The E-learning Curve at Edublogs

I use the fantastic StatCounter.com Website and Blog Analytics service to measure my Elearning Curve Blog’s metrics; this is not just because they’re an Irish company, but also because they provide very comprehensive and granular logs and metrics.

Among other things it allows me to review are such statistics as

• site usage
• page loads
• popularity of site by location (for an English-language site, I’ve an unusually large group of readers in Brazil, for example: Olá! Como vai?)
• location of subscribers (hello also to my most northerly reader in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada)

and so forth.

According to my “Most popular keyword” reports, a very common query is “e-learning companies ireland.” A recent Silicon Republic report states that there are over sixty such organizations based in Ireland, but from my researches no directory of these companies is available online.

Now, we all know about Skillsoft, WBT Systems, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Electric Paper, Intuition, and so forth, but who else is out there?

I (and seemingly quite a few other people in the blogosphere) would like to know.

So, if you send me your company details via the Comments link at the bottom of this post (name, URL, location, market space etc), I’ll put them together in an easily accessible online directory, not for any other reason than nobody seems to have undertaken this activity before - that I’m aware of, anyway.

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And Lo! it came to pass that a friend of mine who would describe herself as a training practitioner based out of Hartford, CT. found herself bereft of employment, for the economic downturn that is called Recession was cast upon the land, and the days were dark.

Straitly was she in need of employment, forasmuch as without an income, the door of her house would be riven and the walls of her home would fall down flat, and the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they would take from the treasury of the house.

And it came to be that by the power of the mighty word processor and the e-mail, posted she her résumé unto many an organization, including unto those that call themselves Financial Institutions.

And so it was that with mighty trumpets the Tribe of Human Resources responded to her. And they declared unto her that without a special power called “financial experience” she was as a beggar cast into the night, and they smote her down into the good earth with the jawbone of the Ox .

And she was afraid.

And so it was that she said this tale unto me, and she beseeched unto me “What is this Financial Experience in Fund Management that they speak of?”

And I said unto her:

“Verily, fear not these Children of the Almighty Dollar!

For it has come to pass that they are responsible for many a woe among the people, including the fearsome Enron Scandal, and the lending of the silver and the gold in the Sub-Prime Sector, and the Dealing upon the Inside, and the Credit Crunch, and Bear Stearns and Northern Rock shall be as naught. The chiefs of the tribes of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup will rightly fall upon their swords, and they will be mocked when they speak of Golden Parachutes, for they spoke not of fiscal rectitude, and the Walls of The Street did tremble.

There will be the taking away of the honey and the wheat and the barley, and the oxen, and the axe and the plough that is called Repossession. For they that giveth, also they taketh away.

Believe ye in the power of Education and Technology, and the Learning that is called ‘E’!

For in days to come, the Children of the Almighty Dollar will see that they too are mere knowledge workers, unto like all others in different sectors of the economy.

I say unto thee, they will cry across the land:

“Oh woe are we who were blind! We could not see that learning and development skills are cross-discipline! And frankly we could have done with a bit of expertise from outside the narrow confines of the financial world! We thought ourselves as blessèd among ordinary knowledge workers, with skills in software and pharmaceuticals and such.

Oh! Vanity! Pride! In our ignorance of the meaning of the global economy we have been led astray from the path of righteousness!”

For during the Boom Years they did utter nonsense and PR, and the diviners they call stockbrokers saw lies; the analysts told false dreams, and gave empty consolation.

Therefore the People of Finance wander like sheep; they are afflicted for want of a shepherd. Go unto them with thine expertise in workplace learning and say unto them “WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE SHALL BE THE STABILITY OF THY TIMES!”

And nail ye them to the wall with high Per Diem consultancy rates, for revenge is sweet.

Here Endeth The Lesson.

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Today’s post is really a (very) mini case study in the power of integrated corporate social networks, the benefits of long tails in learning, and the strength of weak social ties.

