Glorified books?

Perhaps the biggest difficulty I find with e-learning is the narrow view most people still seem to have about it. I posted before about how I fear the term ‘e-learning’ is too contaminated – those who have used it and found it helpful are on board, but many others, some of whom have had a bad experience, some of whom have other prejudices, regard it as too toxic to contemplate.

I suppose this view partly reflects my own concern that, increasingly, the purely online course has limited applicability, and instead we should be looking at greater use of collaborative tools, and more ‘blending’ with offline learning.

To clarify further, what I’m saying is that an online course is typically such a passive experience that it’s really only good for acquisition of facts, figures and information, and at best the gaining of knowledge. A bit like a book, really, and increasingly it seems books are what online courses are competing with.

In the Moodle platform I’ve been using for most of the past year, a course authoring tool is actually called “the book module”. It’s basically recognising that all it’s offering is the creation of an online book. And with the development of more and better digital readers like the iPad, the Kindle and the Sony Reader, this sort of Web-based e-reading is going to look increasingly dated and limited.

We need more interactivity, and not just with automatic and dynamic applications that give the learner a sense of feedback, but with real people, connected through the many collaborative tools that are already commonplace. We need to take e-learning beyond being glorified books, into a place where genuine learning is happening.

Nail on head?

There’s a good column by Daniel Wain in the 11 November edition of People Management, the CIPD journal.

Daniel quotes Charles Elvin of the Open University saying “I am a business person who uses learning for business transformation, and not a learning person who hopes the business listens to me” and goes on to reason that HR professionals making the case for their interventions are approaching problems the wrong way around, “like a workman armed with a hammer looking for a nail to hit”.

I found these comments apposite as I am finalising the manuscript for my forthcoming book, 101 Learning & Development Tools. There’s a danger, in an anthology like that, that I offer a selection of hammers in search of nails. Thanks to Daniel’s timely reminder, I am ensuring that the emphasis in my book is firmly on identifying the business challenges first, before selecting the right tools to help tackle them.

I generally find Daniel Wain’s column pretty good, and I’ve been meaning to find something positive to say about it, since my only previous reference on this blog was to slag it off. I hope this redresses the balance.

Hiatus

It’s been a while since I last blogged – more than three months since my last blog post represents the longest hiatus since I started this blog in 2007. My apologies to any followers, commenters, or readers who may have been disappointed.

My excuses are threefold: my forthcoming book – working title 101 Learning & Development Tools – is approaching the deadline for submission of my final manuscript; my day-job has been very busy; and there’s a significant, albeit very positive, upheaval in my family life (sorry that’s a bit cryptic, but I’m only sharing with family and friends).

Anyway, distractions notwithstanding, I have resolved to get back into the habit, and try to resume my old rate of about two blog posts per month. I’m counting this one. I know that’s a bit of a cheat, but it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

Thanks for reading.

More to follow (I promise).

More about MOODLE

Thanks to those who replied to my previous blog post.

My quest to improve my organisation's MOODLE implementation goes on. The next phase of development addresses three themes: overall look-and-feel, to make the site more user-friendly and give it more visual appeal; developing micro-sites within the site to support different communities of practice; and (three weeks on) still working on the course content development capability.

We've looked at the Accordion plug-in (thanks, Chris), which is great as far as it goes, but we want a lot more of this sort of scope for learners to become more active. We've compared a lot of alternative tools, and decided against Sana EasyGenerator (sorry, Christiaan), as well as proprietary tools like Lectora and ToolBook. However, this review has at least helped clarify that MOODLE's native course authoring software is insufficent for our needs.

Udutu is quite good, but the new front-runner is Xerte, which is open source and free. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has experience of implementing this tool, especially with MOODLE, or indeed anyone who has opinions on it.

I'm looking for a course authoring tool that creates SCORM-packaged content, integrates with MOODLE, offers easy, intuitive navigation for learners, has a straightforward WYSIWYG interface for authors, and offers a good range of simple templates to create interactive and interesting content. All suggestions still welcome!

Moodle muddle

As mentioned in an earlier post, my organisation is implementing Moodle as its learning platform.

Early days yet, but a big success so far. However, while pleased with the platform, I have been surprised by the limitations of Moodle’s course authoring capability. These limitations fall into two categories:

1. There are limited options for course layout and navigation. We’ve tried using the “topics” format and adding the “Book Module” plug-in, but neither is entirely satisfactory. The book module offers better menu options (although not the choice to show or hide the left-hand menu), navigation arrows on every page, and the option to print each book or chapter. However…

2. The book module doesn’t allow features like activities or questions to be included in a book – as it says on the Moodle website, “the book module is not interactive”. We’d like to keep our build as simple as possible, and with as few plug-ins as possible, but if we’re to persist with any version of Moodle’s own authoring capability, that will mean adding in small apps to offer conceal-and-reveal features, mouse-over options, and other added extras.

So we’re looking at alternatives. Top of the list at the moment is Udutu (which, a little to my surprise, seems to be pronounced “you do too” – there was me thinking it was Swahili or something). The alternative doesn’t have to be open source or free – although that helps – but definitely has to be easily compatible with Moodle.

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Communities of practice

I was surprised recently to hear a senior colleague refer to communities of practice as though they are a passing fad. The language may have been around for less than twenty years, but communities of practice are as old as human society itself. So what made my colleague think they are a passing fad, and – implicitly – something new?

I think the answer lies in digital technology, the growth of which has empowered communities of practice on a global scale, given them greater prominence, and provided them with lots of new tools and resources. As the tools and resources improve, I think we can expect to see further growth in communities of practice – they’ve become easier to get involved in, easier to manage, and more sustainable.

Communities of practice, as Etienne Wenger explains, are groups of people with not just shared interests, but a shared stake in applying those interests to both practical and theoretical activity. They have a big emphasis on learning, and on sharing the results of learning.

Websites featuring resource sharing and collaborative tools, such as Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, live chat and virtual classrooms, are the new things. Some people – perhaps my colleague – confuse these tools and resources with the community itself, and of course we can expect the tools and resources to change. But as long as the purpose for a community existing remains, its members will keep in touch, stick together, and find new ways to collaborate and share learning.

Some applications of digital technology are fads, and will pass. I happen to believe Twitter is one of them (a subject for another post, if ever there was one), but I’m confident that communities of practice will continue to go from strength to strength.

Emotional metadata

I took part in a workshop last week where the facilitator made reference, en passim, to “emotional metadata”. I immediately thought of Daniel Goleman’s ground-breaking Emotional Intelligence, but there’s no reference to it in Goleman’s book, and I haven’t come across any reference to metadata in this context before. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of metadata, it’s basically data about data, or, crudely, how we label data on the Web to enable searches using those terms.)

I was surprised to find emotional metadata is quite a common phrase, yielding 391 Google hits – or 161,000 if you take away the quotation marks. But on browsing those, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. In essence, the idea seems to be about developing search routes based on how people feel about stuff, rather than more information-based definitions. This sounds potentially useful, in that we can use it to find related information that makes users feel happy, or nostalgic, or anxious – or whatever. But I’ve yet to see a demonstrably useful application.


In principle, I’m open to any tools that help us gain deeper understanding based on emotional rather than intellectual responses. By coincidence the day after the workshop where this came up, I participated in another, where the facilitator showed a variant of the diagram (left). He was making the point that our feelings influence our thinking, which in turn influences our behaviour. But I think the diagram is flawed, and the point may be made more strongly – sometimes thinking doesn’t come into it at all, and our behaviour is driven purely (even passionately) by our feelings.

This suggests to me we should all be paying more attention to the concept of emotional metadata, and what we can learn from it.