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.