Archive for August, 2007

Bo Harald writes:

We seem to continue to move into more vertical solutions and deeper vertical solutions, when it is clear that better value for customers are delivered by horizontal solutions – those that work in the same way with all partners in all directions. There is of course space for further procurement-driven value chain building – but it should happen increasingly with generic tools.

Read the rest of his excellent post here.

Good points there. Horizontal integration is a way forward. In the eLearning sector many vendors have created eLearning solutions primarily for educational institutions. These technologies are supposedly designed for learning but that is not true. These technologies are institution-centric and vertical by nature. The concept of Learning Management System (LMS) was wrongly named. Better fit for a name would be Teaching Management System or Institution Control System.

No student would use the current so-called learning environments during their worktime or freetime. In 2006 I was at EC-TEL where Scott Wilson asked the audience full of educational technology specialists, “how many of you use a LMS for your personal learning?”. Surprise. No hands.

Social technologies are different. Blogs and wikis are already being implemented by learners themselves. Call them Personal Learning Environments (PLE) if you want but the key issue here is that they are based on user-centric design.

When we started developing our Dicole Knowledge Work Environment, we started from the learning and knowledge work point of view (Peter Scott would say that knowledge work and learning are practically the same thing) and forgot about the teachers. The web is full of teachers, you just need the tools to reach them. I call that parasitic learning.

We have run experiments in the university setting by utilizing wikis, blogs and RSS in addition to more connectivism-oriented pedagogical models. One course had 140 students and resulted in a dense network of about 1700 reflections. Some of the students who have participated in these classes have carried over the skills they learned there to their freetime and worktime. One particular group of students even created an environment for themselves based on blogs and wikis to share interesting lecture notes, podcasts and other topics of interest with each other. We need more of these trojan horses that will bypass institutional systems by helping students to help each other in their personal learning.

What we have done is to promote horizontal integration of knowledge working skills. We start from learning in the design of Dicole KWE and the same tools, learning patterns and models are beneficial in other areas of life where advanced knowledge working skills are required, including school, work and leisure. The pen and paper was a horizontal technology for learning. LMS is not. Blogs, peer-production environments and virtual collaboration rooms will take over.

This is very similar to Bo Harald’s vision of the Same Guy as user-centric design for Customer-Bank interaction. We just happen to see the Same Learners everywhere.