Where do I start with Agile?

So you want to bring Agile into your software development process. And you are wondering where to start. That’s a tough question for each team does different things well. I always like to start anything new with teams by getting a baseline, that way we can show improvement and we can celebrate. We can also more easily identify the low hanging fruit.  Just the process of getting the baseline creates some interesting dialogue amongst the team. Anyhow, I like to keep it simple, so I took the 27 rules and practices of extreme programming, put them in a spreadsheet and made a wag of the percentage of time I actually saw the rule or practice being implemented. For one of the companies I worked with they implemented three of the rules and practices over 90% of the time. These three were; they measured project velocity (in their own way, but they measured it), their unit testing was awesome and they had really good collective code ownership. The other rules and practices implementation varied from less than 90% all the way to non-existent. That’s ok, gives room for improvement

Adventures in CSS

So everytime I build a new site I start coding in straight html. And inevitably I come to the point where I am becoming frustrated with the lack of flexibility html has to build nice looking sites. So, I start using CSS to get the good looking stuff done. So if your finding that you just can’t get the look you need, start your readings / learnings in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). In the long run a good understanding of CSS will go a long way for you. And while your at it review some material on good design, I’ve always found Robin William's books to be right on!

Is educational blogging upon us

I think so… When I review a number of articles and sites on the subject of educational blogging, I believe it is now become the cognitive framework tool du-jour. I recently set up a blog for my daughters grade five newsletter, there are free blog servers now dedicated to K12 school students, University students and Educators in general. Two of my courses want blogs. One asks for it directly, the other wants a learning journal. So here we go, EduBlogging. This shift makes total sense. We are moving toward tools for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) and Personal Learning Tools. A blog provides one place to store our thoughts as we learn. Obviously, a blog is single layered, thinks will change…

Agile Learner Design

Last term I submitted a paper called Agile Instructional Design. I believe this subject needs a more thorough investigation and supporting research. I have added a category to my blog which will reference all my work, musings, references toward this subject. If you have an interest in this subject may I suggest you read the paper and subscribe to this blogs RSS feed.

Learn about Podcasting

Here is a good site about podcasting.  Take the time to listen to the podcast about podcasting…

UNESCO Virtual U

Just needed to post a link to this site. As many of you know my fascination with Open Source and Education.  Here is more evidence of the traction it is gaining.  This UNESCO site has a very rich international list of links to other open initiatives and a great amount of reference material toward the inevitable goal of global openness to education.  May we all have access to education. Get’s me thinking were is the overlap with any of the end poverty initiatives…

EduBlogging and the long tail

So I was doing some research about blogging and it’s application as a tool for learning.  And I came across this great article written by Stephen Downes. This is a must read for anyone considering the use of blogs within their class room. What stands out for me in this article is the example of its use within the grade 5 - 6 classroom and how it is being so successful at engaging the students. The students are obviously getting jazzed about publishing their works for the world to see. All this said I also started thinking about the long tail. Why? because this article was written over 15 months ago and I am sure its readership will last for a long time as blogging becomes more understood and educators look for ways to integrate it into their classes.

SEEMLESS LEARNING

Microsoft Senior managment has made another call for a shared vision. When you think about it, this is about keeping everyone in the company moving in the same direction. They have just finished, or almost finished, shipping a whole lot of new products. And once you ship you need to know what you are going to do next. Microsoft has now told their staff what they are doing next. This is excellent! When you read through this product vision (roadmap) memo you read a very mature assessment of the current and emerging technology trends. This should come as no surprise, given the memo was written by Ray Ozzie of VisiCalc, LotusNotes and Groove fame… All this said, what I found interesting was the Opportunities section where seamless experiences were spoken about. I though to myself that one was missing, SEEMLESS LEARNING. Being bold, I took it upon myself to write it…

SEAMLESS LEARNING – Enabling you to create, store, organize, present, consume and interact with knowledge sources of all kinds; accessing, caching and viewing it anywhere you like regardless of where the knowledge resides. You should be able to share this personal knowledge base (or knowledge ecosystem) with all the others with whom you need to work and learn.

future of learning and curriculum development

if you really want to see the future of learning and curriculum development you need to put a few items together.  First, accept the reality that the online world is having a larger impact on the digital natives than your digital immigration status lets you see.  Second, accept the fact that our current educational structures are in decay. Third, look at current learning theoryand instructional design methodologies combined with current gaming innovations and the crop of media (software) developers coming of age (or already have).  Fourth, consider what the next iteration of the Web is. And what do you get, the future of learning.

drop-out, push-out, opt-out

Usually I try and stay away from cross posting, then I found this post from one of the feeds I monitor.  It reminded me of a friend of mine who dropped out of school in grade nine cause he was “bored out of his tree”.  He was definately an opt-out. I hope articles like this create some interesting dialogue.  I like what Ontario is doing. I believe it will really meet a need.  I was discussing with my wife a few weeks back about how our school system wasn’t meeting the needs of kids that were more “trades” oriented.  In years past if you didn’t fit into the regular school system you could go work on the farm or with the railway or as a tradesperson.  We need to get back to that.

