 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||||||
 |
 |
|
||||||
 |
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
||||||||
|
 |
|
Introduction The theme of this meeting was "Beyond eLearning 1.0: The Future of Learning Technology," building on the findings and methodologies in The Future of Learning Technology, the recent LoD report by Rob Edmonds. The meeting was hosted by IBM at its Bedfont facility near Heathrow airport. IBM was represented by four of its senior learning executives from the United States and the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region—all of whom (like a number of us) had just attended the Online Educa conference in Berlin (see the LoD News Item from 13 December 2004). As with other LoD meetings, which are for a relatively small group of 30 to 40 people to allow for a high degree of interaction, the meeting combined presentations with active discussion. It also included a session in the afternoon at which three groups of participants created a learning-technology roadmap using the methodology that Rob Edmonds presented both in his LoD report and at the meeting. A few of the results appear below. IBM's Perspectives on Learning Technology Nancy DeViney (general manager, IBM Learning Solutions WorldWide), and Yael Ravin (program director, Institute for Advanced Learning & Senior Manager, Learning Technologies, T. J. Watson Research Center) gave the participants a good view of how IBM sees learning and learning technology changing both the learning experience of the individual learner and of how this change will affect organizations and their (business) performance. Although IBM clearly sees an important and enabling role for technology in learning—both formal and informal, and in different sectors (schools, higher education, industry, and government)—DeViney emphasized the role of blended learning and how organizations must recognize the need for different learning models and learning needs and preferences of learners. Thus technology must empower learners to take control and enable learners to access a variety of tools, technologies, types of content, and people (as mentors and coaches) to achieve the learning experiences they need and want. As an upcoming report addressing workflow learning discusses, IBM also sees embedded learning (in business processes and workflows) complementing enabled and formal learning approaches. As part of her presentation, DeViney showed one of IBM's six vignettes for the future of learning, illustrating how IBM expects learning technologies to be used by different types of workers, in different industries, and for different tasks in the future. Although these vignettes seem futuristic, most of the underlying technology and tools in the vignettes are available today. What is necessary is for organizations to commit to learning in new ways to take advantage of these tools and to integrate them in a way that makes learning more effective and also more enjoyable for the worker. Given the coverage and variety of IBM's solution portfolio and its commitment to R&D, the fact that the corporation has a number of very interesting and important research projects that could one day dramatically affect the future of learning is not surprising. Yael Ravin discussed some of these projects, including what IBM is doing to help to create high-quality learning content more quickly and cost-effectively. Although Ravin and her colleagues recognize that context and people resources are very often key success factors in achieving effective learning, learning content remains an important factor—whether it consists of formal courseware or more informal content. Some of this information raises issues relating to finding needed content, and thus to how to tag content with metadata quickly and effectively (see the December 2004 LoD News items on searching and "emergent semantics"). Ravin and her colleagues are working in this area to build some important tools that will simplify and automate the process of metatagging. Another very interesting area with potentially dramatic impact on learning is what IBM refers to as "social computing," which restores social contact often missing in today's learning systems. According to Ravin, "Social computing systems gather, store, process, represent, and disseminate social information distributed across teams, communities, organizations, populations, and markets. They manage social features such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability, presence, social roles, expertise, knowledge, and ownership." Social computing therefore promises to enable future learning systems that take into account a great deal more important information (about the learner and his or her needs and context) than is currently possible. LoD Technology Roadmapping Rob Edmonds's presentation drew on work done by SRI Consulting Business Intelligence both in the LoD program and in our consulting work, and his design of the roadmapping exercise in the afternoon used some of the methodologies from our research. In addition to giving examples of some roadmaps that each addressed technology and learning functionality and resulting learning products and services, Edmonds discussed high-impact, high-uncertainty issues that organizations need to pay attention to as they do their planning. Four areas of focus in Edmonds's work—that his LoD report examines in detail—include the following:
Finnish Perspectives on Learning and Learning Technology A four-man delegation from Finland—an early adopter of mobile technologies, in particular (in part because of the success of Nokia), but with large numbers of small and innovative companies in learning and new media—gave the attendees insight into what Finland and Finnish companies are doing, and have done, on the eLearning front. Kari Mikkela from the Center of Expertise for Digital Media, Content Production and Learning Services set the stage for some of the themes that Markku Markkula would address in the following presentation and specifically addressed issues related to developing value chains in the learning industry and how to help orchestrate an ecosystem that will help all players thrive. Mikkela and his colleagues are probably on the leading edge of mapping clusters of companies in the learning and new media sector in order to understand better how they can achieve sustainable success (see the figure in his presentation "Orchestration of the Ecosystem"). So far they have identified and mapped more than 200 services companies in 37 service categories. Because the eLearning industry has not grown as rapidly as many people had expected a few years ago (see the discussion below of the presentation by Tim Madeley from WBT Systems), it is difficult for small eLearing companies to survive without collaborating and linking with other firms—either domestically or internationally. Thus the work of Kari Mikkela and his colleagues may provide an important basis for small players to find each other and to help them map out their collaboration strategies. But Mikkela's data and company intelligence may also be important for policy makers if they want to understand better how this ecosystem works and what types of policy intervention—in terms of direct support or other economic-development actions that may be considerations—may be most effective in this environment. Markku Markkula, a former member of the Finnish Parliament, presented some views on how learning and knowledge are seen and addressed in the policy arena in Finland. Markkula discussed some of the recommendations that he and his colleagues have made to ensure that Finland becomes even more of a knowledge-based society than it is currently. He ended with a discussion of lifelong learning and continuing education and the roles that universities can and must play in it. We also heard some inside views of a start-up company in Mikkela's ecosystems from Tuomas Lehtinen of Mediameisteri and heard Henry Tirri from Nokia Research Center discuss the role of networks and enabling technologies that support self-organizing talent. Tirri noted that PCs by themselves don't serve us particularly well, but when networked and playing a part of an ecosystem of a range of devices (many of them mobile), they produce a whole new effect. According to Tirri, almost all technological and economic megatrends are related to supporting communication and referred to mobile phones, wide-area local networks, the Web, and sensor nets. Although we have only some 300 million PCs today, we have more than 1 billion information devices (such as mobile phones and PDAs); 2 billion "smart devices" in buildings, appliances, and vehicles; 500 billion microprocessors; and more than 1 trillion sensors and radio-frequency–identification devices. These devices enable the generation of enormous amounts of information and data, as well as giving us an enormous networked infrastructure for communication and collaboration. When we add metadata (data about data) to more and more of the information and content that devices, systems, and people capture and create, the information and content will become more useful and easier to find. Digital photography that is now seeing exploding use as developers embed cameras in mobile phones and the devices become better and easier to use (and to store, share, manage, and print out) will be just one way in which tagged content will explode. Tirri noted that talents necessary today and in the future must be able to find, assess, and generate predictive patterns and cut through the vast amount of noise that the explosion of data and content is generating. What we also need is talent that can create rich frameworks that enable us to study patterns and allow us to recognize and use relevant patterns. A range of existing and emerging technologies will enable us to build richer frameworks and collect the information and data necessary to determine patterns, but we also need talented people who can do analysis and use available technology. The Success and Failures of eLearning The final presentation, by Tim Madeley of WBT Systems, before the roadmapping exercise gave the meeting participants some very useful perspectives by addressing what we did right and wrong in the past and what it all means for the future. Reflecting on the past is always interesting and certainly can help understand better what may come, although the future is inherently uncertain and unpredictable. To apply lessons from the past in a way that can bring future success can thus be difficult. In Madeley's view, technology platforms are now integrating learning-management systems, learning-content–management systems, authoring systems, and virtual classrooms—giving us more useful platforms than we had earlier. But he sees the "solution phase" characterized by technology, services, and content now separating again into distinct elements after first coming together during 2001–02. Some of the key problems of the past include poor economics (large upfront investment and high risk relative to the reward), immature technology (too data driven and often confusing), little human investment (ignoring necessary marketing, for instance), and lack of process integration. Future success will require better alignment, Madeley believes, including aligning producers with consumers at all levels as well as aligning business vision and technology vision. No one took issue with any of these views and also general agreement existed about his views on the future of "personalized learning on demand" (also consonant with IBM's on-demand learning and our long-held view of "learning on demand"), which he characterized in the following way:
These drivers will have the following results:
Questions and Answers and Open Discussion A number of questions focused on the role and importance of both formal and informal content—and emerging tools for developers to structure learning materials properly (while taking into account cultural and other differences that play an important role in learning)—as well as the recognition of the importance of taking learner and learning context into account. More and more organizations are today trying to achieve rapid content development and delivery, driven by rapid changes in the business environment and needs of learners as well as by limited budgets. The importance of communication and the additional complexity of different languages (pointing to the importance of content localization that a number of previous LoD meetings have addressed, because it is a focus area and strength of many Irish eLearning companies attending our meetings) came up in the discussion. To some extent, technology is now able to help deal with this issue, but no perfect solution for language translation exists. IBM and others are developing systems that in some cases can give at least a partial solution that together with human assistance can produce a good translation. Although IBM's recently announced "super-computer on a chip" ("the Cell"), with 16 teraflops of processing power, can help us solve the translation problem, Yael Ravin admitted that semantics and context make it very difficult to come up with automated solutions. Nevertheless, new statistical techniques are finding application. A number of other issues and topics had attention during the day, including the role of assessments in learning—a topic that has long caused debate and argument in schools and higher education because of the different views on what metrics should be used and whether assessments sufficiently capture the many dimensions of learning. In the workplace, assessment is necessary for many areas of formal learning where certification and regulatory compliance are required, but cultural issues often complicate assessment design. As simulations gain greater use in learning, it becomes easier to do assessments that give a true picture of the learner's competence or skills in performing certain tasks and how he or she makes decisions in certain situations and contexts. Such assessments, therefore, may be able to provide a much richer form of assessment than most of today's tests based on true and false responses and multiple-choice testing. Technology Roadmapping Exercise This part of the meeting seemed to be enjoyed by everyone because it allowed for a lively discussion and interactive dialogue in each of the three groups that explored what we would see in the areas of technology, functionality, and resulting learning products and services (see the presentation by Rob Edmonds). In the area of technology, some of the following items and issues were discussion topics: need for better user interfaces; increasing broadband and how it will enable new learning experiences and use of new tools; mobile and portable devices seeing growing use in learning; increasing "intelligence" because we will see "smart spaces" and growing use of sensors and RFIDs, which in turn will allow for better context specification; automated metatagging (an area in which IBM is developing new tools); Semantic Web (see the December 2004 LoD News item); standards-based simulations systems; and intelligent-learning buildings and spaces. New functionality that would be delivered by some of the emerging technologies discussed by the three groups included greater ease of use of learning systems, adaptive customization of content and systems, tagging of video-based content, location-aware services, immersive collaborative gaming, instant video collaboration, open-source learning (increasing the amount, variety, and quality of content), greater information extraction from collaboration and chat, better visualization interfaces, automatic profiling of learners to adapt suitable and relevant content better, and reusable learning-object sequencing. Finally, some of the learning products and services that may result include new products for embedded assessments; products that will enable more rapid content development and conversion; new game-based learning environments; augmented-reality services; dynamic learning profiling systems; content filter services and content gateways; individual knowledge portfolios; performance simulations products; cross-company, cross-publisher repositories of learning objects; and systems that allow for new learning metrics linked to organizational performance. Presentations:
|
 |
|
||||||||||||
(Korean Inquiries)
(Japanese site)