Write Technology

From this week’s ASTD Buzz: Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
(IT Management (07/04) ; Befi, Tony)
More U.S. high school students are not taking the rigorous coursework that is needed to succeed in college and later in the workplace, writes IBM vice president of systems development and Texas senior state executive Tony Befi. He says that trend runs counter to the trend in the workplace itself, where the U.S. Department of Labor estimates that job growth will be fastest in the service-providing industries such as IT. Jobs requiring computer skills, problem-solving, and a sophisticated comprehension of customer markets will grow far more rapidly than goods-producing employment. The U.S. Department of Education says seven out of 10 high school graduates have not finished critical courses needed in college and in a services-oriented work environment, while 49 percent of those graduates will have to take remedial classes if they attend college. Because of this trend, experts predict a shortage of 12 million workers for fast-growing sectors of the U.S. economy. The root cause of high-schoolers’ underperformance is the mistaken belief on the part of students and parents that high school courses do not matter, and the State Scholars Initiative is countering this misperception by joining business and educators in motivating high school students to excel and tackle difficult coursework. The simple and low-cost initiative has produced encouraging results in Texas, where the Houston Independent School District has increased the percentage of graduates who completed a defined set of courses from 18 percent of graduates in 1999 to 70 percent of graduates in 2003, despite the poverty of the area. A key element was the enrollment of local business leaders who made clear to students how their choices in high school would affect them in the workplace. The number of students who took tough classes increased, and the expectations of parents and teachers rose commensurately.
ASTD Buzz

Duke Univ is providing this year’s freshmen with iPods. The iPods will contain audio lectures, “information for freshman orientation and the academic calendar. Through a special Duke Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes site, students also can download faculty-provided course content, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books. They also will be able to purchase music through the site.” The program is a pilot program between Duke and Apple in which Duke “seeks to use information technology in innovative ways within the classroom and across the campus.”

Futhey said she also expects students to develop their own content and interesting new uses for the devices. “I could easily imagine our student newspaper creating a weekly or daily audio editorial that students could listen to as they walk across campus,” she said.

Hmm … wonder how the sophomores feel about all this. I’d be clamoring for an iPod. What a great way to make classes more interactive.
Duke News & Communications

News Observer

ASTD’s Learning Circuits online mag interviewed Michael Allen, CEO of Allen Interactions and author of Michael Allen’s Guide to e-Learning: Building Interactive, Fun, and Effective Learning Programs for Any Company. Oh yeah, he was also the principal architect behind Authorware, in the beginning.

Here’s an excerpt:

Learning Circuits: You often talk about your frustration with current e-learning efforts. Indeed, I saw that your session at ASTD 2004 was called, “No More Boring E-Learning.” Why/how do you find most e-learning to be boring? What isn’t working? Pet Peeves?

Allen: E-learning is often boring for the same reasons much traditional instruction is boring. It focuses on content presentation rather than the learning experience. In fact, I find that 99 percent of it all follows the “tell-and-test” paradigm: convey a block of content through lecture, books, screens, movies, bullet slides, and so forth. Then, give a quiz. All the boring stuff generally overlooks my three primary criteria (the 3Ms):

Meaningful. What’s more boring than content you don’t understand? Not much, except content you’ve already mastered. If you’re set on the content you’re going to present, regardless of who you’re training and the differences among your learners, then you’re set on boring at least some of them—quite possibly all of them. Learning experiences need to be tailored with focus on the learner: Does the learner see the value in learning this? Are learners fearful, impatient, confused? What are their goals and how do they relate to the goals you have for them?

Memorable. What value is learning material you won’t remember even a day or two past the posttest? Good posttest scores aren’t the reason for learning. It’s the ability, confidence, and readiness to perform valued tasks. We need to create learning experiences that stick with our learners so that they are able to perform at the right times.

Motivational. You can’t learn for your learners. They have to do the learning themselves. That means they have to be paying attention, thinking, and doing those things that create knowledge and skills within them. It’s as important to inspire (read energize) learners as it is to present content to them, because, with insufficient motivation, all that content is going to evaporate, leaving scant residue.

The full article is here.

The Instructional Design students at the University of South Alabama have collectively put together a pretty decent primer on the basics of ISD. It’s worth a look, despite the typo in the page header.

