Technology, Innovation, Education

This week I needed to create a small presentation which could help learning professionals do some forward thinking. I decided to repurpose an earlier keynote given to the Dommel Valley group (you can find that presentation here), strip out many of the slides and record a voice-over including cheesy sound effects.

Please find below 9 non-exhaustive things I see happening in corporate learning in the near future and 9 questions that every Learning Professional in 2011 should ask themselves based on these points. I realise that the presentation might feel rushed (it had to fit in 15 minutes) and that many of the points need more explanation to be sensible to the average reader of this blog. However, I do hope that these questions could prod at least a few learning professionals into action.

If the embed doesn’t work, find the slidecast on slideshare or download the PDF (2.6 MB).

Today I had the pleasure of doing a guest lecture for Bits of Freedom at the University of Leiden in a course titled Anthropology of Information Society. I used many examples to try and drive home two points:

1. Technology is not just a tool, it is not “neutral”
2. You can help change technology for the better

One thing the students did, was write their own personal data policies (kind of like a reverse terms of service for using a webservice). This is something that I intend to explore further in this blog pretty soon.

You can also download the presentation as a 12MB PDF file.

Looking forward to any comments that you might have.

Bits of Freedom is doing important work (and are effective in the way they do their job). I am therefore honoured to ocassionally field some of their speaker requests. Today I presented at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on Privacy and the Internet and had some good talks with the students afterwards.

I am not sure the slides make a lot of sense without the audio, but if you augment them with a visit to some of the links in this bundle, then you might understand a bit better in which ways the Internet’s permance, replicability, scale and searchability (thank you danah) should affect the way we think about privacy going forward.

You can also download the slides as a 8.1MB PDF file.

On November 8th 2010 I delivered a keynote at the second Symposium of the Dommel Valley Group in Eindhoven. The theme of the day was “Informal Learning”. My presentation touched on the “Learning DNA” of the company I work for, looked at some of our efforts in the informal learning space and brought up nine (non-exhaustive) things that I see coming up in the near future.

Please check out my slides (or download a 4.3MB PDF copy of them):

The nine points led me to ask the audience nine questions:

1. Have you shared something explicitly in the last week?
2. Do you feel you are an expert on what makes a human brain tick and where motivation comes from?
3. Do you have the capability/capacity to capture and deliver video?
4. Are you creating multiple learning strategies (i.e. are you diversifying)?
5. Do you own an Android/iOS/Windows 7 smartphone?
6. Have you ever started with the best performers to see how something should be done?
7. Have you been the steward of an online community of practice?
8. Does your organisation have a meta-layer on top of its content/information?
9. Is your first instinct to find the great learning materials that exist before you create your own?

I personally cannot answer “yes” to all of these questions, but I am committed to work towards a “yes” on all of them in the next couple of months. To how many of these questions can you answer “yes”?

Finally, this is the first time I used the the concept of Social Contextualization of Content in a presentation. I look forward to exploring the concept further in a future post.

Yesterday morning I got up at 6:30 to deliver a presentation at the very first virtual Moodlemoot: iMoot 2010. All in all it was a hugely enjoyable experience. I had people attending from among other the United States, Ireland, Zambia, Australia, Japan.

The platform for delivery of the session was Elluminate, which worked flawless. I am still amazed at the fact that we now have easy access to the technology that makes a virtual conference with a worldwide audience possible.

My talk was titled “The Future of Moodle of How Not to Stop It”, an adaptation of the book by Zittrain.

The Future of...

I first recapped the recent discussion about the death of the VLE:

VLE is Dead Mob

►

I showed how Moodle was conceived and developed when the web was less mature then it is now (the social web as we know it was basically non-existent) and how a teacher can create a learning experience for his or her students using nothing but loosely coupled free tools. Horses for courses.

I then looked at the two mental models that Moodle could adapt from Drupal:

1. Drupal’s tagline is “Community Plumbing”. I believe Moodle’s could be “Learning Plumbing”.
2. Drupal sees itself as a platform. This is exactly what Moodle should reinvent itself as.

In the final part of the presentation I looked at how the new Moodle 2.0 API’s (repository, portfolio, comments and webservices) will be able to help make the shift towards a platform. I finished with asking people to imagine what an appstore for repository plugins and what an appstore for learning activities would look like.

