Dion Hinchcliffe always does great visuals but I really like this one because I think it will translate well for audiences that perhaps don't swim in water as steeped in technology as all of you reading this.
This is a great way to explain how these pieces fit together.
I love the Webby Awards. Thought they were a bit cheesy at first but what do I know? I wasn't exactly around when the Oscars got started, maybe people thought they were a bit cheesy too. One of the reasons that I like them so much is because they do put design on a front burner and more and more, especially in the learning and training fields, I am coming to consider design, in all forms, as critical yet seriously under-represented. Anyway, the Webby Awards first caught my eye with their 5 word acceptance speeches. I love the recognition that constraints build creativity. Some of my favs from this year:
The image above is the Webby's Flash gallery to all this year's winners. Love the design. I guess I also like the Webby Awards and other award efforts like the Webware 100 winners and the eduBlog Awards, because they can serve as roadmaps - yes biased and yes open to manipulation but don't get me started on the politics inherent in maps - but maps nonetheless that can serve as starting points for explorations into the leading/bleeding/cutting edge of what people are doing on the Web both from a technological standpoint and from a cultural standpoint. So use them as that. Don't believe that these efforts find the absolute best on the Web but believe that they probably gather a nice starter set...go from there.
So I was reading the SCORM 2.0 White Paper Solicitation and I came to this section of items that would be valuable to have addressed by submitted white papers:
"Collaboration and Community. Learning takes place within a community and is a collaborative activity. How should SCORM 2.0 enable interoperability among learning systems and the technologies that support collaboration and community, including social networks, community learning, wikis, blogs, multiplayer games, and the emerging world of user generated content?"
Then I started seeing all the news about Google's new "Friend Connect" (and geez, if you watch the tech news at all, you'd have to live in an abandoned missile silo under a rock to have missed this breathless avalanche of stories (e.g. Tech Crunch, ZDNet Blogs, CNET News, NYTimes, PC World, actual Google Press Release).
I do like this explanation of the functionality from PC World:
"The way it works is any site that wants to can add Friend Connect functionality to their site can simply by adding a bit of HTML code to their site. The Friend Connect feature on a site acts as a small peephole on a Web page allowing content from a preselected social network (including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and others)to be viewed within the predefined window. In this way, Friend Connect seems to just be a way to pull information in from existing networks, almost like how it's possible to embed YouTube videos on your site with limited functionality. Similarly Friend Connect allows Web site visitors to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or… with existing friends from social sites on the Web."
Of course every story goes out of its way to say that this is just the latest in a growing body of efforts to link up the various parts of the social graph. Players in this arena (although not exactly all in the same role or capacity) include Facebook Connect, the Data Portability Project (of which MySpace is a member), and Google's Open Social. These also intersect in ways with projects like OAuth ("An open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.") and Open ID ("OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.").
All of this, the SCORM 2.0 piece and the work being done in all these other places really slammed it home for me how different our e-learning planet is now about a decade down the road. We aren't working in a vacuum or some isolated market vertical. We are running full tilt into other efforts in exploding market spaces that may well be already trying to solve problems that have thought were unique to us. If I was evaluating the white papers and I'm not, I would really look for one that included a process for investigating and evaluating how all of this other work might integrate with the search for SCORM 2.0. That white paper would be a prize itself.
(photo credit) I keep telling people that the whole "Web X.0 thing" (I thought I had that original idea this morning, Googled it and found like 520,000 results with the oldest one seeming to date from 2005 by Joi Ito - 2005 in Web Time being something akin to the Paleoproterozoic) really reminds of the introduction of e-learning. The excitement in some circles feels very similar and the trepidation in other circles also has a very deja vu ring to it. The other similarity is inevitability.