Agile Documentation

A new form of technical documentation? Why not create a detailed picture of the architecture / design / algorithm / concept and attach a video or mp3 describing it. Quick, complete and the most cost effective. Remember, store these on a common share…

Knowledge Management Intellectual Capital

Every day I’m becoming more and more convinced Personal Knowledge Management is the next learning paradigm. When I consider how I construct understanding these days and the way I use all the knowledge acquisition tools and the importance of social networks / mentorship it isn’t far away where all this becomes a major force in how we survive in the knowledge economy. I need to learn fast and forget almost as fast. I need a repository for my intellectual capital. What tools will be available to store and harvest my personal knowledge and how can this knowledge be shared and collaborated over…

XP Architecture Documentation

As a technical architect I sometimes find myself thinking about documentation. And what is the purpose of architectural documentation? I see two primary purposes for this documentation;

1. For training purposes, so people know what is and what should be, and 
2. To support sales and marketing when the potential customer asks those sticky questions about scalability and security. I call these 2nd set of documents, “marchitecture”. 

In an XP / Agile world we try to reduce the amount of documentation, cause it usually never gets read anyhow. As a solution I now suggest the following;

• We video record a discussion with the architects as they describe the architecture on a white board. Store this video on disk somewhere (or in a wiki) for later sharing. 
• Any architectural components which are client focused should be archived into written documents. 

The two primary candidates for this “marchitecture” documentation are; scalability architecture and security architecture. These two are the most commonly requested architecture documents to build customer confidence during the sales and marketing efforts.

Personal Knowledge Managment

I really do think that the Personal Knowledge Managment is the e-learning road we are on. With the Web 2.0 (whatever that really is), with innovations in learning theory, with disruptions in the structures of education (we’ve got a teacher strike on in BC). It’s all coming to a head. Yes, public education practices are a freighter, and hard to get to change course. But it will happen. And it will happen through self-directed learning initiatives. And a part of all this is going to be online reputation managment. So credentials will no longer matter, only what we can do, what we know and that we have a reputation to succeed. Again, not if, but when…

eLearning 2.0

If you are alive and thinking about your life long learning or if you have children, or both  this is an article you must read. http://elearnmag.org/subpage.cfm?section=articles&article=29-1

The Future of Learning Management Systems

I wonder where things are going with Learning Management Systems (LMS). We’ve got a merger going on with two of the incumbents;Blackboard and WebCT. And both of these incumbents have systems that were developed during Web 1.0. And the Web 2.0 seems to be building steam.  The learning theories to support cognitive flexibility and related theories are growing in depth and acceptance.  And we have LMS that are targeting these new theories.  Moodle is one such LMS and after taking a read of moodles proposed future, it get you thinking.

$100 Learning Appliance

The way we learn is changing. The current discoveries in regards to how we learn, combined with the deceasing price of computers are on a convergence. Fold this together with the emergence of new learning theories and techniques. The timing of a $100 laptop couldn’t be better. It will be interesting to see the impact of these computers on the young bright minds of the emerging-economic world.

Howe Sound and Google Maps API

I was wanting to learn more about the AJAX programming model so I figured why not hack google maps. The nice thing about it was that google has published an API for how to utilize their maps and customize them for your use. What I wanted to do is create a map which would describe Howe Sound, it’s islands, navigational aides, flora and fauna, inter-tidal zone, etc. I want to create a rich media learning experience. So I set out to use google maps as the starting place for this learning experience. It was relatively easy. Within half a day I had positioned a number of markers on the map, giving textual descriptions of the islands and providing hyperlinks to pages which would eventually give deeper descriptions of the islands. As you can imagine, I deepened my understanding of a number of things to get this done. I now know more about longitude and latitude, JavaScript, CSS, XML and each island itself. Yes, this project is a work in progress… Check back later and see how it improves…

NUnit and ConnectionStrings

Thanks to one of my co-workers I stumbled across how to get NUnit working with externally hosted App.config files in .NET 2.0 and VS 2005. I wrote test harnesses in NUnit for all the database classes I had developed. The connectionString was stored in the App.config file. Once I figured out that I needed the name of the config file to be the same as the “[appname].dll.config” stored in the “bin/Debug” directory then the NUnit tests worked. Then came the issue of deployment. We have a build server that uses cruisecontrol.net to manage our build and I needed to get the “[appname].dll.config” to be redeployed from my sandbox computer onto the build server. But how to deploy a file targeted for the “bin/Debug” folder. Nice thing about Visual Studio is you can set the property on the file so it gets copied from your project directory to the build server. Nice…

Cognitive Flexibility Theory

I love being in the flow… Over the weekend I was discussing Cognitive Flexibility Theory with a friend of mine. He is a builder of high-end architectural homes on the west coast. He has innovated in home construction by using lazer beam levels, mathematics and ‘good-old’ hand drawing. He’s really pushing the bounds of residential home construction. We were discussing how he got to this level of innovation, and his big challenge is training the employees of his rapidly growing company in how to do what he does. He described to me how he learned what he does… He described Cognitive Flexibility from an unknowing real world perspective. All very interesting… What I also found interesting in our conversation is that we needed to include the fact he was a classically trained musician as an attribute of his knowledge acquisition, processing and implementation.
Then this morning I was reading my daily RSS feeds and came across some stuff about Web 2.0 which then took me to a concept map.http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20050125170206