Well, my doctoral comprehensive exams are finally over, (just waiting for word on whether I passed), and it is time to start writing again. Things continue to be busy, but I have enjoyed writing these articles and I find that they ground me as I continue to discover new ideas and technologies related to learning. So I plan to get back into the routine of publishing at least once a week. There is so much happening right now in the field of educational technology, that it shouldn't be too hard to do.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to share information as well as to serve as a sort of a journal for me to document software and technologies that I believe have potential to aid learning down the road. So today I want to write a little bit about a nice web-based application that my team at Northern Arizona University has used for several years as its internal knowledge base. The software is called KBPublisher and I think it is worth mentioning here because of its characteristics that can support online learning in several ways: as a knowledge base, FAQ, or online manual/book.

My team looked at several knowledge base applications before settling on KBPublisher. In fact, I once considered switching my team to SharePoint due to organizational policies and forced them to try SharePoint for a while. But after a few days, I had an open mutiny on my hands with my team begging to return to KBPublisher. It is intuitive, powerful, and users can quickly master its basic features. It is easy for content developers and end users to manage as well as to search. KBPublisher has a powerful search tool that makes it easy to find information, especially when keywords and cross referencing have been used correctly. In addition to search capabilities, articles can be grouped by categories and subcategories. The front page of KBPublisher allows users to easily drill down to the area they need, making it a great tool for feeding information to non-technical end users. Another great feature from a learning perspective is that visitors can be given permissions to comment on articles and engage in other social media/social learning activities. Finally workflows for creating documents can be enforced and permissions can be assigned to articles to determine who can view them.

On the administrative side, KBPublisher couldn’t be easier to use. It is not hard to install. It uses PHP and MySQL as the database. It allows you to assign permissions by individual, company and role. There are several reports available for monitoring use and feedback. Articles are easy to create and update, as well as to publish and unpublish. You can tell how many views an article has had, how many comments it has had, and even set up a rating system to monitor the popularity or usefulness of the information you are providing. KBPublisher also has a glossary feature which can also be easily added to and worked with from the administration view. Modifying the look and feel of both KBPublisher and the article formatting is very straightforward for anyone with a reasonable amount of web development experience. KBPublisher provides a template feature as well so that the look and feel of articles can be modified and standardized in an organization.

If you are working in a team environment, especially a distributed team environment, and need a way to record important team knowledge or need a way to easily get information out to your end users, then KBPublisher is definitely worth checking out. I recommend it highly. Learn more at http://www.kbpublisher.com

I'm not deluded that I'm writing for a large audience. In fact, I write this blog more for my own reflection and learning than anything else. But in case anyone does stumble across this page or for some unknown reason has been actually following me all along, the lack of articles recently is due to the fact that I am preparing for my doctoral comprehensive exams. If all turns out well at the end of January, I will try to return to a schedule of publishing something at least once a week.

I listened to the Diane Rehm Show this morning and her guest was Robert Darnton: author, librarian at Harvard, and founder of the Gutenberg-e program. During the interview, a caller claimed that more vinyl records were being produced than there were ten years ago. Darnton replied that this illustrated the principle that one medium does not replace another. The point of the caller was that even though digital books and articles are obviously the future, this doesn't necessarily mean the death of the book. I hope this is so. I love my Kindle and downloadable PDFs for research, but I equally love the hundreds of books on the shelves in my study.

I'm not quite sure that the examples are as comparable as we might think, however. I think the rise in interest for vinyl might just be a temporary nostalgia for the past. After all, it is not really back to basics for music, as you still need to purchase an expensive piece of equipment to play the vinyl records properly. In this case, digital really is superior.

But books are different. They are simple, yet powerful. A book and possibly a pair of glasses are all of the technology you need to connect yourself to centuries of great ideas and rich experiences. Plus, there is something fundamental and connective to the human stream in learning and entertaining yourself the way we have done it for centuries. For this reason, books will be with for a long time.

Darnton is the author of The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, available ironically, on the Kindle.

The interview is located here.

The massive online course known as Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2009, or CCK09 for short, has begun. This is a free course open to anyone who wants to learn more about and actively practice George Siemens' theory of Connectivism. The course is hosted by George and Stephen Downes. I participated in the course last year and recommend it highly. It's a lot of work if you complete most of the activities, but it's well worth it and I guarantee you will learn A LOT. The beauty of this course is that you can participate as much, or as little, as you want. There are no grades and no pressure. It really is a lot of fun.

I won't be able to be as active this time around because I am preparing for doctoral comps, but I do plan to drop in as much as possible to see what I can pick up and see how things are going this year.

To learn more about the course or to sign up, visit the following link:

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism

Many learning professionals are currently focusing ther efforts on getting people to learn socially and informally. These ideas are important and we have years of research ahead of us on the most effective ways to use these approaches to learning. But we already know that humans learn in social and informal situations. Bandura’s Observational Learning Theory is well established and one of the most obvious learning theories we have.

We shouldn’t have to do a hard sell to get people to recognize the benefits of learning this way. After 20 years of cooperative and collaborative teaching methods in schools and universities, most people are comfortable with this approach to learning.

So if we are increasingly open to learning in social and connected ways, what will our challenge be in the future? My guess is that it is not going to be to encourage everyone to learn socially, but rather to make sure that we don’t lose the ability to think and reason independently. A related desirable characteristic may also be to encourage people to not be afraid to step outside the comforts of consensus within groups or networks and to form opinions apart from the crowd.

