Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Slideshare.com is an online service where you can upload and share your presentations. They accept presentations up to 20 MB in .ppt, .pdf or Open Office format. So in the spirit of trying out web2.0 thingies, I created a free account and uploaded some slideshows on the 6C learning framework. Not surprisingly, the site works with tags, sharing and commenting.

I had to retry my upload several times ('pipe error'), but in the end it did work. You can find them back on http://www.slideshare.net/decouteb .

The slideshows are presented in a flash format and are of course searchable by tag. The flash format of course prevents reuse or copy/paste of text and image you like.
These are the presentations of Tom, guilty of showing me the site. Many thanks.

Patents basically give you a certain timeframe to exploit (as a monopolist) your own invention. The backside is you need to publish all details of your invention and share it with the world. Patents are thus a system to allow rapid technical evolution and associated economical growth because others can see what you did and build upon it. Without patents there would be far less stimulus to invent, because others would just walk away with your great ideas anyway, so why bother...

That's (my version of) the theory. And theoretically I'm in favor of patents. But than there is reality.
First of all looking at the practical side of the story, patents are a play of the big corporations because it is an expensive and complicated process that involves very specialised patent attorneys and writers. Effectively, it's out of the reach of small companies or average Joe, especially if you want to file your invention in several countries.
Secondly, patent organisations (www.epo.org in Europe for example) have granted ridiculeous patents, especially in the area of software. This endangers the system of patents on its own. At present there are lawsuits from Blackboard that claims to have invented learning systems or something close to that. You could so to speak have patented the concept of a button on a web page...
Thirdly, because there is almost no other way for research centres to measure their economical outcome, many researchers are evaluated on the number of patents they file. My company, IBM, for example is proud to file the highest number of patents every year. But that is a system that pushes people to file for even more patents that not necessarily make sense or are worth protecting. It just adds to the corporate patent 'war' library that can be used to scare off new entrants, hold competitors hostage in costly trials or suck dry via legal settlements.

I'm an average Joe. I have no company. And I still want to build this about2findout.com project. If along the way I would invent something or introduce new concepts, there is no way I could pay for a patent or other form of legal protection even if I wanted to. Luckily for the open source and web2.0 community there is something as Creative Commons, also known as copyleft. It provides a legal framework to share your work, without others later on being able to put their own name on it.

Another problem with patents is the openess. Or the lack of it. It is almost impossible that Linux has no single line of code in it that breaks a patent of let's say - Microsoft. Or any big firm for that matter. That is why the big guys cross-license their patent portfolio with eachother. Patents are close to corporate politics. You can't constantly check all your work for previous patents on it, can you? It used to be quite difficult anyway to search patents, but as with many types of scattered or secret or hard to find information, Google comes to the resue. They just launches the Google Patent Search, that searches patent databases.

Just for fun, I typed in the word e-learning.
http://www.google.com/patents?q=e-learning&btnG=Search+Patents

It would seem SAP filed a patent for course structures in e-learning. Right.

Bottom line, as long as about2findout.com stays small and never generates profit things will be fine. If it gets too big or makes profit there will be players on the market that (mis)use patents or copyrights. Just take the example of YouTube: it never made money, but the second rich Google bought the company, the company UTube sued because it resembled its name.

DECISION: I'm staying away from patents and all that expensive protection because I don't believe the little ones can win here. I put all my trust in the community and the Creative Commons licenses.

I've started the first phase of the about2findout.com project, which is the creation of a mock-up site. As the name suggests, that is a site without any functionality. It's just a bunch of text and pictures to give a visual idea of where about2findout.com is going.

The first pages have been created, so please have a look and give me any feedback that comes to mind. (http://www.about2findout.com)



The mock-up site also contains a first square example: the roots of Santa Claus. It's my Christmas card to all readers, enjoy! You can find it back here. (http://www.about2findout.com/a2fo/findout/overview.htm)

DECISION: When the mock-up is more complete I'll start talks with selected people to finetune the concept and prioritise the development. Development will not start before Microsoft releases the ASP.NET AJAX Extentions (currently in beta and expected in january/february).

