Jess’ E-Learning Blog

The liaison for the company we’re working for was in class in our last E-Learning Design lesson. We were discussing the differences between Brown and Adler’s (2008) descriptions of Cartesian and Social Learning. When we were discussing the use of  social learning in e-learning, Brett asked us the following question:

How do you convince clients, who are competing for funding from you, to share their knowledge with each other and you, or to admit their knowledge deficiencies?

This, of course, really stumped me. So I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and this is what I’ve come up with:

1. Why do you need them to share information? That’s a really big problem which would need a really time consuming, expensive and complex solution. Is it worth the effort to do this?
2. You could define the problem as a culture problem. If you said that the problem is that there is no learning culture, then the solution is to develop a learning culture. A learning culture may be of benefit because if it is successful, the clients actually want to share info, instead of feeling that they are being forced to share the info. However, the problems with this are multiple. Firstly, a culture is intangible and therefore cannot be easily measured or put into a business case. Secondly, how do you plan a project to change a culture,  which is intangible?
3. Possibly, you could alter the funding policy to make participating in knowledge sharing activities a proviso of recieving funding. This would ensure that the clients participate. However, it may also breed resentment between clients and the company. This could result in a lower quality, less useful or perhaps actually less knowledge being shared than if the culture supported knowledge sharing.
4. I also thought that maybe an incentive could be attached to using the e-learning technology. Because funding is limited, this incentive could come from funding money. I’ve recently had my incentive program changed at work; instead of recieving a $10 gift voucher if we make our target for the week, one person from the five-person team will recieve a $50 gift voucher once a month for being a ’star performer’. Our whole team had a really negative reaction to this and a similar reaction could occur among the clients if money was taken from one area to another.

Overall, I don’t think that there is a really good solution to this problem. Anything which is implemented will have negative and positive elements, and considering that costing is an issue, it is important to ensure that the solution actually solves the problem and solves it well. 

This has taken me so long to write -_- I’ve been so busy that I’ve only been able to get five minutes writing time every couple of days.  Anyway, here it is

The following are some of my responses and some of my reflections on activvity 1.1. I don’t want to put it all up here, because I’d have a really long post instead of a normal long post These questions and reflections are in response to the 2008 and 2007 Horizon Report, which predicts what is going to happen in the world of online education in business and educational institutes over the next five or so years.

Regarding the 2008 report, which of these technologies in what context have you heard or used them? How do the trends outlined compare with your experience of technoology in a learning context?

I’ve come into a lot of contact with ‘grassroots videos’ in university and personal educational contexts as well as a entertainment purposes. I believe, though, that this technology is not an emerging technology, but rather an already emerged technology. I have made use of sites such as Youtube and DailyMotion for both entertainment and educational purposes. My brother watches amv’s, I use Google Video regularly to learn from tutorials posted on the net (like this one) or research personal interests (like Wing Chun). I often see user-generated videos embedded into websites which I visit. I think that grassroots videos are already mainstream, not that they will become mainstream.

However, I think that my opinion is due mainly to my age and generation. My mum knows what Youtube is, but only because it sends our downloads over our limit My dad works somewhere in the complicated world of computer systems, but he doesn’t make much use of any type of video technology.  So. I think I would say that grassroots are a technology which is emerging at different rates in different age and work groups.

One of the significant trends mentioned is the way in which social networking, collective intelligence and mass amateurisation has altered the means by which educational institutes teach. I would agree that these three factors have been an important part of my uni course from my first year here. This is mainly because I have been exposed to social networking, collective intelligence and ‘do-it-yourself’ web tools in my e-learning subjects in this course. Educational blogging tools (edublogs.org), e-portfolio sites (like this), wikis (wikispaces.com, wikipedia.com) and many other technologies have the ability to provide a platform upon which educational institutes can support student learning. Aligning learning with technologies already in use by students (even social networking sites like FaceBook) can make learning more accessible and more attractive to teen and early-twenties learners.

In regards to the 2007 report, review your familiarity with the key emerging technologies and your current technology experiences.

I think that user created content has been in use earlier than 2007/2008, particularly in regards to use for non-educational purposes. I have encountered a lot of tutorials, hints and helpers who have published their materials on sites such as wikipedia, youtube, personal or professional blogs, etc. While I did not interact with much user created content in my first year of uni study (2006), I did come in contact with a vast amount of content for uni educational purposes in 2007 and have continued to do so in 2008. However, I am biased, as much of this content has been encountered in regards to e-learning subjects.

I experimented and researched virtual worlds at the end of last year, which was interesting and educational. I think that this technology is not being used very much at all in educational institutes, and is more widespread in business itself than universities such as ING, IBM and HP.