Now read on…

If you’re not familiar with the latter two concepts here’s a little background: the idea of the strength of weak ties is a theory from sociology; according to its originator Mark Granovetter

the argument asserts that our acquaintances (weak ties) are less likely to be socially involved with one another than are our close friends (strong ties). Thus the set of people made up of any individual and his or her acquaintances comprises a low-density network (one in which many of the possible relational lines are absent) whereas the set consisting of the same individual and his or her close friends will be densely knit (many of the possible lines are present).

It follows, then, that individuals with few weak ties will be deprived of information from distant parts of the social system and will be confined to the provincial news and views of their close friends. This deprivation will [...] insulate them from the latest ideas.

(1983, pp.201-202)

The concept of the long tail is something both Jay Cross and Tony Karrer have recently discussed and is example of how the Web (and particularly Web 2.0 technology) changes the way assets - whether physical artifacts like books, or knowledge and informational assets persist for an extended period beyond their supposed “sell-by” date:

Long tails for the enterprise occur when the power to create and publish is widely held, the content can be distributed at near-zero cost and a market exists that connects knowledge workers with a nearly infinite number of content creators.

(Kilian, D. 2007)

Here’s a pertinent example of how these ideas manifest themselves in the workplace: last week, I suffered from a niggly problem with my Outlook e-mail client - it wouldn’t poll the Exchange server and update itself every 20 minutes as it was supposed to do. So I logged a snag on the corporate Bugzilla implementation about the issue. The IT person, who I would describe as being a a journeyman level of competence (has passed their certification exams and is no longer a novice, but is not yet an expert) wen though all the things your supposed to do to resolve such issues

• ran ScanPST.exe
• checked my e-mail profile
• consulted MSDN
• looked at forums for similar issues based on the Error ID

… as well as some “beyond the call of duty” activities (a time-consuming MS Office reinstall).

All to no avail.

So I got my laptop back and had resolved myself to living with this seemingly intractable minor inconvenience, when a third contributor (a more knowledgeable IT support person), working from home, happened to encounter the issue when scanning through Bugzilla, entered the discussion with a simple “I know what this is.”

So, by accessing my laptop via a PC-sharing application, the issue was resolved in about 20 minutes, after 5 days of dead ends and frustration.

The moral of the story is: by developing a corporate culture that encourages wide-ranging participation, and by providing a corporate knowledge-sharing environment (Bugzilla in this case), you increase the chances that somebody you’re associated with, no matter how loosely, will have the appropriate knowledge and expertise to find a solution to an issue. The added learning benefit from the journeyman contributors perspective, is that they have added to their knowledge experientially, by interacting with the More Knowledgeable Other. I would suggest that the knowledge asset acquired by being involved in this problem-solving activity has been aggregated into their personal experience schema, enabling them to grow a little more knowledgeable (or even wiser).

Oh yes… the solution?

Delte and recreate your profile in Outlook.

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References:

Cross, J. (2008) Strength of weak knowledge sources. [Internet] Available from: http://internettime.com/2008/04/21/strength-of-weak-knowledge-sources/ Accessed 1 July 2008

Granovetter, M. (1983) The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. Sociological Theory, Volume 1, 201-233. State University of New York,
Stonybrook. [Internet] Available from: http://www.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/SI110/readings/In_Out_and_Beyond/Granovetter.pdf Accessed 1 July 2008

Karrer, T. (2008) Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis : eLearning Technology. [Internet] Available from: http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2008/02/corporate-learning-long-tail-and.html Accessed 1 July 2008

Kilian, D. (2007) The Learning Organization Meets the Long Tail (Part 2). [Internet] Available from:
http://www.clomedia.com/guest-editorial/2007/October/1949/index.php Accessed 1 July 2008

Not so much a post about e-learning today, but more about how Web 2.0 technology is being used to share information in the most extreme environments and circumstances.