A while back George Siemens referenced an article titled The Liberty of the Networked which questions whether technology liberates or enslaves. Another post by Blanche Maynard reflects on technology and solitude in response to William Deresievicz’s essay The End of Solitude. Some feel that we may slowly be losing the feeling of being comfortable alone with only our own thoughts, disconnected from the world. Another article questions whether too much emphasis on particular types of technology is impacting our ability for critical thinking and analysis.

Sometimes ideas develop better whe they have had time to be worked through, reflected upon, tested in intimate circles, and only then brought out into the public light. Daniel Lemire addressed the role of private thought in research in Why I Hardly Ever Blog About My Ongoing Research. The common warning in all of these articles is basically that while social media can be beneficial, we need to maintain balance in our lives and we need to set time aside to be away from networks: to cultivate real and personal relationships at a deeper, more human level that is not mediated through technology. We need to make time for reflective thought.

I have noticed a series of thought-provoking blog posts in the last few days regarding the rush to social media and the currently popular disdain by some for “experts” and academia in learning.  Social media has the potential to transform personal and workplace learning in many ways, but I’m not so sure that it is going to replace more traditional learning and development methods in the radical way that many social media proponents are suggesting. Social media will have a significant impact for sure, but I think some are being a little too exuberant in the predictions they are making about how it will completely transform learning. I see more of a gradual evolution until social media tools become another tool in the learning and development toolbox, employed when it is appropriate and advantageous to use them.

Norman Lamont talks about the evolution of learning objectives and his flexible approach to using them. Ellen Wagner recently questioned why ADDIE seems to make some people so cranky. And Zaid Ali Alsagoff of ZaidLearn posted a nice piece discussing the benefits of the lecture and why it may still play an important role in learning environments, when used correctly.

Every one of these posts raises important questions about assumptions that seem to be dominating some areas of the field currently. As some wise person said somewhere, "everything in moderation and nothing in excess." Rather than blind adherence to any single concept, no matter how shiny and new, it is the art of the learning professional to understand how to tailor a mix of methods that is appropriate to each unique learning situation.

Educators often rack their brains trying to figure out how to integrate technology into learning. I had a nice surprise this morning, however. I walked in to the family room to find my son seated in front of the computer, guitar in hand, following a video lesson from YouTube. I watched quietly for a moment and then simply left the room while he continued, intently focused on the lesson and mimicking the instructor.

For me, it summed up the still as yet unrealized potential of technology in learning. We can plan for and talk about integration all we want. But technology in instruction will only truly happen when it becomes seamless, transparent, and the most useful way to learn something, as demonstrated by a simple YouTube video streamed to our family room.

No technology plans, no extensive budgets, no committees, just simple practicality.

I finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell a while back and am just getting around to writing about it. I enjoyed the book and recommend it highly. Gladwell makes the case that people are successful because in addition to their own hard work and drive, they are the beneficiaries of a series of lucky breaks that can include being born in the right era, or even the right month. Wealth, good genes, and well-educated parents are discussed, of course, but Gladwell goes beyond the clichés and makes us think about how even the most unlikely factors can sometimes open the door to great things.

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kinds may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t (p. 19).

I think the book might be mistaken by some as an attack on their success, or by others as an excuse for their underachievement, but I don’t see the book as either. Instead, it is a good starting point for a discussion on how seemingly insignificant decisions we make as parents, societies or organizations can have deep and long-lasting consequences on the lives of individuals, groups and even generations of people. Gladwell also repeatedly asks what cost societies incur when they exclude segments of their population from opportunities that will let the most talented rise to positions that benefit all of us.

I see the book as a source of empowerment for individuals and families. You might not agree with everything that Gladwell writes, but he does provide useful information in a way that can open eyes. However, even if Gladwell is right, we still have free agency. We may not have been blessed by a series of lucky breaks in one area of our life, but we may have received them in another area and not even realize it. It is up to us as individuals, parents and mentors to figure out where those lucky breaks are occurring and to seize the opportunity and make the most of them for ourselves and others.

I watch TED Talks regularly, but there always seems to be new ones that I have missed. Actually, there are many, many TED videos I haven’t seen so I’m sure there are a lot of ideas just waiting for me to discover them, even after others probably already written about them weeks or months earlier.

A while back I discovered a TED video featuring Scott McCloud, who is a comic strip artist that sometimes takes the medium and the ideas behind it in unexpected directions. In the video, Scott mentions four principles that I thought spoke directly to what I am trying to accomplish in this blog, which is to examine how we can all become independent thinkers that sometimes learn socially, but remain true to ourselves and determine our own learning paths in a complex, rapidly changing world.

Scott’s four basic principles are:

1. Learn from Everyone
2. Follow No One
3. Watch for Patterns
4. Work like Hell

These principles are simple, yet extremely powerful as a guiding philosophy for the self-directed learner in the 21st Century. Principle number one, learn from everyone, tells us that in a time when knowledge is becoming highly dynamic, we have to find ways to remain plugged in to streams of thought and we do this best by interacting socially with others and learning from them. For the self-directed learner, principle number two, follow no one is critical. Even though we must form connections to learn socially, we have to safeguard independent thought so that new ideas and perspectives can rise freely, assuring that our networks will continue to thrive with creativity and innovation. Principle number three is watching for patterns. Identifying patterns and being able to act quickly on that information will be one of the highly sought-after skills in the 21st Century. This skill always has been important, but in a rapidly changing world this skill becomes critical. The final principle, “Work like Hell, is obvious and doesn’t need much explanation. Hard, focused, dedicated effort is what always separates the dreamers from the innovators. It is McCloud’s call to action.

Together, these principles say it all. They are simple yet effective guidelines as we go about determining our personal learning paths and deciding how we will direct our own learning in a world of complexity.