ICTlogy

Kelly Carey and Stanko Blatnik have written a paper about e-learning in former Yugoslavia in post-war times.

This is something I’ve been specially interested in: what’s the role of e-learning not in developing countries but in countries that have suffered a war or human tragedy and are more in need of humanitarian help than development itself.

The paper is a successful case study.

[via OLDaily]

Yan Simard asked me a few questions related to my previous post.

As I was writing I though it was worth to put is as a post rather than a comment.

My answers are:

• Yes, I think that Google is maybe the best search tool, and maybe it can also become the best learning object search tool. But no, I don’t think that www/Google is still the world’s most efficient learning object repository/search tool.
• And yes, I think there’s a need to gather/describe Learning Objects in a repository just because learning objects do significantly differ in their essence from what you can find browsing the web.

I guess the heart of it all lays just in that last statement: not everything having information is a learning object, and usually, not even a knowledge object.

We can think of a word processor handbook, a word processor tutorial and a the materials of a course on how to use a word processor.

The first one is just information: this word processor can do this and that.
The second one has experience in it: these are ways to use your word processor. You could call it a knowledge object.
The third one pretends to be a knowledge transferrer: learn how to use your word processor so you can use it on your own. It is a learning object.

If we believe that these three objects are different, then Google, that will find everything without discriminating, is not a LO repository (maybe Google Scholar might become sort of it ;)

I you search the web for Learning Objects Characteristics you’d find, mainly, technical characteristics (reusability, number of elements, type of object, etc.). But their aim is not technical but a matter of concept. The Learning Objects Characteristics under a conceptual point of view could be (list not complete ;) :

• pedagogical goals
• target of the course
• methodology
• categories/subjects
• syllabus
• length
• teaching load
• schedule/calendar
• authoring
• mentoring/teaching
• evaluation
• metadata
• standards

Not everything in the WWW has these characteristics but everything in a Learning Objects repository should.
And, if you understand these characteristics (technical and conceptual) as fields, then you have a potential database, thus a LO repository, whose main feature is intelligent queries. Google is good, but it is not yet that intelligent :)

Nevertheless, it is absolutely true that “if you look at various learning object repositories, you will find that when yo do a search you get a lot of worthless results” and that some “learning objects don’t significantly differ in their essence from what you can find browsing the web”, but I think this is not the object’s fault, but the author’s, a human error, somebody thinking what he did is a learning object and it is not.

I also agree with you that “the learning object concept is an answer looking for a question and that question has yet to be found” but there’re lots of good approximations to the correct answer :)

Nick van Dam’s article Leveraging Knowledge Management: The Curriculum Map talks about how Knowledge Objects (reports, presentations, articles, etc. you once made/read), if well designed (through some instructional design) can become Learning Objects.

These Learning Objects could then be gathered in a Curriculum Map:

A learning curriculum map provides all learners with relevant information, supplemental resources, job aids, knowledge objects and learning objects to support their learning and certification needs. From this map, the learner can easily and efficiently access the relevant learning and knowledge objects that are hosted on a variety of portals

I think this is an interesting idea and I’d like to go one step beyond. Now that we’re running into e-learning standards (SCORM, IMS,…) and digital content standards (such as XML) I guess it is no nonsense thinking about one’s own learning management system where to follow courses run by third parties.

I mean, the curriculum map could be enhanced with the possibility of running others’ courses in your environment, an environment you would use, besides e-learning, to keep your “relevant information, supplemental resources, job aids, knowledge objects and learning objects” that would conform this curriculum map.

Then, instead of having a feed aggregator such as Bloglines to read others’ blogs, you’d have a course aggregator to follow others’ courses. And, as added features, everything van Dam is talking about in his article.

SCORM, IMS, XML and all the acronyms that are to come should make this possible.

This is sort of second part of my previous post. I know there must be some pretty good theory about all this, but I’ve got quite a bad connection and less time to do a little research. So, just thinking out loud.

I find there are four levels of online cooperation, or, to be more specific, online cooperation for development, say, online volunteering

• Advocacy: Online volunteering in advocacy consists in subscribing online campaigns to promote human rights and, more specifically, to report some human rights violation and, thus, to force some change. Amnesty International Spain campaign against death penalty in Nigeria for women such as Safiya Hussaini and Amina Lawal is a very good example. BUT, you’d never call it volunteering if asked to sign for a campaign in the middle of the street, so I’d rarely consider it online volunteering when it happens in the Internet, as I’ve seen these actions often labeled this way. On the other hand, sort of very “light” online volunteering would mean make people know about the campaign. Most of these sites include a “send to a friend” option. I think this is online volunteering, though, as I said, in a very few level of commitment.
• Assessment and consultancy: So you know some things and other people (NGOs) don’t. They have connection to the Internet and so you have. So the online volunteer is asked for advice and he brings back some kind of helpdesk service in plenty of subjects, usually related to NGO management or development projects management. No proactive but reactive. “Little” to “some” level of commitment depending on what happens if you just don’t answer the request for help. SolucionesONG (NGO Solutions), the Spanish online community born thanks to some retired enterprise managers that wanted to volunteer (and then enhanced into a portal by Fundación Chandra) is just that: a clearing house of questions and answers where needs (NGOs) and experts (online volunteers) meet. The online volunteer registers, defines his area of expertise and waits for mails to come in with the questions. Answering back or not is up to you. As there’s more than one person by area of expertise, questions rarely remain unanswered.
• Online volunteers for offline projects: This is the natural evolution of the last level. Why don’t increase the commitment of the online volunteer and give her or him a defined role in the development project the NGO is running? No helpdesk but responsibility: this is your duty, your task. These modality usually converts offline volunteers into online volunteers. I mean: volunteers that would exist anyway but that ICTs allow them not to travel abroad, not to be there in that precise place or then at that precise time. It is full volunteering, but kind of a real volunteering virtualisation. Most serious online volunteering programmes work this way.
• Online volunteers teams for online projects: But why virtualize when the Network could exist by itself? Why not think directly in online volunteers teams instead of thinking how to virtualize them? Why not think in fully online development projects instead of its online side? This is what keeps me thinking lately, related to what I said in my previous post and what I read in Pekka Himanen’s book The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. e-learning for development projects, just like F/OSS projects, do not need to have an off-line version, support, etc.

Just to conclude: while first and second steps in online volunteer can be a good approach to a newcomer to online cooperation for development, I think steps three and four should be fostered in order to profit from the full potential of ICT4D. We’ve seen very good examples of both, but mainly of the third type. But I think somehow somewhere a virtual community will rise and lead an exponential growth of the fourth type. The F/OSS community has already done it. The e-educators community – specially when talking about authoring and shared authoring tools – is in the way and there’re already new tools that start to make think of a possible and near future of a real virtual community of e-educators (or ICT assisted offline educators). We (I) should think on how to replicate these experiences in the development field.