I Really Hope to See You at Online Educa 2011!

From November 30th till December 2nd I will be attending the excellent Online Educa which bills itself as the “The largest global e-learning conference for the corporate, education and public service sectors”.

I’ll be co-organizing two different events and would really like to meet you at either (or both!) of them. One is an Edubloggers dinner (a good Dutch tradition, now in an Internationalised version), the other a workshop in which we will create scenarios for the future of corporate learning. More information below:

1. International Online Edubloggers Dinner

The 2008 Edubloggers dinner in Berlin. This year it will be an International version. (Picture by Wilfred Rubens)
The 2008 Edubloggers dinner in Berlin. This year it will be an International version. (Picture by Wilfred Rubens)

On Thursday December 1, 2011 Wilfred Rubens and I organize the International Online Educa edubloggers dinner.

Purpose

Networking, informal talk, having fun while eating and drinking.

For who?

Everybody interested in blogging about technology-enhanced learning. It’s not necessary that you have your own blog. You even don’t have to be an Evangelist. A believer is sufficient 😉

When?

Thursday December 1, 2011 at 20.00 hrs.

Where?

In a restaurant near the place where the Online Educa is held. So at a walking distance from the Intercontinental. We will take into account that we’re in the middle of an economic crisis.

How?

We are not sure yet. If the group is small, we will eat à la carte. If the group is bigger, it might be a buffet. Everybody pays his or hers own food and drinks. We’re Dutch, so we are going Dutch. If we have to order a buffet we might ask you to pay beforehand.

Registration

Please go here and comment on Wilfred’s blog post. Fill in your email address with your comment (it will not be visible on the blog). Do let us know if you have suggestions for restaurants on walking distance of the hotel. Furthermore, you should mention if you are vegetarian or have other special dietary needs (e.g. an allergy to something).

Deadline

Due to logistics the deadline for registration is November 22, 2011.

We will inform you by old-fashioned e-mail when we have found a decent restaurant.

2. Preparing together for the future of corporate learning

When, costs and registration

This workshop will be held on November 30th from 10:00 till 13:00 and costs € 90,-. Registration is through the Online Educa website.

Description of the workshop

What will learning and development look like in the future and how can we prepare for success in these new worlds?

This workshop uses scenario planning and is a unique opportunity for those involved in defining strategies for learning and development within the workplace to consider potential futures in this field. Participants will examine the external factors shaping corporate learning and work together with industry experts and like-minded peers to create future scenarios that can be used to help them prepare more effectively for new worlds.

Scenario planning has been used extensively at Royal Dutch Shell to help change perceptions of the influence of external factors in shaping future working worlds. It is a strategic planning method used prior to defining strategies to help the organisation understand and respond more effectively to change. Willem Manders and Hans de Zwart from Shell, supported by facilitators from within the industry, guide participants through the process of:

  • understanding the external factors that can potentially shape the future of L&D
  • defining a number of L&D scenarios or worlds that could emerge as a result of external influences.

However, this is not just a workshop; the scenarios created in this session will be presented as part of the BUSINESS EDUCA conference track, enabling all BUSINESS EDUCA delegates to contribute to the development of these methods. Conference delegates will be encouraged to look for signals supporting different worlds as they take part in the wider conference and are invited to come together at the close of the conference to reflect on how these developed scenarios can be used in their respective workplaces to help shape future strategy.

In the “Closing Conversation” of BUSINESS EDUCA last year, delegates wanted to find a way to leverage the “brainpower” at the conference and create some new and tangible outcomes which will support them at work. In response to this need, this workshop is the start of a unique collaboration that all BUSINESS EDUCA delegates can be part of at ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2011.

Proposed Agenda

This half-day workshop leverages the Scenario Planning methodology adopted by Shell to help participants consider the external factors influencing Learning & Development in business in order to establish scenarios. External factors include:

  • technology playout – the impact of accelerated adoption
  • the effects of changing legal requirements
  • the influence of changing educational systems
  • the “Big Crew Change” – know-how that leaves with older staff while new staff arrives with different expectations

These factors are not exclusive and delegates will identify other external influences that are shaping our future. Industry facilitators will also provide additional perspectives and help identify challenges. Delegates should come with an open mind but expect disagreement and debate in order to allow for a rich range of outcomes.

