So what is the future of e-learning? And how does it compare to what we already have? I am a classroom trainer by trade and I work for a large British software house. This means that I spend much of my time shooting up and down the country providing training and consulation services to our customers on their sites. This can be anywhere in the UK and Northern Ireland and involves me spending many a night away from home, in one hotel or another. So do I expect this to stop as e-learning evolves? At the moment I would have to say a resounding ‘no’. Much of the work I do is very site specific and therefore requires indepth discussion between myself and the delegates as to the most efficient approach that they can use with the software. This sometimes means changing their business processes but minly it is a collaborative approach between myself and the customer.
However, there are also large areas of my work that are the same everywhere I go. This is where I believe the future of e-learning within my company will develop. E-learning as a method of supporting training, and re-enforcing the learning that has already taken place. Another division of my company has already thought ahead and they are starting up such a programme as we speak (and yes I did go for an interview but with no success at this time - not enough e-learning experience!). The plan behind the new programme is to offer standardised courses where possible, where a fee can be charged instead of a consultant attending site. The courses will be designed by the appropriate subject matter expert and priced at half the cost of a consultant for the day. I feel that this is an appropriate direction for us at this time. The technology is available already to support this and many companies already do. I hope that my division will catch up soon and enable me to get involved too.
The concept of using the internet for social networking is an idea that I am becoming increasingly interested in as I continue my studies and use more of these technologies including Facebook, blogs, wikis etc. I am aware that this makes me a bit of a ‘late bloomer’ in many users eyes but I am catching up fast. However, this interests me in terms of how it could affect our relationships in the future.
I was just reading the latest PC Pro magazine (not available online yet so no link I am afraid) and one article quoted some quite scary figures. According to the Annenberg School Centre for the Digital future, 43% of people who belong to an online community say that the virtual world is AS important to them as the real world. And of those people, over 56% log in every day. It made me wonder how people can possibly make the time to do this - I struggle to fit everything into the one life at the moment. It also made me wonder where this will eventually take our view of relationships. Will we move into the more easily controlled world of the virtual world. The same study said that on average we will make 4.65 friends online who we will never meet (ignoring the implications of .65 of a person…) and only 1.6 who we will actually meet.
This reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s novel The Naked Sun. In that we meet the Solarians who are an extremely rich race of humans who have taken the idea of social networking to the extreme in that they ONLY inteact online. Personal contact is considered disgusting and even contact with a spouse is distasteful and only undertaken if really necessary. The physical contact that we see as necessary to our survival at this point in our evolution has been ‘bred out’ of the Solarians. The fact that they rigidly control the birthrate and that they are very wealthy ensures that they have the space to avoid each other. They also use robots to replace humans servants and therefore need to do little real work.
The humans who live on Earth are the antithesis of this. They live on a severly overcrowded planet where there is no concept of personal privacy - even sharing communal kitchens and bathrooms. They do not communicate virtually, and the Solarians consider them ‘backward’. Which version is our future? I can appreciate that this might be considered two extremes of opinion concerning the route that we as a species make take in the future, but I think it is a valid concept if taken to the final conclusion. Will technology replaces relationships because we have evolved past the point where teamwork and co-dependence is vital for survival - therefore leaving us with a world where we can be independent of anyone else and never have any real contact again. I hope not.
In yesterday’s blog I mentioned internet censorship with relation to China and I want to explore this further.
China is a very well documented case of censorship through the internet and the variety of sites that are blocked is quite broad. The methods used are fluid and resource hungry, meaning that the unitiated user would not necessarily be able to navigate their way around the restrictions.
However, it got me thinking about less obvious forms of censorship that the internet exposes us to.
I watched an interesting webcast on The Oxford Internet Institutions website by Ted Nelson. It is quite a long long podcast but discusses in an engaging manner why many of the things we use today are ‘the way they are’. He then moves on to the fact that many of the information technologies exist in the current form due to political and personal reasons of the people involved with developing them. This then become an industry standard and gets adopted by other users.
This means that the interfaces that we use are are designed and governed by other reason than usability. These reasons are not transparent and users are not aware of why they are there. I think that the same is true of the search engines. I ran a couple of tests between Google and Ask.co.uk where I entered exactly the same search options in each engine, and got different results. The reason for this is the algorithms used by search engines are valuable and highly secret; supposingly avoiding websites ‘fiddling’ the results; and therefore return differing results. However, without transaprency, how can I tell what rules are used to respond to my search request? Is there a political or social bias in the results? There is no way for me to tell why I am being offered certain options. This is a worry.
In one of our second life study sessions my tutor Rory mentioned a book about a “Second Life” like cyber-existence called ‘Snow Crash’ by Neal Stephenson. The conversation resonated with me so I went out and bought the book. Due to the course and work commitments I have only just begun to read it. I am still getting ‘into’ it, but something that has already piqued my interest is the idea of the ‘Library’.
The protagonist Hiro makes a modest living collecting information which is stored in the ‘Library’; a huge searchable database containing something about everything. Hiro is paid whenever someone searches and extracts information that he has entered into the library. This struck me as interesting because it reminded me of a course weblog entry that I made back in February about wikis and whether the content could be trusted if it is entered by ‘anybody’. In the Snow Crash the information is ONLY added by ‘anybody’. There is no control of the information, and it only has value if it is searched by someone else. I wonder if this is the way that our society will move.
There is already a mind-boggling amount of information available on the net, and much of it is of dubious value. This will only increase over time and this will surely have an impact on how useful this amount of data would be. If it took an age to search for a piece of information, would the net-user bother? Or would we simply stick to a small number of websites that we are familiar with and know that we can get the required data from. We use search engines for this purpose, but that would lay us open to the political and social machinations of multi-national agencies who would be able to control what we see in our list of search results.
This is a very real danger in countries with restrictive regimes like China (Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Law School have studied the extent of such restrictions.)
If that was the case, despite the vastness of the net, the individual user would only use a tiny fragment of it. It would become insular and inward looking which is the opposite of the ideal.
Hello and welcome to my new weblog.
This is my first entry and I want to use this opportunity to outline the purpose of this weblog.
The idea behind this is for me to discover and discuss new and exciting possibilities that the new digital age offer us as online educators. I want to be able to track my ideas as they develop and I plan to link this to my e-portfolio recording my own online learning experiences. I hope that others will also take the opportunity to delve into my weblog and leave comments for me. It would be great to create a dialog here with other educators with similar and opposing views.
I should really introduce myself. My name is Sarah, I am in my 30’s and I am a trainer for a large software house in the UK. We supply software to local goverment for everything from local land charge searches, to waste management. I have a special interest in the area of e-learning as a support for conventional learning techniques and I am currently studying (via distance learning) for a Masters Degree in e-learning at Edinburgh University.
Therefore I hope to be an e-learning provider and an e-learning consumer as I continue my training career.