If you’re a regular reader of the E-Learning Curve Blog, you’ll know that I include archaeology and the study of ancient cultures among my personal interests. Recently I posted on the 2008 Stonehenge dig, and today I’d like to talk about the return voyage of the Viking longship Havhingsten fra Glendalough (Sea Stallion from Glendalough) from Dublin, Ireland to Roskilde, Denmark.

The Sea Stallion is a Danish reconstruction of Skuldelev 2, one of the Skuldelev ships. According to tree ring dating, the original ship was built near Dublin circa 1042.

The original ship was built with oak from Glendalough, Wicklow, Ireland, hence the ship’s name. The reconstruction was built at the shipyard of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde from 2000 to 2004.

In the Summer of 2007, the longship made the voyage from Denmark to Dublin - a journey of exceptional endurance on the part of the boat and the crew, and fraught with a certain amount of danger, given the lousy weather we had in Northern Europe last year.

If you saw these lads coming 1,000 years ago, it was time to pack up and leave… quick!

After wintering in the Collins’ Barracks site of the National Museum of Ireland, the Sea Stallion is due to set sail for for her home port today.

Thanks to Web 2.0 information sharing tools and technology, you (and I) can share the journey with the crew via their daily blog and video podcasts, play a Viking Attack game, as well as follow the voyage via Google Maps live GPS tracking as the boat and her crew as they make their journey back across the North Sea to Denmark.

Bon voyage…

…it just goes to show you where a mis-typed URL can land you: I was on my way over to the Xyleme Learning Pulse blog - I quite like The Blunted Edge opinion pieces there - when I accidentally dropped an extraneous “e” in front of “Learning” (finger memory I guess?).

Anyhoo, I was promptly directed to The eLearning Pulse Blog “Your daily source for all things eLearning.” As the two primary contributors Ben Edwards & B.J. Schone there say themselves:

eLearningPulse is an independent online community focused on serving eLearning developers, from instructional designers to software developers to project managers.

This site provides free resources to the eLearning development community, including news, discussion forums, job postings, and more. We realized that there wasn’t a great place to rely on for this type of information in the eLearning field, so we built it ourselves.

eLearningPulse is free. We display eLearning-related ads on the site to pay our hosting fees. We may add features down the road that cost (like webinars, training), but for now everything is free.

While the blog has Forums, Videos, and other functions, of great use to me is the News feature: the eLearning Pulse aggregates e-learning news form abroad range of sources - just enough to allow you to skim headlines and straplines, much as you would with your Google Reader, Bloglines and so on.

So check out the eLearning Pulse.

…Check out both sites actually.

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After yesterday’s short digression into some of the finer points of heuristic evaluation, today I’m returning to the matter at hand: an assessment of the features and functionality provided by the authorSTREAM and SlideShare hosted presentation distribution services.

Now read on…

authorSTREAM is a web-based PowerPoint presentation sharing platform from authorGEN Technologies. After creating a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, content creators can upload presentations to the authorSTREAM website. During the upload process the content is converted Adobe to Flash SWF format displayed via the Flash player. Content creators can use the provided HTML code to embed the presentation in a blog or website, as well to share the presentation via e-mail, and submit the content to YouTube. authorSTREAM also enables users to share their presentations via mobile devices that support MV4 playback such as the Apple iPod or iPhone.

Slideshare supports a range of import file types, including PowerPoint PPT, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF format. Broadly speaking, we can say that the SlideShare upload process shares many characteristics with other Web 2.0 tools, and is in fact very similar to the authorSTREAM submission procedure. Generally speaking, once a file is uploaded and converted to SWF, it is publicly available.

The content creators can choose to make the slide show available to be downloaded. Interestingly for a service provided by a for-profit organization Slideshare is linked with Creative Commons, so various attribution licenses are supported (click here for more thoughts on Open Source Software). As with other hosted Web 2.0 services (including YouTube), a presentation can be viewed in the small screen or take the full screen of a monitor.