We will have three blocks of approximately an hour:

  1. Key trends and uncertainties that will shape the future of corporate learning (in four groups)
  2. Drafting first set of scenarios based on uncertainties (in four groups)
  3. Summarise the key insights and discuss how we can leverage this during the rest of the conference (one group)

Target Audience

This workshop is specifically designed for all those directly involved in defining strategies for learning and development in the workplace. Senior learning and development executives from private, public and not-for-profit businesses are invited to network and work together. Seating for the workshop is limited.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Experience in, and responsibility for, defining learning and development strategy for business.

Outcomes

Participants can take the developed scenarios back to their own organisations, to look for signals which will help them prepare for the most appropriate future for their Learning & Development department.

The workshop also aims to expand the scenarios further into the main conference dialogue, allowing the contribution of BUSINESS EDUCA conference delegates to benefit the wider conference audience.

Finally, the resulting conference outcomes will be highlighted as part of the closing conversation of BUSINESS EDUCA.

So what did I learn at Online Educa 2010?

Photo by David Ausserhofer (CC licensed)
Photo by David Ausserhofer (CC licensed)

For the third year in row I attended the Online EDUCA in Berlin. This learning technology event is attended by more than 2000 people from over a hundred countries. The timing and the location of the event are ideal: it is a sweet train journey away from Amsterdam and the end of the year is good time for reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the next. This year’s snow definitely added to its charm!

This post has some of my chronological notes, reflections, vendor descriptions and random thoughts on the conference. My apologies for its length (check out my tweets about the event for a much shorter and more random summary).

STELLAR
My first stop of the conference was the STELLAR stand, among other things creators of the Teleurope website. Caroline Windrum wanted to get some input for her session later in the conference. She was looking for ideas on how to bridge the gap between academic research institutions and commercial businesses. What things could universities do and what could corporations do differently to make these partnerships more successful? I have written before on the gap that I perceive between the academic and the corporate world. One thing that I think universities could do is to “productize” more. Businesses want to buy finished products, they are not comfortable buying something that is still maturing. Many businesses do not want to be early adopter in areas that are not their core competence. If universities could make it easier for their young researchers (i.e. students) to start a business and start shipping products it would be helpful.

Opening plenary
The opening plenary session had three speakers. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, chairman of the UN Global Alliance, shared some of his thoughts on education (one of the eight Millenium Development Goals). He wanted us all to check out the MDG enabler, a “GPS” for development that will be launched halfway December. The GPS actually turned out to be an oft-used metaphor in the conference. Clark Quinn called the GPS an excellent example of mobile performance support and A New Spring prominently features a GPS in their marketing materials.

Next in line was Adrian Sannier from Pearson (a sponsored keynote). He is one of those speakers that shouts at his audience to try and convey his excitement. Luckily for us he did not cross the Steve Ballmer line. His opening question was whether we are disappointed in the future. Isn’t it shocking that after all these years of talking about it we still have not managed to fundamentally change education? According to Sannier, we now have three technological superpowers that should change the way we learn:

  • We are telepathic as we can instantly transmit our thoughts to other human beings at a distance,
  • we now all have photographic memories with perfect fidelity,
  • and we have total recall with access to all information everywhere.

These technologies will not change anything unless we have a corresponding change in culture. The “one instructor-one class paradigm” has not yet been broken. Sannier implored us to work toward three cultural changes (“the technology piece is over, it is all about the culture now”):

  • Turn education into a team sport. Can you imagine a television show being created by a single person? Why do we accept all these faculty members working completely individually?
  • Let’s start keeping score. Currently it is ok to look at the results of a student, but not of a faculty member.
  • Fix what is broken. We have been sensitive for many years, now it is time to get agressive.

Sannies speech ended with “Step forward and make the culture change, feel the love, thank you very much”. Although the message was quite simplistic in many ways, the emphasis on culture was something that came back again and again during the conference. More on that below (in the paragraph on Bersin).

