Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
A moment of silence, please.
Denis Dutton, a philosophy who founded the pioneering website Arts & Letters Daily, has died in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the age of 66.
Arts & Letters Daily broke new ground went it came online in 1998. The site’s archive shows what grabbed people’s interest back then. Here are entries from the first edition:
Television is indifferent to approval or love. It pursues its only goal with unblinking zeal: to be watched … [more]
Even if the people who made cigarettes or cheap handguns were moral monsters, Wendy Kaminer argues, that wouldn’t mean they were criminals … [more]
Chance and necessity don’t account for everything. Without discarded teleologies, entelechies, and vitalisms, we can still opt for intelligent design, argues William Dembski … [more]
Computer-based learning is a high-priced sham, bound to stunt the emotional and intellectual growth of our children, argues William Rukeyser … [more]
Playing fast and loose with Thomas Jefferson: a Library of Congress exhibit falsifies Jefferson’s view of Christian theology and clergy … [more]
Academic freedom has been twisted into a narrow, self-serving claim to privilege, power, and easy access to the public treasury, argues Thomas Sowell … [more]
Everyday justice: a junior barrister of the Greenwich Magistrates Court helps his client apply for bail … [more]
Riley Weston is 19 years old, though, here as elsewhere, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Mark Steyn reports … [more]
Media and public have fallen in love with the hucksters of acupuncture, homeopathy, chelation therapy, herbal concoctions, magnetic placebos … [more]
Filling in the black holes of a college education means forgetting the postmodern ironists and returning to the library, says Camille Paglia … [more]
Nude photos of Dr. Laura mark the fall of a grasping Tartuffe. Never mind: this yenta’s credibility was built on shrewish hectoring, not morality … [more]
Escape from Pleasantville! Sven Birkerts wonders if we can ever get back to reality … [more]
Planning that Dream Wedding? If you think the ultimate joy is a day spent being the center of a big party, you’re too young to get married … [more]
Do electronic books spell the end of paper as the preferred book medium? Any optimism on behalf of trees is premature, says the Economist … [more]
History belongs to everyone and to no one: hence its universal authority. This claim will be contested. But without it, we are in trouble … [more]
Isaiah Berlin was a fox who’d rather have been a hedgehog. The themes of freedom and its betrayal were the obsessions of his life … [more]
Corporate nomads: are the virtues of public and private life being corroded by the demands of a more ruthless economy? … [more]
Richard Dawkins might have been a superb drill instructor, perhaps like the vicious Marine sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, murdered by a conscript he drove insane … [more]
In their own eyes, the Stuarts were quite as modern as the Spice Girls. So what exactly is modernism? … [more]
The notion of an aggregator with intelligent selections was a breakthrough. I corresponded with Dutton, thanking him for making and maintaining such a great resource. This was pre-Google. RSS didn’t get real until 2000. Arts & Letters Daily’s teasers and links gave access to smart stuff on the web.
Until I read Dutton’s obit in the Times this morning, I hadn’t realized that ALD was still around. I may well become a dedicated reader again although I note it’s now a service of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
For several years, I’ve used YouSendIt to send large files over the net for free.
Yesterday I tried to send a 1.25 gig movie to a colleague. YouSendIt said I’d need to sign up for the pro version to send a file that big. I clicked the okay button and was charged $110 for a year’s service. So far so good.
Then I received a notice that my file was not transferred due to technical errors. What errors, I wondered. I clicked okay and was taken to a page that offered the same service I’d just purchased for $49.
WTF? I filled out a service request asking that my account be cancelled immediately. I haven’t heard back. YouSendIt hit my credit card for $110 today.
In the meanwhile, I discovered WeTransfer.com. They will send up to 2 GB for free.
The Internet Time Community has been hosted on Ning for a little over three years. Most of the time, it has been more of a test site than a real community. We’ve experimented with features, swapped ideas, kept track of one another, and so forth.
I was shocked and saddened when Ning announced that its free service was ending. Lots of non-profits had signed up on Ning. They were told to pay up or shut down. In essence, they were betrayed. Many of these organizations have zero tech support. They don’t know how to set up alternatives. Ning could have at least provided a decent migration path away from their service.
The way Ning handled things left a bad taste in my mouth. I decided to move the Internet Time Community to Grou.ps. It wasn’t very difficult. I’ll show you what I did in case you’d like to do likewise.
I downloaded and used the free Ning Archiver to move my data off Ning:
Over the course of 30 minutes, I downloaded blogs, discussions, events, groups, music, videos, pages, notes, and photos. No sweat.