Table <!–[if supportFields]> SEQ Table \* ARABIC <![endif]–>1<!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–> authorSTREAM & SlideShare Feature Comparison

General Observations: Content Authoring

authorGEN provide authorPOINT Lite, an advanced multimedia presentation creation software utility, which installs in PowerPoint and offers a host of features for power users. Presenters can upload presentations directly from within PowerPoint with this add-on software.

authorPOINT is an advanced multimedia presentation creation software, which installs in PowerPoint as an add-in and provides a range of features for power users. Presenters can upload presentations directly from within PowerPoint with this utility. SlideShare does not offer any offline desktop utility to support the website service.

General Observations: Audio
authorSTREAM handles voice-over audio in presentations very well. Audio is retained in narrated PowerPoint presentations when uploaded to authorSTREAM. Authors can also create audio presentations using either live or pre-recorded audio as a media type via authorPOINT, before uploading to authorSTREAM.
SlideShare on the other hand, has a “slidecast” feature where the content author synchronizes a pre-recorded audio file online following upload to the server.

authorSTREAM’s offline desktop application is a very flexible feature - potentially very useful for e-learning content, in my view.

General Observations: Content Distribution

One very usable feature of SlideShare is it facility to enable extended distribution of content outside of it’s native hosting environment. By clicking on the <embed> button on the UI, both an author and any other user can either share the presentation via any one of a range of social networking services (see the screenshot for some examples) as well as provide the source code to enable the presentation to be embedded in a blog or web page, very similar to YouTube’s functionality. A case could definitely be made that this type of portability will support the creation of Internet memes in environments where YouTube is not appropriate (due to bandwidth issues, for example).

Conclusions

So which service is better? Well, I guess that comes down to WIIFM - what’s in it for me. The broad sweep of features and functionality are pretty similar on both services: deficiencies in one are accommodated by lack of functionality in the other, so it really comes down to personal choice.

My user experience of authorSTREAM was slightly superior to that of SlideShare: upload and conversion times were lower on the former service, for example. Equally, the enhanced slide animation and transition support on authorSTREAM was a positive advantage, as was the ability to view presentations in full-screen mode via a third party environment (my blog in this case). I also prefer the extended functionality afforded by the desktop-based client client, as well as the better audio integration.

In the end… well, I recommend that you try both out yourself, and you decide which service meets your needs.

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After yesterday’s short digression into some of the finer points of heuristic evaluation, today I’m returning to the matter at hand: an assessment of the features and functionality provided by the authorSTREAM and SlideShare hosted presentation distribution services.

Now read on…

authorSTREAM is a web-based PowerPoint presentation sharing platform from authorGEN Technologies. After creating a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, content creators can upload presentations to the authorSTREAM website. During the upload process the content is converted Adobe to Flash SWF format displayed via the Flash player. Content creators can use the provided HTML code to embed the presentation in a blog or website, as well to share the presentation via e-mail, and submit the content to YouTube. authorSTREAM also enables users to share their presentations via mobile devices that support MV4 playback such as the Apple iPod or iPhone.

Slideshare supports a range of import file types, including PowerPoint PPT, OpenOffice.org Impress, and PDF format. Broadly speaking, we can say that the SlideShare upload process shares many characteristics with other Web 2.0 tools, and is in fact very similar to the authorSTREAM submission procedure. Generally speaking, once a file is uploaded and converted to SWF, it is publicly available.

The content creators can choose to make the slide show available to be downloaded. Interestingly for a service provided by a for-profit organization Slideshare is linked with Creative Commons, so various attribution licenses are supported (click here for more thoughts on Open Source Software). In addition, these presentations can be retrieved at any computer without need for USB drives or other storage devices. In other words, presentations in Slideshare can be held before a conference for the presenters use and then reviewed afterwards by guests. Like YouTube, a presentation can be viewed in the small screen or take the full screen of a monitor.

Table