The final speaker of the session was former Financial Times editor and consultant on innovation and strategy Charles Leadbeater. His talked was titled “Learning from the Extremes”. According to him the route to radical innovation is not starting at the best and then copying that. “Radical innovation usually comes from the margins: social entrepreneurs and the hardest to reach.” As your vantage point determines what you can see he decided to travel the world and go where the need is the greatest and the resources the least. There were three things he learned from his travels:

  • Everywhere he went people told him: education + technology = hope
  • Everywhere he went education was like a religion (there is global belief in education
  • All around the world everyone accepts that education is dysfunctional

So how can this be changed? There are two types of innovation (sustaining and disruptive) and two educational domains (formal and informal). They produce four ways forward:

Four ways to innovate
Four ways to innovate

It is relatively easy and essential to improve education, but it is not enough. We can also reinvent: there are many examples of new types of schools whose teaching philosophies can generally be summarised as “Learning with and by and not to and from”. One of the obstacles of this approach is that it is very important what happens outside of school too. This leads to a supplemental strategy where schools are working with communities and where social and emotional conditions for learning are also looked at. The most promising way to innovate is the transformation to entirely new ways (here Leadbeater mentions Mitra’s infamous hole in the wall experiment). The characteristics of these new ways are:

  • Pull not push
  • Motivation is key: extrinsic and intrinsic
  • Learning through… (not schools, but things like music)
  • Different people, technologies, places for learning

He then focused on the learning habitats of the future using another interesting conceptual model. The future can be high on systems or low on systems and these systems can have high empathy or low empathy. Some examples:

Empathy and systems
Empathy and systems

Highly systematic and higly empathetic are where we want to be, allowing us to finally deliver intimacy at scale.

Presentations 2Go
The lecture capturing outfit Presentations 2Go had a strong presence at the event. They demonstrated their next version of the software and provided a live-stream of the plenary sessions and many of the sessions in the business track. You can view the captured version of these talks here.

Tobbi eye tracking hard- and software
Tobii demo-ed their hard- and software solution for tracking people’s interactions with a screen through watching their eyes. In the past people had to have their face strapped into an immobile position for the hardware to determine where somebody was looking. Now this can be done completely dynamically. I sat in front of a screen which immediately picked up my eyes as two green dots. I closed my left eye and one dot was gone. After a calibration exercise I had to do a little test. Tobii’s software allows you to create tests with certain tasks (like looking at a webpage, or answering a question). The results of multiple test subjects can be aggregated to create heat map like overlays of where people looked at what microsecond.

This type of technology is hugely useful, but not often used in the educational world. Education is opinion-driven, not data-driven and that is a real shame. I would love for big IT projects to not only do “testing” against the business requirements, but also do UX testing with these types of technologies. The technology isn’t cheap: a simple 60Hz setup starts at around €25.000.

Social contextualization of content
Online EDUCA allows people to organize Special Interest Group (SIG) lunches. I was the host of one about the “Social Contextualisation of Content”. Recent developments like Facebook’s opening of the social graphs of their users and Amazon’s aggregated Kindle highlights have shown me very clearly that all our interactions with any type of content (books, magazines, videos and also learning content) will soon be augmented by a social layer. The first time I noticed the power of this idea was when I logged into Facebook while playing the Bejewelled iPhone game: suddenly I wasn’t trying to beat global highscores (how the hell can they score that 50 times as high as me), instead I was trying to beat my family and friends. In a world where Google will be gamed, what is more useful than knowing the thoughts of your friend and colleagues about products, ideas and information?

The lunch unfortunately did not really progress my ideas on this topic, but Olaf Dierker from the TeleLearn-Akademie did have some interesting examples of large US-based publishers who are creating social networks around course books. I’ll update this post with some URLs as soon as I get them from Olaf.

Improving business impact using mobile learning
This was a very full session. Mobile learning apparently is a topic that is on many people’s minds. First up was Erica Wadley from Microsoft. She was in a situation where there were endless amounts of 60-90 minute online courses that could only be accessed by turning on a corporate laptop, logging in, going to the Learning Management System, logging in again and searching for the course you need. Her audience was incredibly mobile and busy. They wanted access anywhere and anytime. She aligned her effort to go to a mobile solution with an internal effort to create a YouTube-like site for Microsoft. The videos from this site can be pushed to any mobile device.

