflakes). It used to be the case that the Internet was laid out according to the physical metaphor of the web page: a virtual location. You moved from place to place by switching web pages. That infrastructure is in the process of being broken up: you now have the possibility to pull in data from all over the web and display it in a single location (look at popurls as an example).

An LMS should support this through its architecture. Bryan gave a quick demo of Asiatrac Learning Studio. This LMS is created in Thailand and allows embedding of all of its contents as a widget on another site.

The courses in the Laureate group’s universities are designed through a very solid design process. This allows them to have a lot of high quality content (much video and audio) in their repository of digital assets. The repository allows for tracking and can display its assets in an LMS, but also in a Facebook app or through the iTunes university. All they need is to make sure the student authenticates. The university is now in control of what options they will give their students and they can experiment with having the content only available in Blackboard, or sharing it more widely capitalising on the site that is currently en vogue with their students.

I find this a very interesting strategy and love how Bryan managed to conceptualise his whole presentation very clearly. It would be great for current LMS’ to have more of an architecture that would support its contents being displayed elsewhere. However, I do see two issues that could use some more thought:

  • Content is seen here as broadcasted material (audio, video, interactive e-learning modules, etc.) and not as pedagogically designed activities. Where is the student as a constructor of knowledge in this story? How do you facilitate and moderate student interaction and collaboration?
  • How do you ensure that the learning experience doesn’t become too fragmented? The British Open University has explicitly chosen a strategy in which all the learning takes place inside the LMS (or as they call it: the VLE, compare Niall Sclater). This way they have full control over the design of the learning experience and are able to optimally facilitate their learners with a unified and clear interface.

I would love to explore this topic further. Does anybody have any pointers?