Another week, another conference. This time I’m in San Jose, CA at DevLearn2007. My expressed purpose in being here is simply this: I want to understand the innovative technologies available in eLearning. What better place than a conference in Silicon Valley, right? So, three days from now, I hope to have shared some interesting new approaches with you.
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Back at it this afternoon… (quotes are loose)
- John Howley, legal expertise
- “Tell your lawyer what you need from them.” This is the great incentive to get your lawyer up to speed on the things you require.
- We have developed in the common law tradition, in which judges were driving law creation based on existing law. Recent developments have pushed us away from that toward legislation only. Interesting… everything I hear today asks that judges not legislate. Is it inherently bad?
- “Get away from the lawyer as risk avoider.”
- Scott McPherson, CIO for Florida’s Legislature and Florida’s Pandemic Coordinator
- A pandemic is a novel virus, to which humans have no immunity
- A pandemic requires sustained human to human transmission
- He gives some compelling reasons to fear a pandemic
- The first risk he mentions is that we haven’t had a pandemic in so long
- I acknowledge that this has little to do with learning, and less to do with SCORM, but I’m fascinated, so you get it here.
- From Eisenhower, “The plan is useless, it’s the planning that’s important.”
- Wayne Hodgins
- Here comes the relevance… Wayne is going to talk about the future for SCORM and LETSI.
- Adoption exceeds expectations dramatically
- The commonality of the problems people encounter is surprisingly high
- Learning Education and Training Systems Interoperability (LETSI) is a federation of organizations loosely coupled to shepherd SCORM forward
- Elliott would love…
- An open standard API that allowed for plugging things together… Editor’s Note: This is a great idea, but incredibly difficult. In this case, the devil is absolutely in the details. But, it’s a great place to start.
- Could you maintain your learning profile on a thumbdrive?
- What should we expect?
- Q1: LETSI becomes a formal organization
- How do we prioritize the needs?
- Announcing: The Global Learning Expedition
- Wayne is going south from San Francisco in a boat… literally
- More or less, this a focus for Elliott and Wayne on global learning
Well, the relevance level came up slightly. Stream of consciousness blogging is what it is…
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Session 646 was titled “What if Amazon and Google Partnered to Build an LMS?” Good thought, and something we’re thinking about all the time. Google and Amazon are doing some things really well, and we’d love piggy back on many of those concepts.
Thoughts from the group (and these aren’t new to us):
- iGoogle as personalizable, “LMS” homepage
- Context aware content suggestions/recommendations for learners
- Profiles. How can we establish a profile on an individual and use that effectively.
- Commission based virtual classroom. Editor’s Note: This one really resonates for me. Democratization of content production and offering is fascinating to me. I want a brilliant content producer (like Jenny Zhu of ChinesePod) to be able to deliver content to people directly.
- How do you incent learners to take the content?
- Tie all of this into “communities of practice”
- Access to a system of mentors, or an SME network?
- Amazon/Google are trustworthy, innovative, easy to use. LMS’s fail in this regard today.
- Usage statistics on the content itself… which pieces of content are useful and used.
- A suggestion to check out Epic 2014
- They want to stop thinking about SCORM and AICC (I know someone who can help with this…)
So, the most interesting thoughts and questions to me…
- The best analogy I heard for a training department of the future was that of the “newsroom”. Newsrooms are looking at all the stories, structuring them, validating them… Training departments need to be doing the same things.
- How big does an organization have to be in order to make use of “the wisdom of the crowds” for creation of content? Can a 500 person company effectively generate content at the bottom levels and then confirm its validity? Can we please open up LMS’s and centralize them like Google and Amazon so that usage data and information has a massive audience?
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Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) talked this morning, and spoke on his vision of the future. This is a guy with tremendous credibility in predicting the future. The most interesting thing he shared (to me) was this:
Technology, to kids, is like air. It’s just there.
I’m pretty comfortable with technology, but it did occur to me, perhaps for the first time, that those who are coming behind me are more comfortable with it than I am. I think I like that.
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Yup, I skipped my 200 level session for the blog… it was basically more of the same from my 100 session.
So, Session 320::Rapid Online Prototyping. (The link is the wiki page from the conference… pretty cool stuff.)
Richard Culatta led the session, demonstrating how freely available tools could be used to create content iteratively and quickly. This is a concept near and dear to my heart. Blogs are one of many tools that I believe can be aggregated to create great learning content. I’m fascinated by the tools of the web as well (youtube, flickr, etc).
Richard used several free tools (Thinkature, Fauxto, etc) to similar effect. Here’s the problem:
The process is disjointed. I can grasp the leap between the tools, figure how they fit together. But it’s not immediately apparent. In the course of the session, it was obvious that the tools are not entirely ready, and they certainly aren’t tightly integrated. How do you put it together elegantly? How do you best aggregate these tools?
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