Making this a successful change did require a big culture change (see, there it is again!). She branded her project strongly, did a lot of evangelising and educated people on how to create and use these materials. She created reward programs for usage of the system and found early adopters (“look for the bloggers”) who she equipped with a fourty dollar “podcasting in a box” kit. The results? 70% of the content is now built by the right people and she showed a very impressive graph with the uptake of mobile content consumption versus traditional elearning consumption. Proofing ROI therefore wasn’t a hard question.

One other idea I picked up from Erica was to have a newsletter that consists of nothing but pictures. A nice challenge that I might pick up whenever next I have send something out.

Adam Salkeld from Tinopolis talked about a mobile course his company had made teaching people some soft-skills around communication. They relied heavily on well produced and very funny videos (which ironically for a media production company didn’t play from his slides). He shared some of their lessons around the difficulties of trying to make it the same for every platform (in the end they dropped the Blackberry) and advised us to keep it simple when in doubt.

Clark Quinn, author of the forthcoming Designing mLearning book, gave a much more conceptual talk titled “Harnessing Magic, mLearning for Business Impact”. All mobile devices share the fact that they are a computing device that can have inputs, have output, are connected and have sensors. Mobile devices are accessed way more in a single day then traditional laptop or desktop computers, but have much shorter session times. When you pick up a device you are accessorizing your brain allowing the four C’s of mobile (content, compute, capture and communicate) to help you in your performance.

Battle of the bloggers
IBM’s Bert De Coutere, author of the fabulous Homo Competens book, kindly invited me as one of the three bloggers (Tom Wanbeke and John Traxler were the others) in this year’s “Battle of the Bloggers” session on the graveyard of learning. His goal was to answer the following question: What are the concepts, theories, best practices or trends in the land of the learning that we will declare dead and send to the heaven or hell they belong in? The voting technology of Shakespeak (a possible interesting alternative to PollEverywhere for interactive real-time audience voting and response) allowed the “Just don’t get the microphone near my face” OEB audience to participate in the discussion.

I think the session was more entertaining than insightful (the three bloggers were probably too like-minded), but we still got very positive responses afterwards. In about an hour we talked about Podcasting for Learning (alive), Mobile Learning Content (alive, with some provisos), Learning Styles (dead), Diplomas and Certification (very much alive) and ADDIE (most of the audience had never heard about this: dead).

Business plenary
Josh Bersin talked about what he calls a “High-Impact Learning Culture”, which according to him is the next “big thing” in corporate training.

First let me state that I have love-hate relationship with companies like Bersin. Many large corporations look to analysts like this for guidance in their decision making processes. They presumably to this to beat their competition. I have a common sense approach to this: if you want to do something better than other companies, you will have to do something different than other companies. By virtue of all companies listening to  the same analysts, the analysts have a homogenizing effect. Reading Bersin reports will therefore not drive your innovation. Bersin’s Enterprise Learning and Talent Management 2011: Predictions for the Coming Year – Building the Borderless Workplace is a good example. The ten predictions in there (e.g. “Innovation, Empowerment and Learning Culture Will Become Common Themes for Talent Management and Business Growth”, “Informal and Contineous Learning Will Continue to Transform Corporate L&D, and Will Drive Further Adoption of Internal Social Networking” or “Companies Will Start to Unravel and Replace Their 20-Plus Years of Investment in HRMS Systems – And Evolve to SaaS and More Modern Systems for Core HR Management”) are all very likely to occur in the next year, but the predictions itself should not be underestimated as part of the cause for them becoming the truth. Analysis will show good practice and maybe best practice, but it will not show you next practice (thank you Jay Cross for that last one).

That said, Josh Bersin did deliver a very interesting and engaging talk. He started with the current big focus on innovation as a consequence of the downsizing of the last year or so (my current role is probably a consequence of that) and the real struggle to hire talent while most companies are suffering from the aging of their workforce. He used Chevron as an example: 40% of their workforce have been with the company for more than 25 years and senior production engineers take 5-7 years before they are fully skilled up. How do we bridge that gap?

