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December 29, 2005
Podcasts For First Aid?
Here's an example of a free (sponsored) podcast for first aid I came across from Elliott Masie's Learning Trends:
2. First Aid Pods - Just in Time Performance Support: Here is a great illustration of using PodCasting for Performance Support. FirstAidPod has created some audio (and graphic enhanced) PodCasts that walk you throughhru emergency first aid procedures such as CPR. This is an intriguing use of PodCasts to mobile devices. Imagine being able to access a collection of 100 Emergency Procedures with step by step coaching.
Check it out at http://www.firstaidpod.com (Thanks to our colleague Keith Fieldhouse for this reference).
(You can subscribe to Learning Trends at the Masie Center.
This is another great example of portable performance support!
Of note, I saw my first iPOD on a golf course yesterday being sported by a near retired bus driver. He's not using podcasts yet but says he's very interested. Is podcasting close to becoming mainstream?
Posted by Ron Edwards at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2005
Web 2.0, eLearning 2.0?
I've been trying to stay on top of developments in the rapidly evolveing movement known as Web 2.0 through podcasting (primarily Silicon Valley based podcasts such as The Infotalk Podcast, blogs and conversations. Web 2.0 is essentially the transformation of the web happening before us from a content delivery platform to one in which millions of individuals produce and contribute content in a more socially oriented way.
The term eLearning 2.0 has been coined to describe a similiar evolution in eLearning from an event based course model to a more social and dynamic learning objects orientation in which content is more fluid and is created, used and discussed by many. You can read more about eLearning 2.0 here, and below is an excerpt describing how learner content creation and context building are supported by games and mobile learning by By Stephen Downes of the National Research Council of Canada written in eLearn Magazine:
Where games encourage learning is through the provision of what a student needs to know in a context where it will be immediately used. As (James Paul) Gee recommends, 'Words are only meaningful when they can be related to experiences,' said Gee. If I say 'I spilled the coffee,' this has a different meaning depending on whether I ask for a broom or a mop. You cannot create that context ahead of time— it has to be part of the experience. And in just the same way, the science text doesn't make any sense to someone who has not done any science (though it makes a great deal of sense to an experienced scientist)' [23].A similar motivation underlies the rapidly rising domain of mobile learning [24] for after all, were the context in which learning occurs not important, it would not be useful or necessary to make learning mobile. Mobile learning offers not only new opportunities to create but also to connect. As Ellen Wagner and Bryan Alexander note, mobile learning 'define(s) new relationships and behaviors among learners, information, personal computing devices, and the world at large' [25].
Thanks to Ted Cocheau, CEO of Altus Learning Systems who writes the Rapid eLearning News Blog where I found the reference above. Of note, many of you have asked me for examples of corporate podcasting, Ted has produced a very successful project for Cisco you can read about on his blog.
The chorus of catalysts helping the evolution from the lagging, static, event-based learning paradigm to a dynamic, learner contributing, context-aware model grows louder...
Posted by Ron Edwards at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Museums and schools are adapting, now libraries are considering it... what's next? Corporations?
This is an easy time of the year to see just how pervasive gaming has become with all of the advertising, press and hype running through the holiday season. It is indeed part of our culture. Other indications of gaming culture include incororation into our learning institutions such as museums (many are very innovative adopters of emerging media and a few have recently explored location based gaming), education - just take a look at the exhibitors at the upcoming BETT conference in London in January (search on keyword 'games' - 27,000 educators expected to visit with dozens of game creation tools and educational game releaseson hand where there were only a few just two years ago, and in libraries, long thought of as bastions of quiet consumption of content now exploring incorporating games to adapt to our changing culture:
A conference was recently held in Chicago titled 'Gaming, Learning and Libraries' to explore how libraries could and should adapt to gaming culture.
Brandon Breyer wrote about it in Gamasutra here where you can find this presentation summary of Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin who has been studying massively multiplayer online role playing games and makes a few great points on gaming as a learning environment and an example of 'participatory consumption'
'...She also took care to discuss gaming as an intellectually rich environment, where young players with no classical training in education were utilizing sophisticated techniques: joint participation, scaffolding and sequencing of activities, repeated opportunites for practice and feedback to apprentice newer players not only in technical in-game practices, but full enculturation into the ethos of the game world.Steinkuehler urged libraries to care about gaming for precisely these reasons, that their environments were sites for wide array of literary and educational practices, and that through fan fiction and game modding, they represented a cultural shift toward participatory consumption, where gamers were 'not reading, but rewriting the book.'
Which institutions will be next to adapt to our gaming culture and the capabilities for learning today and tomorrow? Corporations proud of their reputation or aspiration to be 'learning organizations'? Organizations wanting to accelerate speed to competence in their new hires? Companies that see gaming as a communication medium seeking to reach their people in new ways that work and stick? Non-profit social cause organizations trying new educational methods for better results? We're already starting to see examples of these...
