Supporting Incremental Relevancy

Interestingly, there are companies that are zeroing in on this exact problem. Mahalo, Jason Calacanis' new, people-powered search and KnowNow, who is focused on RSS for the enterprise. These companies are talking about and pushing solutions to improve the signal to noise ratio on the web. These two particular companies are approaching it in different ways.

One Mahalo is using a "humans as aggregators" approach. This means that they are actually creating search result pages that they feel best address the search term or topic. Early results seem to be pretty well done.

KnowNow is "RSS-ifing" as much data as possible, allowing for very sophisticated filtering options. This approach should allow corporations to continually create new mash-ups that combine existing and new data sources and deliver them through RSS to a host of devices.

Both of these approaches address the support of incremental relevancy, that is continually improving the relevance of the information that you are engaging in or giving your attention to...

There may be some links to Pattern Recognition Theory. Stephen Downes is discussing this at his blog. Do we learn be recognizing the connections in the information? I think so...

Current Drivers of the Future of Education

I am hoping to attend a few sessions of the virtual conference with the title "The Future of Education." First, I am assuming that most of the conference is related to how technology is improving our ability to support and implement educational activities and learning. I'm not sure exactly what they are presenting, but I would probably address the changes in content development, content publishing, and content consumption as drivers in the future of education. I would also talk about how new social networking characteristics of web technology has brought new engagement opportunities to mainstream web users.

Changes in Content Development

The past few years have brought radical change to our ability to create digital content. Software enhancements, increased computer power, and increased broadband have empowered anyone to have the ability to create content and they have done it. The educational community has taken full advantage of these new technologies and have engaged in content creation, however because millions of others have also engaged in creating blogs, videos, and podcasts, there has been an explosion of content on the web. Examples of this explosion are everywhere and in every category. Without digging into the the details, just surf the web and you will encounter the explosion of content creation.

Another key characteristic is content remixing. Because duplication of digital assets is so easy, many people are able to take existing work and adopt it for new context. This will continue to evolve and the remixing of content will become both driven by content creators like educators and trainers and will start to happen dynamically through "mash-ups" within personal learning environments.

Changes in Content Publishing
Two key drivers that have changed the publication of digital content is Really Simple Syndication (RSS). This defacto web standard has allowed web content to transform from a static destination model (visiting a web site) to a dynamic "pull" model that allows content to be published to individuals who choose to read it. By subscribing to an RSS "feed" the learner can have content come to them.

The second change in content publishing is Embedded Scripts. Allowing users to embed HTML-based scripts that will pull content from other sources, like embedding a YouTube video within a blog, has allowed content to be passed around the web through a very simple "cut and paste." The functionality allows the content component to interact or even continue to live with the original site that originally published the content. Slideshare was enabled presentation sharing in this fashion and we will continue to see this model be implemented as a way to embed educational content.

Changes in Content Consumption
Another area that is currently changing is that of content consumption. Learners are now pulling feeds of information and content through aggregators like Google Reader to quickly scan content throughout the day. This new approach allows learners to filter information quickly and gain many varied perspectives on a single topic. This has also changed the way the content is managed and used. Content is now quickly archived and stored for later retrieval and detailed analysis. Learners have come to trust that content will come from a variety of sources and evolve over time. This new model has also changed views on accuracy and authority, increasing the importance of skills such as critical thinking and rapid decision making.

The Social Web
While from the beginning the web as been a social phenomenon, new techniques and technologies have continued to enable increasingly engaging interaction among learners on the web. In my experience, improvements in Instant Messaging and email (through Gmail) have been significant drivers, and now applications are starting to build collaboration into them to allow teams to work in realtime on tasking and content development. The creation of social bookmarking services and online communities that allow for groups to collaborate asynchronously and tag, review, and share content have also driven increased interaction. Now, new services that apply analysis and feedback within the social networking tools have added additional opportunity to engage on the Internet.

The Future
With these drivers I think the future holds some interesting things for education. The creation of learning content will become very collaborative, dynamic, and innovative. Content will come from everywhere and everything and there will be new tools for personalization. Social networks will emerge as a leading filter of learning content. The educator's role will become increasingly more about assessment and evaluation and they will serve as mavens within the social networks. These leading educators will have a much greater influence on a much larger audience, while educators, along with experts within knowledge domains, unwilling to engage online will become less and less relevant.