The slides are on Slideshare and embedded below (you can also download a 2MB PDF version). The session has been recorded. Once that recording comes online, I will update this post and try and share that here too.

The one difficult thing about a virtual conference, by the way, is communicating the dates and times. Timezones add a lot of complexity. iMoot, for example, provides users with a custom schedule for their timezone and replays each session twice after the live event. I am starting to believe in the Swatch Internet Time concept again. Wouldn’t a single metric .beat not be great? See you @850!

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about how (auto)presence could increase team and network communication. The post also has to include some video or audio. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

I decided to put this month’s blogpost in a 17 minute long Slideshare presentation (download the 1.5MB PDF here):

My voice was recorded with VR+ on the iPhone. This cheap app converts the file to MP3 and allows you to upload it over wifi. The MP3 file is hosted by the Internet Archive.

I would love your comments and ideas on this matter!

On the last day of the Online Educa I did a talk titled “Open Source: Getting Failure for Free (and Why That is a Good Thing)”. Whenever I talk about open source it is like preaching to the converted: no sceptics in the audience. The two other speakers in the “The Added Value of Open Source Solutions in Times of Crisis” session were pretty hardcore. Matteo Uggeri was wearing a “I do not work for Fronter” badge and Elias Aarnio prefers to talk about “Free Software” and did not use the proprietary laptop that was available to do the presentations.

In my talk I tried to explain that cost should not be the only reason for choosing open source software. Another reason to use open source software is the fact that it will allow you to innovate faster. The slides are available on Slideshare, as a 1.4MB PDF file and below:

A special thank you to Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture who kindly allowed me to use some of his slides in this presentation.

This morning I presented in the “The Moodle Experience: Moodle in Practice and New Developments” pre-conference session at the Online Educa in Berlin.

My talk was titled “Will it Blend” and the slides are available on Slideshare, as a PDF ( 4.9MB) and below (no audio unfortunately). If you have any questions about these slides, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments.

On Friday (14:30-16:00 in room Lincke) I will talk about the use of open source software in corporations. My talk is titled “Open Source: Getting Failure for Free (and Why That Is a Good Thing)” and is part of the “The Added Value of Open Source Solutions in Times of Crisis” session.

I do hope to meet readers of this blog there!

It was always my intention to write a post summarising last April’s Moodlemoot in Loughborough in the UK. It was a highly enjoyable event with many Moodle luminaries present and there was much to write about.

However, I doubt I will ever write that post, so I have decided to share the presentation that I did titled 10 Things to Like About Moodle. It tries to describe the factors that have contributed to making Moodle such a success in the seven years of its existence. The audio is sometimes a bit hard to understand (too much hand-waving on my part), but overall it should still be valuable to many people.

Download the slides as a 3.5MB PDF file.

The Dutch Moodle users group (Ned-Moove) organised the fifth Dutch language Moodlemoot in Amsterdam last Wednesday. It was a successful event with nearly a hundred people attending and two excellent keynote speakers: Helen Foster and Martín Langhoff. Helen is Moodle’s community manager and Martín is an important core Moodle developer and currently architect of the school server in the OLPC project.

The programme of speakers was better than in any earlier Dutch moot, with tracks about education, business, digital pedagogy and sysadmin/development tracks. Nowadays events like this leave digital tracks and can be relived in a way through the Twitter messages, blog posts and shared slides. My ex-colleague and friend Marcel de Leeuwe wrote an interesting (Dutch) blog post about his experiences at the moot that includes his slides and my co-Ned-moove-board-member and friend Arjen Vrielink did a conceptual talk about Moodle networking. Many of the other speakers have put their slides online at the Moodlemoot 2009 website.

Moodle in the Netherlands finally seems to be taking of outside of secondary education. About half of the visitors did not come from the educational sector:

Sectors/Visitors at the Dutch Moodlemoot

My own presentation was less about Moodle and more about learning this time. I talked about instructional principles that can be used to make sure you deliver top quality blended learning. The slides and audio are in Dutch and can be downloaded as a 5.3MB PDF file or viewed here:

All in all a great event. I am looking forward to next year, it will most probably be in Belgium.