Posted by Ron Edwards at 08:24 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2005
Social Mobile Games
Connecting people to each other is often more valuable than just delivering content to them and is a key aspect of the advice I often give to organizations pursuing mobile learning to strategize how it can/should be part of the mix. This holds true when discussing the application of "serious" mobile games to address corporate communication and culture change initiatives.
It is the interaction with each other, the social aspect that helps make the game appeal to more people and key to the success of the initiative vs. trying to make the game look and play like a console game at considerable more expense. The importance of the 'social aspect' was was recently made by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, the worlds largest video game company and now founder of Digital Chocolate, a mobile game company already among the top ten best selling (I like their tagline 'Sieze the Minute'!). You can read an interview where he describes his 'epiphany' of changing his goal of trying to create games to be ever more realistic but appealing to a fraction of the population to creating games that connnect people here.
The mobile phone games industry is predicted to be worth US$ 8 billion by 2008 and 1 billion game ready phones are expected to be sold next year...all adds up to more acceptance, demand and opportunity to reach and engage people in innovative and fun ways!
Posted by Ron Edwards at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Online Educa Perspective
I have written a bit more on my experience at Online Educa in Berlin for a colleague's publication I'll share with you here as well, focussed on my perspectives on eLearning for Security, Enterprise eLearning, Mobile Learning, Games for Learning, and eLearning for Developing Countries.
Online Educa 2005 Perspective
I have attended Online Educa four years in a row now and have seen the conference grow steadily. The format and focus has been consistent with more attention on higher education and governmental initiatives than on the corporate world in which I have been a part of for more than a dozen years (last year I counted about eight corporate attendees, this year seemed about the same). The structure of having four presenters share an hour or a bit more is quite different from what I have come to recognize as primarily an American model of one presenter per session. This means that you can get a variety of perspectives in one session, but I find that they rarely fit together or are of the same caliber, and rarely (by design) do I obtain any real insight. Experiencing Educa as a collection of data points to draw your own conclusions about the state of the industry and to generalize on trends rather than as an educational experience where the learning happens in the sessions is where I have found value in addition to the networking, of course.
My conclusion from this conference is that while the presentations did not change much in terms of how advanced the subjects/projects were, the interest in the audience seems to be shifting towards more innovative approaches. I noticed five areas in which this seems true, naturally the same areas I am working in and spent my time at the conference pursuing: eLearning for Security, Enterprise eLearning, Mobile Learning, Games for Learning, and eLearning for Developing Countries. My thoughts on each:
eLearning for Security
New to Educa this year is the emergence of security as a significant educational need better addressed through technology as I experienced through my participation/presentation at the Defense and Security Forum preceding Online Educa, where Dick Davies and my presentation on mobile games and simulations for learning received significant interest and generated conversations throughout the week. This audience ranged significantly in experience with eLearning so what impressed some as an example of effective learning looked like standard-issue page turners to me – an arena ripe for innovation.
Enterprise eLearning
Two presentations stood out for me, Nigel Paine of the BBC on their new learning practices, I’m impressed by how far he’s led his organization to adopt collaborative informal learning utilizing an effective mix of blogs, wikis, podcasting and other techniques Elliott Masie is calling 'Extreme Learning'. It was especially amazing to see progress in their culture Nigel would characterize as 'not sharing' before! The other presentation was by Jonathan Levy on a project he led for Cisco for an enterprise learning portal that matched needs and interests of learners to content, courses and other people, a utopian mix he actually got to work and used a wide variety of people around the world to help make it a reality, showcasing the new way innovation is constructed and providing a state of the art working model companies should aspire to. Based on the questions and comments heard, I don’t think either audience grasped the significance of what was being presented, in the first, that a mix and match low cost approach can get even the most insular company collaborating – helping it to move faster while saving money, and in the second, just how far we’ve come to now see a real example of a dynamic and intelligent learning portal that has almost nothing to do with an 'LMS, yet the questions from the back were 'so what LMS are you using'…
Mobile Learning
I found the interest in mobile learning strong based on the number of participants and sessions held on the subject, as well as the myriad of discussions I had in the corridors and Giunti Labs booth where they were showcasing their mLCMS. Three tiers of applications are emerging; solutions for executives, traveling employees (primarily sales & engineers) and line workers often in remote locations – for these combining corporate learning with connecting to experts and the emergence of context sensitive help (wearable computers, location based content) were of high interest once you got past their first impression of what mobile learning is (same content and approach on a smaller, mobile device). Most people I talked to or overheard did not make the distinction of fitting need to device and approach so there is a lot to be done to educate people to better understand the context in which mobile learning can be a powerful addition to their efforts.