Buttons

There is a service at www.buttonator.com that lets you create web 2.0 style of buttons. It's a commercial subscription service that will cost you 10$ per month, but the old beta site is still available for free at http://old.buttonator.com/ .





I might use a few buttons on my site. The text on the buttons is not equally aligned though...

Web 2.0 Style Generator

A free 'joke' site at http://www.web20generator.com generates a typical web 2.0 style page based on your selected colors. It has a gradient background and rounded corners. You can save the generated page and use it as a base for your own site.

It's that time of the year again when you get wishes and e-cards full of dancing Santa's in your mailbox. Yesterday was my last working day of the year and I had a hard time keeping up with all new incoming Christmas e-mail! I'm always interested to see what new stuff people are using for their reflections on the past and new year.

- Of course, I had my share of dancing Santa's and other animated gif files.
- Flash cards are also still popular. Our team in Spain made one starring a mouse.
- Our Brussels team created a nice flash-based multi-player game this year. It is basically a word guessing game dressed in snowflakes but it is also a clear intention statement of the kind of things we might expect from them next year.
- Managers want to top that of course, so our region (Benelux) manager at IBM send around a video-based greeting. If only the guys doing the recording had switched off their mobile phone :-) (hint: switch off your cellphone if you are recording someone, it creates interference noise)
- Our Belgian CEO also created a video based message, that was made via the online video editing tool onetruemedia.com .

http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/share_online?&utm_source=emplay&utm_medium=txt3

- And my own manager wanted to top that, so he quickly made a video greeting with his webcam. (He's probably reading this, hi manager!)
- The most learning-related wish I got this year came from MyNetwork in Poland. It's a short e-learning course (in Polish!) on Christmas:

 http://xmas.mynetwork.pl/mail.html

As for me, I'm working on my Christmas card as we speak. I'll post it tomorrow. It's part of the about2findout.com mock-up. Stay tuned.

Congratulations, dear internet user and blog reader! You are the person of the year 2006, according to Time Magazine. They have chosen you for the contributions you have made to the 'collective mind', via the millions of blogs, wiki's and other places where people create the net and not systems. Keep up the good work!

The four key areas of about2findout.com will each be identified by their own color. Today I've been working on the color scheme and the style guide. (And I'm not good at it.)

• Find out : pink / purple
• Explain : dark and light green
• Helping hand : yellog and orange
• U&I : dark and light blue

Fonts will be Tahoma, Verdana, Arial.

How did I do it?
- You can 'suck up' a color from an image you like with the color picker tool in PAINT.NET or other graphical tools.
- Colors are either displayed in RGB (Red Green Blue) values, or in hexadecimal form (#FFFFFF). You can convert the values with some free convertor sites, for example http://www.kenjikojima.com/java/RGBHexConverter2.html .

Here I am trying to find out how to set up a web2.0 thingie, and the perfect answer is out there:
http://emptybottle.org/bullshit/ . The Web 2.0 BullShit Generator lets you make phrases to add to your business plan. According to the generator, I should 'share undefined communities'. Makes sense.

There is another helpful and equally serious site to get a cool web2.0 name on http://andrewwooldridge.com/myapps/webtwopointoh.html . So my name should have been MeeBeeRaTi instead of about2findout.com. Also makes sense.

The Web 2.0 logo creator seems to be offline though (http://msig.info/web2test.php)... Pitty. It's the only one I actually used so far :-) .




There is so much scepsis about web 2.0. Maybe we are heading for a second bubble. But then again maybe we won't hit the wall if we keep the lessons from Bubble 1.0 in mind. Any way or the other, I'll be part of it this time. I need something to tell to my little nephews when I'm old...