It will be interesting times.

Between Formal and Informal

Clark addressed one of the questions that I raised in my DIY post. I kind of like the way Clark puts informal learning

"...informal learning is about putting resources out there for the folks who are beyond courses, but are not yet ready to be creating their own resources."

I am interpreting this to mean the he sees a large number of people not quite to "DIY" at a creation level, but are really wanting to "repurpose" or "reuse" content, data, in a variety of formats to have as part of their own conversations. So just as Robin Good does with all his posts, make the content available in ever possible format and be proud that the learners only take what they want.

Improving Informal Learning

Here is a great list by Ray Sims on how to improve informal learning.

Here are the first 10 of 25...

1. Make collaboration easy. Employ the usual technology suspects such as discussionboards, wiki, web-conferencing solutions, IM, VOIP, etc. Facilitate physical meet-ups through architectural design and orchestrated face-to-face events. Support and encourage communities of practice and other community constructs. Identify and address roadblocks via organizational network analysis and other means.
2. Teach critical thinking and “web / learning 2.0″ skills
3. Help employees discover and refine their own personal learning environment
4. Include desired learning behaviors in talent and performance management frameworks, programs and systems
5. Improve content findability. Obsessive attention to enterprise federated search, cross-linking, social tagging, content reuse strategies, etc.
6. Provide electronic performance support
7. Improve people findability. Both expertise location applications and other means.
8. Make outside connections easy. Funding for information and research services, conference attendance, guest speakers at company events, etc. A liberal blog policy and encouragement to blog
9. For every new piece of formal learning, explore complementary informal learning opportunities — explicitly driving this exploration through process
10. For every new piece of formal learning, answer: What can we do to increase the likelihood and depth of immediate practice in a safe environment; ideally where failure is not only expected, but created

It would be a great next step to take the entire list and create specific how-tos. I think I will when I get a chance. Check out the entire list.

LC: The Big Question

Learning Circuits' big question for February is 'what questions should we be asking?'. I don't like this one, but here goes.

1. How can we make the assessment of learning really, really easy?
2. How can we create a networked user environment that enables a learner to grab just the right thing (knowledge, experience, conversation, simulaton ) that gives them what they need?
3. How can we really start to use all the existing data that we already have about learners to improve their learning quest?

I guess these are a few questions I think we should be asking.

A collection of Resources for Informal Learning.

Jay Cross and friends are having an unWorkshop. It looks really interesting. One of the goals of the identified on the website is to "Understand the role of blogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, RSS in learning." So I decide to pull together a collection of web-based resources around the topic of informal learning. They are located on LearningFlow, under the goal with the same name.

My thoughts on the subject:

blogs: Just as back in 1993 we saw a model emerge with tools like Hypercard, blogging technologies can serve multiple roles in the learning process. It can allow learners to create and clarify their knowledge or understanding of knowledge in a very constructive model. Another role of blogging could be to allow for an expert to document their understanding of information and publishing for easy access by novices. When we were developing hypermedia environments in the early 1990s we used this "cognitive apprenticeship" approach. But the amount of effort required to capture the media was incredible compared to today's, click and publish world.

wikis: The simple technology of an openly editable html page has become a powerful tool to capture the knowledge of the masses or "crowds". The simplicity of the approach has allowed for complete new ways of thinking about keeping information up-to-date and accurate. To imagine that an encyclopedia could be constantly updated is really amazing. Bonus: My example of using a wiki in a K-12 education environment, look for a scientific concept not yet in wikipedia, allow the students to craft the language and contribute the results online.

Podcasts: I have talked a lot about podcasts in the past. On a personal level they have been truly transformational in the way that I get information for my job. I know this won't fit everyone, but by having IT Conversations, PodTech.net, and TWIT available for my commute, I have turned brain-numbing traditional radio time into a time for me to improve my understanding of technologies.

Tags: I think of tags as a kind of glue that can keep the "stuff" or information that you are searching for, publishing, or creating together across the web. By tagging a piece of content, you are making that information discoverable over the web.

and finally....

RSS: Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, your choice. This simple standard, based on XML allows you to syndicate content to any aggregator that is connected to the internet. My favorite aggregator? Google Reader.