According to Bersin skill specilization is now driving value. High performing organizations realize they have to have specialists. Accenture for example has a hard time to continue their expansive business model. It is not good enough anymore to train their relatively smart generalists with some business skills and put them to work at a client. Customers now expect to procure world class experts.

He then went on to share an insightful result from his research: development planning is one of the key indicators for good performance (using median revenue per employee as a performance indicator). Real learning and developing is informal. If you ask people how they learned to do their job their answer is always something informal. Bersin sees this as an opportunity for the renaissance of the learning and development profession.

Is it important for organizations to have a true learning culture. Learning culture is the collective set of organizational values, processes and practices that encourages individuals and the organization to contineously increase knowledge, competence and performance. The Bersin team brainstormed and got to 40 practices that are manifestions of culture and correlated these with eight business performance indicators to get some very interesting results. The 40 practices are divided into six “families” of cultural practice:

  • Building trust (it is important for people to be able to share what doesn’t work, “knowledge can be shared without political risk”)
  • Demonstrating value of learning (you will always find people that are passionate about developing themselves, you have to honour and value that)
  • Knowledge sharing (traditional instructional design is too slow for many things)
  • Empowering employees (people need to have control over their jobs, autonomy, Microsoft is suffering from these problems currently: people are really confused as to how decisions are made)
  • Learning as a process
  • Encouraging reflection (giving people time to think about what they have learned)

The five practices with the highest impact are:

  • Leaders are open to “bad news”.
  • Asking questions is encouraged.
  • Decision-making processes are clearly defined throughout the company.
  • Employees are frequently given tasks or projects beyond their current knowledge or skill level in order to stretch them developmentally.
  • Employees have influence over which job tasks are assigned to them.

The bottom line of the research is that innovation and business success depend heavily on a learning culture. This culture can be built taking the following into account:

  • New roles and skills for Learning & Development (content manager, community manager, connection manager, performance consultant)
  • New reward and policy systems (promoting and rewarding knowledge sharing)
  • Leadership is critical to success (of the 40 practices 33 are owned by line management and senior leadership, only 7 are in the hands of the L&D organization).

I would love to get my hands on this research and study the research methodology. If this is indeed solid, then it should be a huge driver for the ambition to change.

Balancing individual and organization learning
This session was a bit disappointing to me. It was very traditional in its form and the chair did his utmost best to turn it into an ELIG commercial. Some choice quotes:

Paul Hunter told us that individuals are members of various communities both in an out of “work”. Your organisation is a collection of communities. Learning happens in communities across boundaries. Learning happens through individuals bringing their outside community in.

Bersin spoke again about the impending retirement of older workers and senior executives and how this is still a really big problem for companies. He sees an opportunity for stronger alumni networks: allowing people to scale down while still being involved.

Martti Raevaara is Vice President of the Aalto University: where science and art meet technology and business. This is an innovation university built in 3 years. They don’t compete with their salaries, but with an inspiring environment. All curricula must be based on future scenarios and competencies with enough flexibility for new studies.

Carin Martell from Exact Learning Solutions was there “to increase the diversity aspect of the panel” (which I thought was an insensitive and unnecessary statement). Her talk was very much focused on the tool that she was there to promote, but she had one brilliant example that caught my eye: the Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. This hospital has no waiting lists and treats over 500.000 “healthcare tourists” each year. They can only do this by staying at the forefront of medical science. Do yourself a favour and look at their pricelists to realise that we are doing something wrong somewhere.

Working smarter with learning networks
The Internet Time Alliance hosted this session in which they could share their ideas about “working smarter”. For me it is interesting to track the way that their thinking has evolved since last year. Jay Cross does not talk about “learnscapes” anymore, he now calls it “workscapes”. Charles Jennings talks about “real learning” to battle the “conspiracy of convenience”. Harold Jarche links where and how work will be done to the Cynefin framework: anything that is simple is being automated, if the work is complicated the work will be pushed to countries with low labour cost (remember the hospital?). Complex work requires creativity, passion, specialisation and is what we need to start focusing on (this aligns with what Josh Bersin was saying).