Imagine if you drove the car your have now to work but when you got to work and had to drive any where, you had to take a horse-drawn carriage. How would that strike you? Web X.0 becoming mainstream in the enterprise is being driven from the consumer-side. Why is that important? Because it is outside the control of companies and organizations. People will see and use these tolls and then they will come to work expecting them and no, it won't be just the Gen X'ers, Millennials, or Gen Y's. The tools will are already becoming integrated with your existing enterprise platforms, so they're already inside the firewall. What can you do? Change. The hardest thing in the world - re-conceptualize everything from incentives to strategic objectives to make the best use of these emerging technologies and innovations - not in a faddish, short-term way though; create a process for evaluating and integrating these changes in a way that makes sense from a business perspective - the most important thing though is the starting point - don't start from a place that says "how little can we allow through and still keep going?" - ask instead "how much can we allow through and still remain coherent?"
Here is one for you: Web 2.0: Companies Will Spend $4.6 Billion By 2013, Forrester Predicts
(excerpt) "Though still considered an upstart technology, Forrester believes that conventional Web 2.0 elements -- social networking, RSS, blogs, wikis, mashups, podcasting, and widgets -- are fast becoming the norm for communicating with employees and customers. The report highlights megacompanies such as General Motors, McDonald's, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, and Wells Fargo among those who already have jumped into the Web 2.0 pool with both feet. Additionally, some 56% of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008, according to another recent
Forrester survey."
Want more? How about JackBe and Kapow releasing enterprise-grade mashup platforms? And before you say - "Yeah but my enterprise has security concerns, blah blah blah" Check out JackBe's case study of their work with the Defense Intelligence Agency and then talk to me about security concerns.
More?? How little companies like Intel releasing a client-side mashup creator and Microsoft releasing Live Mesh? Check out these business and career focused apps on Facebook. Or some of the great app from the Webware 100 Winners. Oh for Pete's sake, even Dilbert is doing it.
So please, much as with the "Should we use games for learning?" question - can we put the "IF" we'll use Web X.0 tools for learning and really get down to creating some design principles and case studies and processes that will help? Because your job will change..will you change with it?
In the beginning there were dumb clients and the server reigned supreme. Then came the powerful desktops and the server lost control. Then came the Web and while there were still powerful desktops, peoples' desire for storage, search and functionality and small devices, drove them toward the Web as a platform and servers regained much of their power - although, where before it was like a monarchy, this time its more of a bicameral system with a strong executive. Confused? Great. Right on track.
MSFT, Adobe and Firefox are among the big players developing ways to run Web apps (e.g. GMail) in their own personal, customized browsers as opposed to them living as a tab in your browser. TechCrunch has a great article which looks at the major efforts through the lens of Firefox's effort - Prism. ZDNet has an article that also looks at Prism and the idea that it is already available as an extension in the beta versions of firefox 3. You should read both articles but a quote toward the end of the TechCrunch piece caught my eye:
"It’s pretty early to call a winner in the site-specific browser space, especially since heavyweights like Apple and Microsoft are probably poised to enter the game as well. But Prism has one big advantage: a killer app in the form of Firefox. By integrating Prism into a future version of Firefox, Mozilla could quickly get its technology into the hands of its 150 million users. AIR, on the other hand, has the advantage of using Flash and Flex to add sizzle to web app user interfaces, at the price of requiring potentially significant adaption on the part of the web app developer. However the space shakes out, the era of running applications in a tab in a traditional web browser may soon be coming to an end."
Another blog within the ZDNEt universe kind of brings this to a head with an article entitled "Microsoft, Apple, and the death of the desktop" .....a bit hyperbolic and I think misses what to me is the interesting point; design choices. These browser bits are being referred to as "single-site browsers" (SSBs)...an interesting design element here is that when a Web site is presented in a regular browser, the UI has to have buttons and functionalities for all occasions. SSBs can be designed to be customized to a specific Web app and that means slimmed down, sleeker UIs. I am just wondering as all this shakes out, about designing a building Web-based, learning focused SSBs...what would they be good for? What would they be bad at? I don't know the answers but I do think that as designers or learning opportunities, we should be aware of how our learners' computing environments may be shifting and how we can best leverage that shift.