Another online service in the web2.0 world. For 2007 my friend and me are going to use Google Calendar for our common agenda. It's another free service, you just need a Google account. You can create and display several agenda's , share them with others, create and manage appointments and all the usual things you expect from a basic calendar.
I exported my Outlook agenda (actually my PDA agenda) to CSV format, and imported it back in Google. That is when I discovered a bug in the program: when you create an agenda you can set a timezone, but it isn't saved. You need to go to the settings of your newly created agenda and set the timezone again. If you don't you will discover errors during import of another calendar.

But all in all this seems like a nice, free and easy to use online calendar that should make our lives a little easier. We could even share this agenda with our mothers (although I'm not sure I want to do that yet :-) ).

I'm still struggling with the design of about2findout.com. Sometimes I just want to mimic some web site, or use a generated template. You can save a HTML page via your browser's 'Save As...' menu command, but this often doesn't save the stylesheets (CSS) or other layout elements.

To 'suck' a site to your computer, with linked pages, images and everything included I found a tool called Web Reaper. It's freeware.

Used it to 'suck' the generated hideous but typical web2.0 looks from www.web20generator.com . But contradictory to its feature list, it did not 'suck' the embedded CSS images. So I did that manually.

Technorati.com is for blogs what Google search is for web pages. It's basically a search engine for blogs. But as a proper web 2.0 thingie, it also has web service interfaces others can make use of and build upon.
I just opened a free account on Technorati, made my profile and 'claimed' my two blogs. I also added a technorati search function to the layout of my blog. It would seem three semi-automated blogs have linked to me so far :-), one of them in Japan.

As I am fairly new to blogging and still figuring out for myself how to best give it a place in my life, I didn't want to do it sooner. But now I'm blogging for two months so there is something to read on my blog that is hopefully interesting for others.

Labels: Technorati

This mindmap summarizes what about2findout.com might look like. (Click to enlarge.) In the next months I'll start building some of the components.


Please feel free to comment and contact me to refine the current plan, add your bright ideas, prioritize or just discuss.

You can reach me at bert@6c-learning.org .

• I remember the first time I was confronted with a mindmap. It was in one of my MBA classes two years ago. The guest speaker Jef Staes only had one handout: a mindmap of his entire lesson. When I look back at it now, I can still recall his story. If I remember well, a MASIE studie revealed that only 70 to 80% of employees look back at their notes after following a classroom training. So why take all these text notes when one picture can literally say a thousand words? The more I am confronted with mindmaps, the more I like them. They are increasinly used in education to lay out the story or to summarize. Compenies find in mindmaps a useful brainstorming tool. A professor and his students made a 10+ meter one on American history. Sometimes during conferences live mindmap is drawn and projected during the speech.

First some definitions. Mindmaps are basically visualisations of ideas and items around a central topic, usually drawn in the middle. Concept maps differ from mindmaps in the links: the nature of the link is defined in a concept map, so it is rather a visualisation of relationships. Otherwise, I find the two very similar. The first image in this post is a mindmap I have drawn on requirement gaterhing for e-learning projects. The second image in this post is an example of a concept map.


There are several tools out there to make these maps. I'd like to share 3 with you:

• Freemind : Freemind is a JAVA program that you can download for free here. The best thing about this open source project is that it is free. But that's about it. I find it quite ugly (looks do matter, especially for visualisation software). And when you export Freemind maps to web pages it generates text-based trees. Maybe Freemind will improve with time but for now, I'm not a fan and I'm not gonna use it any further.
• Mindmanager : the most sold commercial mindmapping software, by a company called MindJet. The first image on this post (the requirements gaterhing one) is made with a trial version of MindManager. It's a very rich and easy to use program, with nice visualisations. Also exports to various formats such as web, powerpoint etc work quite well. The big negative point is its price tag: the PRO version will cost you 299 euro. That is quite a lot of money.
• IHMC CMap Tools : made by IHMC, this free tool allows you to create concept maps. I did not find the time to use the tool myself yet, but I've seen a colleague using it and it looks quite straightforward and easy to use. CMapTools are for free. CMapServer is a server-based repository for CMaps and is not free for commercial use.

