Interesting Paradox - Choices

Gladwell - TED Talk - Malcolm Gladwell talks about providing choices that people don't even know that they want.





Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.

Understanding eLearning 2.0

My article - Understanding eLearning 2.0 - was just published on ASTD's Learning Circuits.

I would like to thank readers of this blog for helping with contributions. As I said in the article:

Thanks

This article would not have been possible without considerable discussion and input from many different people who have taken part in discussion around this topic via the blogosphere. For example, in the discussion on the blog post, "e-learning 1.0 vs. 2.0 - Help Needed," you can see that Howard Cronin provided the analogy of AM/FM, CD, and iPod adaptor. Thanks, and I look forward to the continued conversation.

Aide RSS Filtering Tool

AideRSS looks at a variety of sources of information including comments, technorati, bloglines, icerocket and del.icio.us to determine what posts are generating the most interest. It provides a widget that allows you to show your top posts for month or year. You can see what it thinks are mine in the right column of the blog.

I've been creating similar information manually for a while, so it's nice to have an automated support for it.

I've not quite figured out how to take a very large list of blogs, e.g., all edublogs, and have it filter those down. It imports OPML, but the interface didn't seem intuitive. I'll let you know if that works later.

Change Your RSS Feed?

A while ago, I created a feedburner feed for this blog so I could add lots of stuff to the feed - most importantly I publish a daily summary of my new del.icio.us links. It appears that most people still point to my Blogspot feed.

I would suggest that readers of this blog might want to change over to the FeedBurner feed to get this added functionality: http://feeds.feedburner.com/eLearningTechnology

How Wikipedia Works and Wikis in the Enterprise - HBS

Great article - How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't) that looks at Andrew McAfee's experiences around the "Enterprise 2.0" article and Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion process. It's an interesting discussion of the net impact of Wikipedia's process - which can be frustrating, especially to casual users. At the same time, I've also had some very good experiences such as when my 10-year old son updated Wikipedia.

At the bottom of the article, the author interviews Andrew about the use of Wikis in the enterprise. A couple of things jumped out at me:

Sean Silverthorne: Is Wikipedia a good model that transfers to a corporate environment?

Andy McAfee: No is the short answer here, simply because (a) how valuable is the corporate encyclopedia, and (b) how much enthusiasm or incentive do we have to contribute to the corporate encyclopedia? But an encyclopedia is only one of the things you can build with wiki technology.

This is a somewhat strange answer. In my experience, Wikis often start (and sometimes end) as an easier-to-use replacement for simple web publishing (an intranet that's easy-to-edit). For example, you have a bunch of resources that get shared and you want to put them up. Or you have a set of reference pages. The old way would be to work with your IT staff's content management system or to hand-craft web pages and go through a painful posting process. The new way is to use a Wiki and just click the edit button. Often, you don't really expect end-users to edit the pages when you start out. Sometimes, they end up editing them, sometimes they don't. But it is still easier. My strong belief is that:

Anytime you think about creating a web page, you should probably think whether it wouldn't be better to make it a Wiki.

The article later discusses:

Silverthorne: Have you used wikis yourself?

McAfee: I can give you a couple of examples because I try to use wikis in a fair amount of my own work. I was organizing a 40-person conference of academics and needed to take care of all these administrative tasks that I really hate doing, like putting the schedule together. And I thought, "Ding, I'm going to outsource this to the people who are coming to the conference." So I put up a couple of initial wiki pages and e-mailed them to everyone. I said, "Here is the bare -bones schedule. You guys tell each other and tell all of us what you think we should do in each of these slots, and if you want to present in one of these 4 daily slots, just add your name to the list." And with very little pushback, the Web site for the conference self-assembled, and most people were quite happy with it. The amount of overhead went through the floor.

I also use them in my MBA course Managing in the Information Age. I tell my students that about half their grade will be based on wiki contributions. So I solve the incentive problem that way. And then I have to deal with all the problems of, "Well, what do you want us to do?" ("I'm not telling you.")

A couple of great examples. Both are uses in smaller workgroups which is probably an early place to look for adoption. I've similarly used Wikis in conjunction with a class environment, and it's quite natural, especially if you have collaborative exercises defined for the students.

eLearning 2.0 Presentation - ASTD OC - September

I'll remind people when it gets closer, but if you read this blog and can come to a presentation in Irvine, CA on September 12, it would be great to have a few blog readers there.

Details here.

Pimp My Course

In a comment on Podcasting has No Inherent Pedagogical Value - which has some interesting comments in it around technology and value - I was pointed to an interesting article in the Chronicle - Pimp My Course and Stephen Downes summary of some of the responses. It seems that no one is sure if the author is serious - but I worry that some people might actually think so, especially since it reminded me of conversations I had with fellow professors 15 years ago when I was teaching computer science at Loyola Marymount.

When I first started teaching, I felt that much class time was wasted as I wrote stuff on the board and had them feverishly trying to take notes to keep up. Unfortunately, that's how I went through school and so I did the same thing. I quickly realized that I could have a much better classroom experience if I provide my students with class notes that meant they only had to write down the 20% that was in the discussion or dialog around the topic that would be there thoughts on the topic. I also changed to start every topic with a problem that would hopefully capture their interest and then answers would unfold through the material as we worked through and discussed it together. It changed the dynamic somewhat, but, of course, it's still lecture. What technology did I use? MS Word - posting links on an intranet - remember this was 15 years ago.

Now I would definitely be using a Wiki for my class notes and syllabi - it's just easier. I'd also have students use blogs for collaborative learning assignments.

Still, even using MS Word and problem-based learning seemed like a big leap from what other professors did in their classes. When I discussed this with them, they seemed to conceptually get the idea, but none of them seemed to change to actually do it. It's not like as a young professor I really challenged why they would stick to a note-taking approach, but it was interesting to me.

Back to the Chronicle article. I'm still not sure how serious the author was ... which is maybe why there's such concern. I could believe that 60-80% of teachers/professors feel that way. But it was also interesting to see the comment in my other post that points out that unless you start with what you want to be happening for your students and in your classroom, technology makes no difference.