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

MVC, a pattern or an architecture?

Is the Model View Controller (MVC) a design pattern, a framework or an architecture? I was having a discussion the other day with all of the developers on our team. We were discussing if the MVC was a pattern, a framework or an architecture? I said it was a pattern, two others said it was an architecture and the third said it was a framework. Being a thorough guy, I set out to prove it was a pattern.

I started out by getting definitions of a pattern, a framework, and architecture. This is best done yourself, but this is what I found;

• Architecture as defined by the Software Engineering Institute “…is the structure or structures of the system, which comprise software elements, the externally visible properties of those elements, and the relationships among them.”
• When in doubt, check the wiki. The wikipedia defines a framework as “…a reusable design for a software system (or subsystem). This is expressed as a set of abstract classes and the way their instances collaborate for a specific type of software.”
• Again, check the wiki. A “… design pattern is a general solution to a common problem in software design. A design pattern isn’t a finished design that can be transformed directly into code; it is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.”

So then I went the the “bible”, Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides (Gang-o-Four) to see what they said. They referred the MVC as though it was a pattern, they never explicitly said it was a pattern. They said it was a triad of classes and that when you looked inside the MVC there were patterns. So from this I would not say the MVC is NOT a pattern but an architecture. Then of course I’ve been wrong before…

Patterns in .NET

If your into design patterns and your on any kind of a learning curve in implementing patterns in .NET and C# I’d suggest you read the descriptions of patterns from the data & object factory; developer training website. The great part of the site is they also provide samples.

Looking forward into education

There are many changes afoot with all the new technologies and the people who use them. In particular, the digital natives and how they will use technology 10 years from now… What I was pondering was how will they engage “traditional” education for their children? Is the concept of home schooling going to change with ubiquitous online education? Maybe our education system should be leaning toward a more metacognitive or “self-directed” approach.

Test Driven Development; Microsoft vs. OpenSource

So why pay Microsoft when you can get the tools for free? Currently, I am team lead for a very talented group of people. One of the things the team has agreed to do is embrace eXtreme Programming (XP) and Test Driven Development (TDD). We have been making awesome progress on all fronts. Every day we deepen our understanding of XP and we have solidified our build, test and deploy platform. Having a TDD approach will assist us to become more nimble in meeting our customer needs while ensuring we have a quality product through time. Another interesting thing we are doing is using Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) and .NET 2.0 for our development platform. Yes, they are in beta, yet we are wanting to embrace the .NET platform for the next major release of our server product so we figured we would jump right into the latest toolset. What we have found is that the OpenSource tools for our TDD work very well in combination with VS2005. We are using; MSBuild, Nant, Nunit, Ndoc, Ncover and CruiseControl, and we hope to integrate FxCop soon. Having all these tools working together will allow us to focus further on the business needs and not the technology implementation (and if our refactoring efforts break anything…) To get better insight into using these tools I do suggest you look at their respective sites and do some further reading, in particular; http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/tdd_in_dotnet.asp this is an excellent introduction in using Nunit and Mock objects. So, now I get back to the title of this entry, why spend the additional money on the Microsoft Team Services (which provide you the TDD tools) when you can get it for free through OpenSource?

singleton pattern

So how cool is that. I was running through one of the new MSDN enterprise application blocks in the debugger (IMHO, the best way to get to know a piece of code). And I was stepping my way through and what do I see but an URL to a blog entry explaining the singleton pattern, and why it was utilized in this particular situation. Some of the best sample code I’ve ever seen…

./sqlexpress

I love diving into new technology. So much to learn, so many cools things. A whole lot of reading going on. So I’ve installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) and am wanting to work through a number of the samples. In particular, samples related to database / n-tier development. And VS2005 has a lot of new features for databases and database development. But when your learning you need to start somewhere.  And I decided to start with the Microsoft MSDN Enterprise Library June 2005.  This is a library of source applications for you to take a part and learn from. So I download the files, and begin to set things up.  This is great, so to get the database samples running I need an instance of SQL Server.  And fortunately, one comes with VS2005, it’s known as SQL EXPRESS or MSDE (by its previous encarnation).  One problem it has no GUI. So how do you create databases, tables, etc. Well you could do it from within VS2005. But I’m a database guy at heart so I want my query window. Again fortunately, there is Express Manager a free download.  If you used the default VS2005 default setup you need to logon to a server instance of SQL EXPRESS. This one got me, I was thinking “localhost” would work, nope! I ended up discovering that the instance you logon to is.\sqlexpress (that’s dot slash sqlexpress) there you have it. So much to learn, so little time… fun, fun, fun…

Open Courseware

Evidence toward a trend. Over the last three years I have developed the though that curriculum should be developed once and used by everyone. At this time, on the planet earth, there must be a huge duplication of course material and curriculum. I wonder how many 1st year spanish courses have been developed, and how many more will be developed. Or what about 1st year calculus. The duplication of course material and effort in creating and delivering this material must be staggering. What a waste of Masters and PhD educated peoples time. Why not just develop the course material once and have it shared around the globe? It would all become a part of the creative commons. It could all be a part of a SCORM type standard which uses a UDDI type directory service for the discovery of the course material required by either student or teacher. We can see the beginnings of this with the opencourseware site of MIT. This isn’t a matter of if a global repository of courseware will be available, but when it will be available…