You have to download Members separately. For a while, I could not get the download to work. Then I accepted all the pending memberships and the download button magically appeared. No sweat.
I opened up a new Grou.ps account and chose import method #1. I used their Template importer.
An on-screen message warned me the import would take a while. Grou.ps emailed me that things were ready when I returned from a two-hour walk:
Dear administrator of Internet Time Community,
Migration process that started in 2010-08-10 18:45:01 has been completed.
Go to your network : http://grou.ps/internettime
To administrate: http://grou.ps/internettime/admin
Here’s the new Grou.ps community. It looks much like the Ning community.
I’m now signed up for the site twice.
Twenty videos don’t seem to have made it to the new site. 59 of 67 photos transferred. I don’t have patience to count how many blog entries came across; most entries are solid text, no paragraphs. Groups seem to have been mangled in the move. Somehow, the move added 100 members; I hope I haven’t added all the banned spammers back in!
If you see other glitches, please leave a comment here or on the Grou.ps site
In the beginning of the year, I decided to experiment with a simple learning technology developed at Harvard Medical School. Called SpacedEd, the free, cloud-based software doles out a couple of questions at a time every other day. Two minutes and you’re done. Great for basic drill.
I talked with Duncan Lennox, co-founder and CEO, who told me SpacedEd lived up to its motto, Online Learning Radically Simplified. Duncan and I swapped eLearning history stories; he’s not a newbie. The SpacedEd approach is predicated on a set of core principles:
Push Learning: The learning comes to you on a regular schedule. You don’t have to remember to do it or set aside large chunks of time.
Adaptive: The daily content adapts based on past performance automatically to drive long-term retention while requiring less time.
Immediate Feedback: Once a question is answered, detailed educational feedback is provided. Users are also given performance data (their course progress and performance relative to peers) which feeds their addiction to the course.
I wrote 16 multiple-guess questions and invited readers of this blog to give it a whirl. To-date, 173 people have enrolled. 16 of these provided feedback, usually including a one- to five-star rating.
Normally, you wouldn’t expect me to give formal, push, multiple-choice methods a second look, but sometimes people have to master explicit facts. This is a relatively painless way to do that. I enrolled in a few other SpacedEd programs and rapidly picked up what I needed. (Granted, it was frustrating. You don’t have to be a designer to construct a SpacedEd course and sometimes it shows.)
As the course progressed, I changed and clarified questions based on participant feedback. Sometimes people learned more from the discussion than from the question itself. Here’s all the feedback to-date. I’ve removed names but everything else is intact.
Current rating:
07/16/10
For a Free course, this offers a glimpse not only into Learning, but into the strengths and weaknesses of the SpacedEd approach to learning. The value of the course comes more from the discussion than the specific questions and answers. Also, I think that the Feedback on the answers evolved and became more robust and useful with the course’s development. Given that the course is limited to 16 items, you shouldn’t expect to learn a whole lot about learning. But, what Jay accomplishes in those 16 questions is reasonable for this medium.Current rating:
06/28/10
I love the delivery method. The questions are relevant to the career of Instructional Designer.Current rating:
06/15/10
I think the author of this program ‘Learning about Learning’ is asking questions that reflect his own specialist knowledge/interest, rather that trying to enhance the understanding of those who engage with the program.Current rating:
Current rating: 06/01/10
No star rating on 05/23/10
Zero stars. A self-indulgent melange of random factoids that began and ended in a wasteland of so what? I learned nothing worth learning about learning.
n 05/04/10
a few too many “who did what” questions – not bothered about who came up with an idea – moe interested in the idea itself. But an interesting intro to spaceded learningCurrent rating:
I enjoyed this course and learned quite a few new insights. Some questions are asking for factual knowledge and a bit US-centric, but apart from that, I’ll recommend this course to anybody interested in learning about learning.Current rating:
03/30/10
Current rating:
This course was an interesting first experience with this particular implementation of the SpacedEd concept. I am favorably impressed with the SpacedEd idea and believe that it has an exciting future, particularly in the emerging area of mobile learning (which some are now calling “mLearning”). Thanks to Jay Cross, the course author, for taking the time to develop the questions and monitor student responses and comments.I still have questions about how practical and influential this form of learning can be. This course consisted of 16 questions which, while interesting, were not deep enough, individually or collectively, to generate any Ah-ha moments that will influence my professional practice or general learning behavior. My experience with SpacedEd so far suggests that it is an effective way to introduce and reinforce certain facts, but it is not yet clear to me that it has the power to impact students at a level that will alter their subsequent behavior.