(article link) 
When I first saw this article, I thought 'great, another study telling us what we already know.' That doesn't mean that its not a good article, it is, just slightly predictable. What is interesting though is that the article draws its data from a study conducted by the Society for Information Management. Those of us who have homes out past town on what we consider the bleeding edge, often like to paint the "IT Guys" as the black hats, riding in to crush our innovations and creative dreams that could transform the organization! So I thought it was really interesting to have an IT professional organization not only commission a study but then to return said study with as solid a set of recommendations as though below. Kudos.
The study recommended:
OK...today we have two reasons why having a browser built on open source code with a powerful and passionate development community behind it, will continue to provide a more robust and user-focused experience than something provided by say a large corporation - no knock on large corporations (some of my best friends...).
Reason #1: Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2. Hmmm. That's a tough one. Really need a degree in rocket science to understand that.
Reason #2: Hands on: Mozilla's new Prism brings web sites to the desktop. (Link to Prism extension - only available for FF 3.0+). Excerpt from the Ars article:
"Prism makes it possible to launch web sites from the desktop and load
them into a simple browser window without all of the extra features and
functionality of a regular browser. This is advantageous for users
because it allows them to run those sites in a separate process from
their regular Firefox browser and interact with the content without any
unnecessary distractions. Prism also allows web application content to
be customized in some ways to make it more conducive to desktop use."
Ooooh. I can't wait for Firefox 3 to be out of beta now. Don't see it yet? Imagine you manage a course and you have a web page you go to to follow registrations, etc. Well now you can just create your own 'widget' that loads up that page from a bookmark that you can have on your desktop w/out having to open the whole browser. Now I do want to see this in the wild and be able to watch what kind of resources this draws...FF can have memory leaks - especially in extensions...but overall, this is really going to be handy.
So I am in DC today and attending the Web 2.0 University workshop put on by the fine folks at Hinchcliffe and Company. Its good content, presented ably by Jeff Kelly, formerly of AOL.
One of the really valuable things that this workshop is helping me to do is to look at how I can better explain Web 2.0 to people who don't breath it as deeply as I do. I am trying to come up with a series, almost a menu really, of Web 2.0 technologies (I know its not about the technology but when my bosses ask me what pieces of Web 2.0 we have coming in the door, technology is what they mean)....coupled with explanations of their capabilities and impact. It's looking something like the items below. I'd love some help finding the best, short definitions for these technologies, pieces that I really need to include, and ways in which you feel or have seen these technologies impact businesses and/or other organizations.
...Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have, I'll publish the aggregated list here once I get finished....
Blogs
Capability: Allows Individual Users to speak passionately on topics of their own choosing
DAU Use/Impact: Technology is included in upcoming Ecco release and will allow for a range of possible scenarios (faculty will be able to blog about ACQ topics that they feel passionately about, each class will be able to have its own blog to distribute data/assignments/student contributions [which then becomes easily searchable]).
Wikis – Allows groups of users to collaboratively write and edit quickly with integrated discussion, version control and tracking
Capability:
DAU Use/Impact:
Social Bookmarking
Capability:
DAU Use/Impact:
Video/Audio (podcasting/vodcasting on its face is NOT Web 2.0, using Web-based services to create and distribute these objects IS Web 2.0)
Capability:
DAU Use/Impact:
Tagging
Capability:
DAU Use/Impact:
Collaboration
Capability:
DAU Use/Impact:
One of my favorite sessions at GDC was Player Generated Content in Casual Games (my notes). Another great one was Facebook and the new web of Social Gaming (notes) (You have to scroll down a bit - did I mention what a horror show the printed guide was for this conference?).
So what really strikes me is that between sites like Kongregate and Facebook, the bar has never been lower for starting your own company. Check out this class, taught at a small West Coast school, Stanford, on Creating Engaging Facebook Apps.
Here is my question to all of us (corporate, government and education types)...when a 23 year old can write one app/game and get 1 million page views a day and.....how do we either prepare them better to be able to do that or stay relevant to them as employers/trainers after they have?
I mean they could create the app, run it as a company for six months and then maybe it goes out of favor and then they come back to school or they come to you for a job. How we flex to that? Can we leverage their experience internally while filling in the blanks they may have?