Jay Cross then made a very good point: we need to stop judging technology without giving it a try. You cannot have a sensible opinion about something that you haven’t experienced. As an innovation manager that is something that I am convinced of too.

Another interesting concept that I picked up in the session was the “social media cigarette break”. Many organizations don’t allow people access to tools like Facebook and Twitter, cutting people off from their valuable networks. This forces people to take a break from their corporate PC’s and use Twitter on their smartphone in the toilet if they want to find out something quick using their social network. An absurd situation.

At the end of the session I had an interesting chat with Clark Quinn who is a former student of Donald Norman (one of my heroes). We talked about the appaling state of design understanding in the learning function and I shared my feeling that we don’t do enough engineering of the environment of the employee to get the behaviours we want. When we want to change how somebody does their job, we always try to intervene at the level of the individual, rather than in their environment.

Winner of the best learning game
Through Twitter (I wasn’t in the session) I learned that the winner of the best learning game award was Enercities. I have put it on my list of things to look at and might report on it in the near future.

The importance of decent wifi
The Internet connection during the event wasn’t optimal. There were many moments where the wireless connection just wasn’t working for me. I really felt dismembered at those times. How was I to enhance and contexualize the information I was hearing? I cannot be the only one who expects a flawless connection when they come to a conference and I do hope that ICWE will manage to get this sorted next year.

Conclusion
All in all this event has shown that it is worthwile coming back year after year. There is no other way to get connected to as many new ideas and people in such a short time. Where else would one meet the former world champion in Pooh Sticks?

Online Educa Berlin 2008: Language

Jay Cross
Jay Cross

Language is still our prime tool for learning. I find language a fascinating subject and noticed a couple of things about language during the Online Educa.

First, Jay Cross. He was a panelist during the Battle of the Bloggers session. One topic they discussed was the financial crisis and how it could affect our profession. Jay said that if you are currently a Director of Training it would probably be smart to change your job title to something like Director of Sales Readiness (“we can’t let the director of sales readiness go…”). I think he is right. Language changes perception and a change in how you call something can significantly alter people’s behaviour. This is also the reason why I don’t like to use the Dutch word “allochtoon“: I think it has an unnecessary connotation of exclusiveness and us versus them.

Jay was very insightful about the other topics too, so I decided to go to the front desk an buy his book Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. I like how he consciously has put “performance” in the title of his book. That way he instantly disarms any suggestion that informal learning is just a pet topic for educational scientists. Instead, it directly addresses the issue that is central in the corporate world: “executives don’t want learning; they want execution. They want the job done. They want performance.”

The ability to adapt your language to the language of the client is one of the skills that any good consultant should have. Ton Zijlstra had an interesting take on this. We met at an Edublog dinner and one of the things we talked about was how he uses del.icio.us to find people who bookmark the same sites as he does, but who do this using different tags. If they use different tags for the same concepts it means they are in a different community or network. That is interesting, because they could be starting point for a whole set of new connections.

Online Educa Berlin 2008: Day 1

Norbert Bolz
Norbert Bolz

I am the Online Educa with Stoas for a commercial purpose: we have a stand with four European Moodle partners and are trying to talk to as many people as possible about Moodle

This means that I have not had the opportunity to really go to any of the sessions. I did manage to go to the keynotes of the first day though, so I would like to write down some of the things that I have noticed there.

Just like Wilfred Rubens I had really looked forward to hear Michael Wesch speak. I should have known that I would have been disappointed. This had nothing to do with Wesch, who is an insightful and entertaining speaker, but with the fact that I already know what he does. He focused on the lowest common denominator in the audience and that wasn’t me.

I guess you could say that he suffered from the exact problem that he is trying to solve in his educational practice: how do you stay significant when you stand in front of an audience in a design built for non-participation. The title of his talk “The Crisis of Significance and the Future of Education” is highly relevant. I thought it was unfortunate that he only focused on the first part of his title and did not talk about recent educational projects like his World Simulation Project.