To explore this further the two simplest paths, in view of the technology demonstrated on the SpacedEd website, are: 1) add more questions and/or 2) formulate questions that have a more explicit link to a deeper understanding of the subject or an improved practice. (Which of these would depend on the objectives of the course.)
Another idea that occurs to me, which may be possible with the current technology with some enhancements, would be to incorporate a more immersive student experience than simply answering multiple choice or true/false questions. If questions could be designed along the lines of simple case study simulations with the opportunity for multiple answers that lead to different outcomes and feedback to the student.
I’m still questioning how powerful this very simple Q and A model can be. I plan to try out some other courses and, possibly, develop a course of my own. Now that I’ve experienced one course as a student, it would be very interesting to “walk a mile” in the instructor/designer’s shoes to see the SpacedEd concept and this implementation from that vantage point.
Current rating:
What I like most about this course: The author is continuously improving the quality of the questions and answers, and is responsive to the ongoing (and often energetic) discussions.Current rating:
Nice way of learning although the emphasis was more on actual facts (and a bit US-centric) and I expected a bit more Focus on activating questions that focused on real understanding of the subject. But Jay: thank you for offering this experience!Current rating:
ok!Current rating:
An enjoyable course on some of the core aspects of learning with some excellent discussion by the author and participants.Current rating:
NLP is ‘snake oil’?: OK, where’s the research to prove that categoric assertion.
Time after time, I repeated what I’d stated in the introduction, that this was intended as an experiment to test SpacedEd, more than a learning experience. As you can see from the comments, many chose to overlook the technology and complain that the questions were not relevant or fair.
The criticism kept on coming despite my comments that sometimes you do have to know who did what just to establish your credentials. In the field of “learning about learning,” the topic at hand, wouldn’t you expect someone to be able to identify Gloria Gery, George Siemens, and the PLATO system? Geez. I’m not ready to lower my standards on these.
Making mistakes makes participants angry. My explanation that this is when they will learn the most didn’t go over well with some participants. (Like those who want to critique the questions or the questioner instead of the methodology.)
The Learning About Learning course is still open at SpacedEd. If you take it, pay attention to the dialogue, not the multiple choice items. I spent less than an hour coming up with the initial questions; they are not that deep.
My bottom line is that SpacedEd is cool for conveying explicit information that can be boiled down to a limited number of options. It’s simple. It’s useful. It’s free. I will suggest my clients experiment with it.
Too simple? Take some of the SpacedEd courses for med students!
This morning Jane Hart posted this 5-stage model of the evolution of workplace learning in an organization.
I’ve re-worked the model to show:
The further you go to the right in these models, the less the support provided by L&D. I advocate filling the gap with support of social and informal learning.
LMS have their place: opening up and tracking performance of formal and compliance training. However, the more mature the worker, the less dependence on the LMS and the greater the need for social network solutions. Old pros don’t take classes. If all you offer is via an LMS, you are failing to support the biggest money-makers in your organization. Duh!
Internet Time Alliance spent a couple of days last week putting the 2.0 into a tedious proposal for a large, forward-facing multinational corporation. (more…)
There’s still plenty of room in our virtual classroom. Please join us.
At Online Educa, Berlin last December, we wanted to show collaboration among the members of Internet Time Alliance rather than just talk about it. It turned out to be the first online conferencing in Educa’s 15-year history.
We pulled in six simultaneous feeds by running Skype video conversations within a session of Adobe Connect Pro. Harold Jarche and Jon Husband joined the discussion from Montreal and New Brunswick; Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, and I were on the ground in Berlin. Heike Philp was our technical director.
The six of us expect to conduct numerous multi-continental sessions at conferences this year. Two-way conversations are a lot more interesting than one-way broadcasts. Four-way conversations open more possibilities. The Alliance’s informal slogan is “six heads are better than one.”
Are others of you doing sessions like this? Please share your experience with us.
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Here’s a recording of the first hour of the session. It’s not going to win an Oscar for Best Documentary. You’ll hear some echoes, for we were improvising the connections as we went along.
TinyChat looks very cool for impromptu video chats. I joined one group of eight simultaneously on screen — with 40 logged into the text chat.
Harold Jarche and I had a conversation that went quite smoothly until my Flash player blew up. Internet Time Alliance will be torture-testing this app to see if it’s got a place in our social learning arsenal.
Here are some of the tools I added to my repertoire of handy freebies in 2009.
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