Part of the key to an enterprise learning strategy

From The eLearning Guild's new 360 Report on Mobile Learning:

"[C]onsider what Dr. Conrad Gottfredson calls the
'Five Moments of Learning Need,' as enumerated below:

1. When learning for the first time
2. When wanting to learn more
3. When trying to remember
4. When things change
5. When something goes wrong

Is there a way to better meet some or all of these needs by combining learning expertise and mobile devices?"

Dave Winer: Open Identity in 2007

Thoughtful blog post, thoughtful podcast. Read it here.

More on this later from me. Deadline snapping at my heels right now.

Where did the name of this weblog come from?

Tom Gilbert, the "Father of Human Performance Technology," published a book in 1974 titled Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performnance. This (in my opinion) belongs on the shelf of every instructional designer. In it, Gilbert defines performance as the accomplishments we value. He then goes on to lay out four "Leisurely Theorems" that are at the heart of what we do.

I wonder whether we should look again at the Leisurely Theorems, in light of changes in the environment over the last forty years. How much has technology, and the possibility of global collaboration without traditional management structures driving things, affected "worthy performance"?

Here are Gilbert's Leisurely Theorems:

First Leisurely Theorem: Human competence is a function of worthy performance (W), which is measured by the ratio of valuable accomplishments (A) to costly behavior (B). That is, W = A/B

Second Leisurely Theorem: Typical competence is inversely proportional to the performance improvement potential (PIP). The PIP is the ratio of exemplary performance to typical performance. The ratio must be stated for an identifiable accomplishment -- there is no general quality of "competence." That is, PIP = W(e)/W(t)

Third Leisurely Theorem: For any accomplishment, a deficiency in performance always has an immediate cause in a deficiency in the performer's behavior repertory (P), or a deficiency in the environment supporting the repertory (E), or both. The ultimate cause is always a deficiency in the management system (M). That is, W = A/B = A/(P + E + M)

Fourth Leisurely Theorem: There are a number of views of human accomplishments, at different levels of generality. The values we assign to those accomplishments are derived from the level just above them.

Doing my homework

Dare Obasanjo has posted some intriguing analysis of what an "open social network" is. Read it here.

Obasanjo is in charge of the social networking aspects of Windows Live.

Here is a pretty complete (if admittedly biased) presentation of what's wrong with closed social networks (e.g., Orkut, MySpace). This is by Richard McManus, who has a business connection to one of the aggregators.

And there's this by Scott Gilbertson of Wired.

Social networks + collaborative learning + self-guided learning = ?

Maybe The Next Big Thing?

I'm studying up on the interactions between these developments and such movements as OpenID. I was thinking nobody else was paying attention to them, but then this morning I saw Clive Shepherd's post about Harbinger's Flockpod, so now I know that Clive is looking, and that Harbinger is too.

Quoting my comment on Clive's post: So what worries me about things like Flockpod is that this particular application is just another closed silo on a proprietary platform. Your "stuff" goes in, but you can't get it back out. It's not open. Will Harbinger expose their API? I don't see anyone in e-Learning worrying much about this right now, but they will. If not, then we are back to the same mess we have now with LMS and LCMS.

Scoble interview: m-Learning

In the Shared Items on the right side, there's an item "Larry Page's teacher." This links to a video interview, part of which deals with e-Learning and m-Learning (cell phone division) in K-12 education. Nothing earth-shaking, but it indicates that the idea is making headway.

Hey! I figured it out!

PeopleAggregator does not support Safari, the browser that comes built in on the Macbook. Everything works wonderfully well under Firefox, however.

I might make deadline with this story after all.

PeopleAggregator

I spent a couple of hours this morning fooling around with PeopleAggregator. I managed to set up an account, set up a group (Collective Wisdom), and make a blog post to the group blog. I have not been able, for the life of me, to figure out how to set up a personal blog there or to post to it or to the Community blog.

What is PeopleAggregator? According to its developers, PeopleAggregator has a number of different purposes:

- It is a social networking applicationthat runs at http://www.peopleaggregator.net.
- It is also a do-it-yourself social networking system. You can create your own community at the click of a button - no coding required.
- It is a development platform - the entire source code is available for download (free for charities and non-profits). You can also modify the code, for example to extend the functionality or create a new user interface.
- PeopleAggregator exposes open APIs and supports open standards. So all web applications that support these APIs can seamlessly share data between themselves. We also support open standards like microformats and OpenID.

All very interesting, but not so easy to use. If I figure it out in time to make today's deadline, you can read about it in Learning Solutions come Monday, August 13. But for now, it's not looking like I'm going to get it figured out in time. I'm testing the social network to see if I can get any help.

Intense Debate

Spotted this at TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/07/intense-debate-soups-up-your-blog-comments/

While threaded comments might be overkill on most Weblogs, I can't help but think that for collaborative learning designs it might be an incredibly valuable tool.