But by far the best mindmaps to my humble opinion are still the ones drawn by hand. The image hereunder is one I got from www.eoi.be, the site of Jef Staes who rose my curiosity on mindmaps.























DECISION : one of the items on about2findout.com will be maps. These maps will be used to link the squares.

Labels: cmap, freemind, mind manager, mindmaps

I'm increasingly allergic to professors who do research on e-learning, but have never actually done it themselves. To sales people with presentations for great learning concepts but nothing practical to show for. To consultants who keep talking about e-learning like the bubble is still to come. To companies who keep waiting for all e-learning standards to evolve and improve.

To all these people I'd like to say: the e-learning industry is mature enough, we're good enough, we have figured out some best practices and we know what we are doing.

Like the shoes once said : just do it already!

I've moved the forum at my http://www.6C-learning.org site to a new blog. Over the next months, I'll migrate all entries in the forum and then it will be closed down.

The new blog is not hosted on my own site anymore, but on Google's own blogspot.com. The reason is that I can't get dynamic 'widget' data in my template unless I host the blog there. It's a 'blogger in beta' site. The advantage obviously is I get the 'labels' displayed at the right hand column, and it is also the only way to make use of the new visual template designer. (see pic) The disadvantage is I have lost some control on how my template looks as it is harder to integrate your own HTML code in there at exactly the place you want.

Summary of my 2 blogs:

• http://www.about2findout.com/blog : my journey to find out what web2.0 and learning 2.0 means and the resulting web site project
• http://6Clearning.blogspot.com : articles on learning in the broad sense of the word, labeled according to the 6C learning framework

Hope you enjoy!

Labels: 6C Learning, blog

Today I'm back from Online Educa Berlin. This year, the conference has grown to 2012 participants out of seventy-something countries. It was my 3th Online Educa. I really like the conference, not only for the smooth organisation and follow-up, the fact it brings together both academics and business worlds, the content and the networking. It's just a special place for me at the end of the year to reflect on the previous year and get inspiration for the year to come. It's the place where last year I decided to join IBM Learning Development for example.

Anyway, it was one of my most intense weeks of 2006. (In a nutshell: excellent pre-conference by Jef Staes - the IBM exec dinner at the Judisches Museum - meeting all those IBMers I only mail or phone with during the year - speaker's reception - chairing a session with red and yellow cards for time mangement - presenting a case study with my main customers and showing them around Berlin - new blogs to add to my feed list - many business cards - being at our booth - the fun of the speed networking session - Jay Cross after some drinks - the special interest group lunch on learning2.0 - the later hours of the OE party - demo's at the booths - Christmas market in Berlin - 1/2 m bratwurst - being a tourist on the weekend - etc)

I've been concentrating on networking this year and have not followed as much sessions as the years before. Among the highlights for me were the keynote from the World Bank, informal learning and the many practical case studies of e-learning on the workfloor.

Looking forward to next year's edition.

(pictures : Benjamin and me at Hamburger Bahnhof - IBM Booth)

Labels: online educa

According to conventional wisdom, the women that sit in their underwear before the window under red lighting have the oldest profession in the world. I would disagree. I would argue education is the oldest profession in the world. We have been teaching our children how to feed, walk and talk since day one.

The education industry doesn't only have the oldest profession in the world, also one of the biggest ones around. Just count all people that make a living out of it: school teachers, almost all university staff, corporate learning, etc. I have no idea how much of the working force that is, but it's enormeous! That explains why there are so many web sites, networking sites, communities, conferences and other events or clubs around learning. That explains why there are so many researchers, theories and different opinions on the subject. It doesn't explain however why after thousands of years of education, we still have a hard time valuing it.

Anyway, education is the oldest profession in the world. It´s not the other one. (You can quote me on that.)