ICTlogy

What I’m writing about can be found at the WikiMedia list of Projects page, but I feel like paying it a tribute here, as it is becoming the greatest repository of content on the Internet.

Projects actually held by the Wikimedia Foundation:

Wikipedia, the free-content encyclopedia.

Wiktionary, the multilingual dictionary in every language

Wikiquote, the compendium of quotations.

Wikibooks, a collection of open-content textbooks. It includes the Wikiversity, the learning community with online courses.

Wikisource, the repository of source texts in any language which are either in the public domain, or are released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Wikinews, the free-content news source

Wikimedia Commons, the central repository for free images, music, sound & video clips and, possibly, texts and spoken texts, used in pages of any Wikimedia project

Wikispecies, the open, free directory of species

Pretty bunch of content, isn’t it?
It might seem absurd to copy and paste this information here, but I guess some of us did not know about all the projects the WikiMedia Foundation is running untill we bumped into someone posting about them ;)

Yes, even if it might sound as something quite new, there’s a classical approach to online volunteering.

I can read here, here and, in part, also here, examples on how to e-volunteer or ways e-volunteers can help organizations. Right. The examples given are good and they do work.

Nevertheless I call it the classical approach because it usually deals with the virtualisation of onsite/offline/”real” volunteers. What I mean is that it is not an endogenous way of thinking about the internet possibilities, but designing volunteering posts as always and, then, after that, try and see if volunteers can stay home and do the things we planned.

I’m not saying this is not the way, but that this should have been the correct way until the whole thing became mature. Now that we’ve got some experience in the field, I think we should turn into – as I said before – some endogenous way of online volunteering design.

And this keeping in mind what the Internet is all about:

• Knowledge Management: I guess there’s no doubt that ICTs’ main added value is dealing with knowledge (we could talk whether it is knowledge, information or just data), so when talking about e-volunteers (or teleworkers) a good approach should be the identification of our most knowledge intensive tasks and the identification of our major knowledge holders. Matching should then be just fun.
• Networking: Talking to Janet Salmons past Friday I told her that we usually did not had individual online volunteers but teams. It seems to me that in a network architecture such as Internet’s, networking becomes almost a must. If we add the Knowledge Management approach, connecting people that know with knowledge intensive tasks/projects, then the networks is the way.

So far, end of my morning sermon ;)

Scott Leslie posts about the Wikiversity:

a free, open learning environment and research community. Online courses are being created as a form of co-operative and interactive exchange of knowledge

Some days ago Yan Simard and I had some interesting discussion about learning objects repositories vs. the power of the Internet by itself (enhanced by Google or other search engines) to act as a repository.

Well, I think the Wikiversity comes up to complicate things.
Simplifying quite a bit, I thing there are four kinds of free content (I wouldn’t call all of them learning objects) repositories:

• Learning objects repositories in the pure sense of the word, such as Careo or Maricopa’s MLX
• The Wikiversity, the Wikipedia and other wikis
• Open educational directories from education institutions, such as MIT OpenCourseWare or Berklee Shares
• The Internet itself + search engines

Forgive me for putting it that simple.
The question is that we’ve been talking and talking about folksonomies and it looks like what we make converge (categories) in one side we make it diverge the other side (repositories).

No, I don’t have any alternative, nor a clue. Just thinking out loud and sharing what I think is quite a big problem. At least, in the F/OSS field, even if there’s a huge diversity, you know that you have to be souceforged if you want to exist.

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.

When speaking at presentations, seminars and so, there’re usually two different approaches:

• Look, this is what we’ve done
• Let me explain to you why things happen

Depending on the audience, the speaker swings from the most practical point of view to the theoretical one or the contrary. In most cases, though, and this is my case, we tend to theorize, to go from concrete to global, to find the rule that moves the world, the key that will open any door. And I do it not because I am a great philosopher, but because I don’t want to bore my audience with details and, instead, I want to give them the essence of it all, the conclusions I got in my path of essay and error.

These last days we’ve been working together with my colleague Marc Ribó, expert in quality management, in the gathering of the history of the Campus for Peace. This morning he asked: “well, quite interesting the historic evolution of the Campus for Peace, it must have been exciting, hasn’t it?”

From this question, and from others people at seminars do, seems like everything was planned, that we once sat at the office and designed everything from the start. Well, I guess the answer to this is what spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite once said:

“A ver si te crees que las cosas que te cuento esta noche con su dejillo de filosofía las sé porque las he leído en un libro, no hijo, ni hablar, antes de ser palabra han sido confusión y daño, y gracias a eso, a haber pasado tú tu infierno y yo el mío podemos entendernos esta noche; vivimos un lujo, el de poderlo contar”

Or:

“Don’t you dare think that the things I’m telling you tonight, with their philosophic air, I know them because I read them in a book, no my son, no way, before being word they’ve been confusion and harm, and thanks to this, thanks to you having gone through your hell and I through mine, we now can understand each other tonight: we live the invaluable chance of being able to explain it”