Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK (OUUK) and is the academic lead on the OUUK’s SocialLearn project which is developing a social network for learners. He blogs at The Ed Techie

He has written an essay as part of a special edition of the education journal On the Horizon. Authors contributing to the special edition of the journal were asked to contribute a blog post describing their articles in a condensed form; Weller's post appeared here.

The basic premise is:

Higher education faces a challenge. It may not now it yet, but it does. And the challenge is this – when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalisable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising, why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for?

He argues that the experience provided by universities goes beyond simple classroom-based student-teacher learning. The main reason schools attempt to attract a diverse motivated student body is due to the fact that they play an important role in influencing the course of learning by directing discussions inside the classroom and continuing the interactions outside. From this view, universities act as learning aggregators: they form groups of students with similar interests and connect them with experts in the field and relevant resources.

Weller points out that Web 2.0 communities perform a largely parallel function, in that they foster groups with common interest and link them to relevant resources. However, these communities don’t fully replace the university experience as these communities tend to have self-appointed experts. Weller argues that comparisons between the two systems can’t be helped and being raised in a Web 2.0 world shapes the students’ expectations.

To this point, Weller is working on the Social Learn project, which is intended to be a replacement for the systems currently in use by univerisities. It is intented to be an extensible platform with well documented APIs for doing so. The group hopes to make the whole package open source in the future.

Comments(0)

I was at a client meeting the other day where the topic of discussion was “multi-channel delivery of learning content”. The client has a legacy collection of audio and video learning objects that it wants to make available to employees on an on-demand basis. I suggested that the client could group the learning objects into a series of topic areas based on job performance competencies. Employees could then select which topic areas they were interested in and have a tailored selection of content delivered to them via a personalized RSS feed.

I noticed some eyes start to glaze over at this point as we continued to discuss how we could set up an RSS feed to deliver learning content. The room seemed to be divided into 2 camps. Those that knew what an RSS feed was (me and one other guy). And everyone else in the room.

I should have shown everyone this clear and simple explanation of RSS brought to you by the good people at Commoncraft. Here is “RSS in Plain English”

After watching this video you will know all about RSS. Now let’s start getting that learning content out there!

Comments(1)

After a brief hiatus, I’m back to address some some questions that we’ve been getting from our client and friends alike. With the arrival of the likes of MySpace and Facebook into the public mainstream consciousness, we are often asked about Social Media.

‘Social Computing is not a fad. Nor is
it something that will pass you or
your company by. Gradually, Social
Computing will impact almost every
role, at every kind of company, in all
parts of the world.’
– Forrester Research, Social Computing - How Networks
Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It

Is it a big deal? In a single word…YES!

As tracked by Technorati, a specialist site that follows blogs, there are currently just short of about 100 MILLION blogs and this number is currently doubling every 6 months. There are about 100 million videos being watch on YouTube.com every day…and this number exceed the total number of Google searchs performed in the same period!

So, what IS Social Media? Well, there are a lot of definitions, but they all involve online media and applications that have these features in common:

Participation - encourage contribution and feedback,
blurs lines between content creator and user

Openness - open to feedback and participation, lack
of barriers to access and use of content

Conversation - conventional media is about
broadcast, social media is two-way

Community - allows communities to form quickly and
communicate effectively around common interests

Connectedness - online links and combining different
kinds of media in one place (mashup)

Next time, we’re going to talk a bit about each of the following common types of Social Media:

Blogs

Wikis

Podcasts

Forums

Social Networks

Content Communities

Until next time…keep learning!

Comments(0)

Paul is a New Media Superstar!

Later tonight, before he goes online to do his nightly lesson with his Chinapod tutor, Paul Dillon will be interviewed by a journalist by the China Economic Review.

The interview will cover his experience with ChinesePod, thoughts on trends in learning, and generally cover the topic of podcasting.

Stay tuned for the full interview and more of our shameless self-promotion!

Comments(0)

We all know that media habits have changed radically over the past few years:

Print- Blogging is hot. Newspapers are not.
Radio- Podcasting is in. AM/FM is out.
Television- YouTube yes. Networks no.

3 significant trends have emerged:

1. Media consumers are now also media producers: YouTube is a great example of this. You can upload videos you have created for all to watch, and you can watch videos created by others.

2. Media consumption is personalized: Think iPod personal playlist. You don’t have to buy the whole album any more. You just buy the songs you want, and you organize them in a way that makes sense to you.

