eLearning Guild Annual Gathering 2007

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

David Holcombe kicks the morning off here at the Sheraton Boston announcing that attendance at the Annual Gathering is up 35% over last year.

Steve Wexler, the Guild’s new director of research comes on stage to demonstrate the Guild’s online interactive research tool. Scatter diagrams. Ability to select samples. Steve gets people hungry by showing how to figure out the salary of, say, instructional designers working for small companies in Florida. He mentions “if you’re bucking for a new job,” you can find the market rate for it. Then he shows satisfaction ratings for LMS. Blackboard users were more satisfied than Plateau users and less satisfied than Moodlers.

Clearly, the Guild has targeted research as a core effort and money-maker. Bump your membership fee by about $500 and you get increased access to the research tools. Also, you can buy research reports for an extra fee.

Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins, MIT
Comparative Media Studies Program

Says he has gone from being seen as an entertainer to being taken seriously. People are taking media in their own hands. Media companies are concerned about losing control over their IP. The truth is that they lost control long ago. It’s true in learning as well: you don’t control the learner. See http://henryjenkins.org

American Idol. A phenom! Henry points out product placement – screen shot of Paula Abdul with prominent glass of Coca-Cola. More votes for American Idol than in the last presidential election. Also web, global reach, visible feedback. Howard Stern crosses media line. Old and new media meet one another in convergence culture.

We now live in a world where every story, image, sound, idea, brand, and relationship will play itself out across all possible media platforms. Collective intelligence.

“Members of a thinking community search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore . . . not only does the cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment….” Pierre Levy See http://worldwithoutoil.org

We are seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their own interests. Participation is a property of cultures. Interactivity is a property of technologies.

Participatory culture. Low barriers to astistic expression and civic engagement. Informal mentorship. Social connection between members. Strong support to for creating new media.

The Wealth of Networks. Difficult book but worth reading.

We are acquiring skills now through our play, including our game play, which we will later apply towards more serious ends. (Henry and I are on exactly the same page on this stuff.)

10,000 anonymous Chinese meet in Second Life to protest against the government.

The spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify them…

Swiftboating is on the way.

Check out New London Group, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. If it were possible define generally the mission of education…. Learning is about participation. Think about Spelling Bee (punative) and Scrabble (positive).

Learning through remixing. How are we learning about culture, history, etc (Ties in to the each one/teach one aspect of informal learning. “We’re all in this together, man.”)

http://Projectnml.org – new media learning, funded by MacArthur Foundation. Learning through making media.

Funnily enough, Henry is talking at us about participation. He’s not eating his own dogfood here.

Talking about a “new informal curriculum.”

MySpace is banned from anything Federally funded. (even though kids are more likely to be molested in their Boy Scout troop than online)

Henry and I talked briefly after his presentation. His take on culture dovetails with my vision of where corporate learning culture must go. One aspect I hadn’t considered: workers learning by creating mash-ups of official policies and practices.