Siemens: Questions I'm no longer asking

This post is so brilliant, I wish I'd written it myself! George Siemens has absolutely nailed it with this one. While many people are still squabbling over the scraps like the gulls in Finding Nemo (see below), George has long since reached "ah shaddup" point.

The questions he's no longer asking are:

1. Is online learning more or less effective than learning in a classroom?
2. Does technology use vary by age?
3. How do learning styles influence learning online?
4. What role do blogs or microblogging [insert tool in question] play classroom or online learning?
5. How can educators implement [whatever tool] into their teaching?
6. Is connectivism a learning theory?

I won't steal his thunder by revealing the answers here - go and read them on his blog. You won't be sorry.

And now for those gulls...

First Life - a different take

Listening to a Training Magazine Network recording of Allison Rossett talking about what e-learning is and isn't, I came across this YouTube video. Good for a chortle.



Have you considered First Life for your business meetings, yet? ;o)

Namechk

Today, via a Facebook group, I learned about namechk, a mashup which allows you to see whether your username is available on a variety of social media sites. Since usernames and online identity are increasingly intertwined, it's a useful service to have.

learninganorak is available everywhere except YouTube - where it has been taken by me! What would be nice now, would be a way to reserve the name in all those spaces in one batch!

Reinventing the has-been

As a sort of continuation to this post.

There is a series on the BBC at the moment (which I can't bring myself to watch) in which pop idols of yesteryear are tracked down and given an extreme makeover to see whether they can still wow an audience.

The first outfit they tracked down was a duo I had never heard of (but then I wasn't in the UK in the '80s, when they were in their heyday). This pair had both inevitably aged. And why is this a bad thing?

In this teaser for the series, the male half of the duo just about broke my heart. Not because he was overweight or middle-aged (I see overweight and middle-aged every time I look in the mirror!) but because his face looked positively Mickey Rourke-esque. As if he had spent the past 20 years engaging in heavy drinking and then trying to improve things with a facelift that had exactly the opposite effect... and this was before the extreme makeover began! I confess I have no idea how successful or otherwise the makeover was.

So what has this got to do with learning?

Simply this. When a thing is past its prime and has had its day, repackaging, rebranding and relaunching it is not going to make it what it was in its prime. It just makes it ridiculous. The audience demands have changed.

Chalk and talk has had its day. Using a medium like Second Life to deliver a chalk and talk session is not a move forward. Let's not try to nip and tuck the old bird into something hip and modern. Let's not make her ridiculous. Let's just be gracious about this and let her fade gently into obscurity, dreaming of a bygone era and muttering to herself.

And instead, look for ways to use the newer media to deliver meaningful learning appropriate for today's audience.

And let's recognise that it, too, will have its day and then be supplanted by something else. That's just how it is.

Sequel to an African tale

My recent participation in a blogversation caused a fresh trickle of traffic to a post of mine from some time ago, including a comment which brought this blog by Kobus van Wyk onto my radar. I would like to encourage readers to swing by and offer support and encouragement.

Google reader has gone mad!

Just wondering if anyone else is having similar experiences with their Reader over the past few days. Yesterday, the number of new posts showing against some blogs was unrealistically high. When I had identified that I had, in fact, already read all the posts on that blog, I would select 'Mark all as read' and move on, only to have that same number of posts listed against the blog within seconds.

This morning, my account is showing 496 new posts, including 9 from me. Bloglines, on the other hand shows 21.

Any suggestions?

Imagine...

Imagine if no-one ever spoke at meetings unless they were certain that they had the definitive, final solution.

Imagine if no-one ever chatted to their friends unless they were absolutely 100% sure of their facts.

Imagine if no-one ever published an academic paper unless they knew that no-one anywhere could find fault with it.

Imagine if no-one ever conducted a workshop unless they knew that they could answer absolutely every question that the attendees might raise.

Imagine if no-one ever presented at a conference unless they knew every last detail about the subject.

Imagine if no documentaries were ever released until every last piece of information had been captured.

Imagine if no-one ever sent an email unless they were sure it was complete and accurate.

Imagine if no-one ever spoke to their colleagues until they had collected every fact on a subject.

What a silent world it would be! What a small handful of people would hold all the knowledge in the world, until, as they died off, eventually no-one knew anything, because no-one shared their incomplete perspectives and the complete perspective was never achieved.

Ridiculous.

Of course, ridiculous.

So why oh why do we impose these restrictions on collaborative knowledge building, learning, sharing that happens online? Why the moved goalposts? Why the special treatment?