One slight disappointment was followed by a very pleasant surprise. The Berlin based media scholar Norbert Bolz gave a slide-less talk titled “From Knowledge Management to Identity Management”. This talk was highly conceptual and sociological (if not philosophical).

He talked about five Internet related phenomena and what kind of effects these are having on society:

  • Serious play or the “paradise of work”. Bolz thinks there will be less of a difference between work and private time. Successful people will be absorbed in their work. The software tools that we buy are also toys. We should learn how to play with these tools (just like with toys) to use them effectively. Younger people are naturally the avant garde of this development.
  • Self design, also known as branding yourself. Personal brands are humans who have learned how to catch people’s attention. He described a progression from broadcasting to narrowcasting to echocasting and considers Youtube to be a prime example.
  • Identity management has to do with social wealth. He thinks we are living in the age of reputation and recommendation.
  • Attention management is about the interrelation between ignorance and trust. To know more is to also know less. All our options are disproportionate to our available time resources. Attention should be considered a naturally scarce resource. There is huge battle for this resource in trying to grab our attention.
  • Linking value is the most surplus value add in this century. This is because of the logic of networks. Bolz referred to Granovetter’s “ground breaking essay” The Strength of Weak Ties. Old social networks have strong ties, whereas the current social network have weak ties (e.g. a Facebook users with 2600 “friends”) . Networks with weak ties are more information rich while the information flow between strong ties is very small (he gave the example of how lover’s communicate).

All of these are topics which invite more exploration. I am looking forward to doing that over the next couple of weeks and will start with Granovetter’s essay.

Tomorrow is another day. I am hoping to see another keynote session and go to the Battle of the Bloggers (with Jay Cross, Wilfred Rubens and Stephen Warburton; looking forward to the strong language!).

Online Educa’s Platinum Sponsor Fronter is a Closed Source Proprietary Product

The most Deceptive Sign in LA
The most Deceptive Sign in LA

Warning, this is a bit of a rant…

I hate false advertising. That is why I was delighted to read that Apple had to pull an iPhone ad recently (see: What the banned iPhone ad should really look like).

I am currently at the Online Educa in Berlin where Fronter is the Platinum sponsor. I found their brochure in the conference bag and was appalled by what I read.

Fronter has decided to adopt the discourse of open source software without actually delivering an open source product. Recently, this has been a strategy for many companies who produce proprietary software and are losing market share to open source products. This is the first time that I have seen it done in such a blatant way though.

Some quotes from their brochure:

The essence of Fronter’s Open Philosophy is to give learning institutions the benefit of an open source and open standard learning platform – while at the same time issuing guarantees for security, reliability and scalability, all included in a predictable fixed cost of ownership package.

And:

Fronter’s Open Platform philosophy combines the best of two worlds; innovation based on open source, with guarantees and fixed cost of ownership issued by a corporation.

Finally:

Open source: The Fronter source code is available to all licensed customers.
Open guarantee: In contrast to traditional open source products, Fronter offers tight service level agreements, quality control and a zero-bug regime.

I am sure the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) would not appreciate these untruths. So let us do some debunking.

The term open source actually has a definition. The Open Source Definition starts with the following statement: “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.” It then continues by listing the ten conditions that need to be met before a software license can call itself open source. Many of these conditions are not met by Fronter (e.g. free distribution, allowing distribution of the source code or allowing derived works).

These conditions exist for a reason. Together they facilitate the community based software development model which has proven itself to be so effective (read: The Cathedral and the Bazaar if you want to know more). Just giving your licensees access to the source code, does not leverage this “many eyeballs” potential.

I really dislike how they pretend that open source products cannot have proper service level agreements or quality control.SLA’s and QA is exactly what European Moodle partners like eLeDia, CV&A Consulting, MediaTouch 2000 srl and my employer Stoas (all present at this Educa) have been delivering in the last couple of years.

What is a “zero-bug regime” anyway? Does it mean that your customers cannot know any of the bugs in your software? Or is Fronter the only commercially available software product in the world that has no bugs? I much prefer the completely transparent way of dealing with bugs that Moodle has.

Fronter people, please come and meet me at the Moodle Solutions stand (E147 and E148). I would love to hear you tell me how wrong I am.