3. Media consumers/producers form communities: Like minded people have always enjoyed hanging out with each other. There is nothing more fun than spending a lot of time with people who are seriously into the same things you are into. My Space, Facebook, Twitter et al are all about the formation of communities of common interest.

Those of us in the business of learning design need to explore these trends, and figure out how to work with them. Some thoughts:

1. Learners become learning producers: Learning content will be increasingly produced by the learners themselves and not by learning designers. Think corporate wiki. Finding ways for people to share what they know in both formal and informal ways will become the task of learning designers. We will become facilitators of knowledge transfer as opposed to developers of content.

2. Learning is personalized: “Just What I Want” learning is in. Learners do not want to sit through an entire course or complete an entire online module, if only parts of it are relevent to their own needs. Rather, learners are increasingly demanding that learning content be available in a self service fashion, and they desire tools that help them to organize learning content into a personal learning playlist. The task for learning designers is to develop the infrastructure and implementation strategies that promote personalized learning.

3. Learning is a community activity: People learn best when they learn from each other. Learner designers need to explore the social nature of learning, and examine how Web 2.0 technologies can help us to provide our learners with access to authentic communities of learning. The key is to create opportunities for members of the community to share what they know through an interaction framework where everyone contributes.

I will revisit this theme in future posts. Your thoughts…….

Comments(3)

In an article by Mathew Ingram for the Globe and Mail, the question is posed of whether Web 2.0 technologies and social media are being adopted by the corporate world. The answer is mixed. Some companies are trying out the technologies in order to provide business solutions such as building a knowledge base or to connect people in a “war room” type situation.

My sense is that companies don’t get it. Technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and other collaborative tools are pretty much mainstream. Really, trust me on this, the Internet is here to stay and despite the überhype, Web 2.0 is REAL.

The problem is that companies view these technologies to something akin to a faster server–something that will give them a productivity gain or solve a business problem. These companies have to wake up. Anyone tuned into popular geek culture will know that there is a revolution underway.

The revolution of social media is about breaking down the structures and barriers that have kept people from having a relationship with each other and expressing their thoughts and desires. Web 2.0 technologies are still nascent, but already they have created meaningful collaborations such as Wikipedia for sharing knowledge, Flickr for sharing photos, and my favourite new addiction Twitter for sharing bits of your life.

So why do any of these technologies matter to business? They matter not because the technologies are the latest and greatest. They matter because the technologies are mainstream and are forcing a rethinking on the relationship companies has with their own people, their customer, their vendors and even their competitors.

For example, over the years, much lip service was given to the premise that the biggest asset a company has is its people. If so, why is there currently even less workplace satisfaction than ever and the negative health-effects of workplace stress continue to climb?

Structured properly, the implementation of technologies that allow people to collaborate easily and relate more openly will level the hierarchy in large companies. This allows people to interact on a more human level and as equals. I know this is shocking to big business, but most of the great ideas in a company do not come from the C-level suites!

One of the biggest opportunities for social media is in changing how a business relates to its customers. For decades, in the golden age of big business, it was the companies and the marketing firms that told us what we need and should desire. I would posit that we are at a stage where we are so saturated with advertising being pushed at us, that the tables are about to turn.

As the saying goes, he heart wants what the heart wants…the consumer is starting to tell companies what they want and how they would like it. Why fight it? Instead of paying for market research, consumers are telling you want they want!

It isn’t all about big business either. There are some goods that aren’t economical to mass produce, but have niche markets where the consumers are willing to pay a bit more for what they want. A fine example of this is how Threadless.com T-Shirts is using collaborative technologies as an integral part of its business model.

At Threadless, you find people competing to have their T-shirt designs printed. The designs submitted each month are entered into an online contest. The site’s members vote for their favourites and the winner gets their design professionally printed by Threadless. The shirts are then sold online in a limited edition until they are gone.

In this model, the designer has a shot of winning $2,000 of cash and prizes. Happy customers get a chance to collaborate, and gets the product that they truly desire. The business, of course, gets free designs submitted regularly, the opportunity to print a design that it knows will be a winner, and…PROFIT!

This use of social media can promote an authentic relationship between a business and its vendors, competitors, and especially its lifeblood…its mighty customers. Companies are going to have to work hard at figuring out how to engage and delight their customers with the new tools available to them.

Companies that don’t “get this” will be trounced by those that do. This isn’t something to be taken lightly. Regardless of its size and position in the market currently, companies that continue to ignore the changes brought about by social media will stagnate and slide into oblivion. Scary stuff, indeed!

Comments(0)