Games for Learning
The session held on this subject was so full there was a queue outside the 150 seat room waiting for people to leave so they could enter for the six presentations that varied wildly on relevance and value. The most important thing to note was the sheer interest in the subject. The organizers should take note and hold better and bigger sessions to accommodate. Interestingly, I did not see any vendors exhibiting game engine platforms or other related solutions. We generated several interesting discussions with our handheld gaming platform we demonstrated continuously shoulder to shoulder (it was hard to get it back sometimes!) - on applications for sales people (rich media demonstrations) to corporate communications/culture building games to team building support on the device that costs less than many mobile phones and could either be integrated with corporate systems or not - it was appealing that they could be a low cost way of distributing content and engagement without infrastructure impact.
eLearning for Developing Countries
There were a few presentations showing quite advanced elearning programmes in universities in South Africa and Ethiopia and across Latin America/South America and a room full of interested participants who shared overviews of their own significant programs (e.g. a Kenyan University startup with 18,000 learners). Conversations revealed high interest in African countries being able to participate in EU funded educational initiatives in 2007 and upcoming relevant conferences. I was impressed at the scale of the programs with attention to learning effectiveness. The South African example of 28,000 students with class sizes of 800 having to be split into sub groups for engagement and facilitation was encouraging to see how programs can scale and evolve with student needs at the forefront. I came away with a sense that eLearning is working in places in Africa quite well and at a scale many would find surprising. Of course, there is still much work to be done, especially with educating teachers how to best use existing and emerging technologies. Interestingly, mobile learning support was seldom mentioned for countries in which the majority of learners have mobile phones but not access to email and computers from home – contrasted to the mLearn conference in Cape Town which highlighted mobile phone support for learning programs in countries across Africa.
Posted by Ron Edwards at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2005
The Movies Game - First Educational Film?
I just came across this on Water Cooler Games, a posting (excerpt below) describing how a new video game called The Movies in which you play as a Hollywood movie studio executive with the ability to actually create movies and distribute them has been used to produce a film on the recent riots in France.
"I learned this morning about The French Democracy, a machinima film created with The Movies. The film deals with the recent riots in Paris' suburbs and seems to have been created by a French player. While some details are questionable (cops don't ask for passports but for I.D.'s) the film is a quite powerful example of the potential of The Movies. When The Sims was launched, some players started creating social commentary photo albums in order to tell stories of abuse. Technically, the quality of these videos is impressive"
When I first heard of this game in PC Zone several months ago, I suggested it could/would be used to produce inexpensive educational films and here's the first example I've found. It's consistent with Will Wright's (creator of The Sims) view that people creating their own content is very powerful and is the next trend in game creation (you can hear him discuss the "future of game content" from the Game Developers Conference here (you may have to register for free to access).
Posted by Ron Edwards at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)
Online Educa & New Security/Defense Conferences
We're back from Online Educa in Berlin where we were among 1700 attendees and hundreds of exhibitors. I experienced a few standout presentations that were thought provoking and inspiring, but one that really stood out from me was Nigel Paine of the BBC explaining how over just the last few years they have adopted several leading edge collaborative learning technologies including Wikis, Blogs and are exploring internal podcasting. They have created a culture of sharing information which has cut considerable time from others searching for the same thing. An example was given of one leader sharing the list of links he had acquired on the New Orleans disaster that was used by thousands. They really have come a long way and win my informal "best of show" award!
(Here's a link to a recent article on BBC Learning in Workplace Performance Solutions for context.
Dick and I presented Serious Games to the New Security and Defense Forum by giving an overview of examples and why games for learning are so important for this field. We then did a live demonstration of Forterra Systems OLIVE platform, an immersive 3D virtual world in which avatars driven by real people can practice skills and proceedures. The demonstration was coordinated with 15 people from across the United States during the I-ITSEC conference in Orlando - attended by thousands, showcasing how a distributed audience can learn together during a First Responder scenario. We received a lot of interest in using the system for a variety of security and safety training uses. We also presented the work we're doing on geo-location based gaming and augmented reality (placing virtual objects in real environments for lower cost, more realistic training using mobile devices).
We hosted a Special Interest Group Lunch that was packed with a people interested in mobile applications and games. I promised a few links I mentioned so here they are.
Serious Games Europe
Water Cooler Games
Social Impact Games
Gizmondo - Serious Games Mobile Platform!
My presentation at the end of the conference "Learning Innovation at the Speed of Business" had at least a few people interested in games and simulations and the instructional design considerations of rapid content development. Thanks to those of you that made it to the end of the conference to catch it!
Posted by Ron Edwards at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)