Instructional Design Electronic Workbook

Note: It is put together using MacroMedia Authorware, so you may require the free download/plug-in.

Survey: 40% of large companies read employees’ outbound e-mail

More than 43 percent of corporations with more than 20,000 employees are now employing staff to monitor and read outbound e-mail, according to a new study.
The study was conducted by Forrester Consulting on outbound e-mail security and content issues and was paid for by Proofpoint, Inc., a Cupertino, Calif.-based company which sells e-mail and messaging management software products.
Other key findings from the survey:
- It’s not just the biggest companies that are going through their employee’s out-bound e-mail. More than 30 percent of all companies reported that they employ staff to monitor outbound e-mail content.
- Almost 75 percent of companies with 20,000 or more employees said that reducing the financial and legal risks associated with outbound e-mail is “important” or “very important” in the next 12 months.

Results are based on responses from 140 corporate decision-makers.

Survey: 40% of large companies read employees’ outbound e-mail – 2004-07-12 – Cincinnati Business Courier

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.
Into the Blogosphere

From Slashdot:

“Carnegie Mellon is offering free courses through its Open Learning Initiative. Unlike MIT’s OpenCourseWare which has 700 courses available, Carnegie Mellon currently only has five courses available. However, Carnegie Mellon is unique in that they offer ‘…courses [that] include a number of innovative online instructional components such as: cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, simulations,’ so rather than just offering course material Carnegie Mellon is pursuing a more interactive, community approach. Carnegie Mellon is also unique in that they offer the courses as an Academic Version which ‘…is offered through educational institutions for credit awarded by the student’s home institution.’ Interestingly, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds both MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (‘Funding for the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has been provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.’) Sadly, the courses are not supported on any open source platforms or even any open source web browsers. More importantly, I’m curious how other universities will start making their courses available freely online.”
Carnegie Mellon OLI
MIT Open CourseWare

Stephen Downes is a Canadian eLearning specialist who works for the National Research Council.

“E-learning is an extension of ourselves in the sense that it greatly increases our capacities. With appropriate incentive and a little bit of work, it is possible today to become well educated in just about any academic field (professions, of course, with a significant practical component, resist this trend). This means that the imbalance between the formally educated and the uneducated in a discipline has shifted.”
Link (via the Contentology Web Log)

I find web logs fascinating. What is a blog exactly? At its most basic, a web log – or blog – is an online journal. I have friends who use blogs simply to write about their day. Many blogs are political, or news-based. Still others focus on gadgets, gizmos, movies, television, film … the list goes on.
Blogs are everywhere in the news lately, as more and more people (mostly in the 20-40 yr old age bracket) are getting their news and information from blogs. I read 20+ blogs, and a lot of times I’ll have information hours, or in some cases a full day, before I hear it on the local or national news. With the advent of blogs, news has become a 24-hour cycle – a constantly changing thing. On the flip side, with the advent of blogs, news has become biased and opinionated. Bloggers are not actual journalists. Bloggers are people, with opinions, who are under no obligation to present all the facts or to not bend the facts. The readers are under no obligation to seek out an opposing or neutral viewpoint either. Imagine if we all get our news from blogs within 3 years – everyone’s take on the news will be biased.
In recent events, the DNC invited bloggers to their National Convention at the end of this month, providing them with journalist credentials. Ana Marie Cox, otherwise known as DC blogger Wonkette, has been invited by MTV to cover the convention. Bloggers, like Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin of Boing-Boing are becoming Internet celebrities, respected for their opinions and ideas.
A Time Magazine article, Meet Joe Blog, recently had this to say:
We may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. It will be interesting to see what role blogs play in the upcoming election. Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with.
How can blogs affect technical writing and elearning? I would think in a number of ways.
Take secondary education, for example. In high school, every year a teacher asked me to keep a spiral notebook as a journal. And every few weeks we’d turn in said notebook for a grade. This was to help develop our writing skills. The thing was, we would all write every entry in our journal the night before it was due. We did a lot of back-dating. Imagine if that same teacher had assigned us all blogs, hosted on a school server. The teacher could check in on the blogs periodically. The blogs could be password-protected, for sharing, or they could be interactive. Other students could post to a blog with comments. A whole new world of interactivity is opened up for teacher and student. And that’s just one example.
What about technical writing? I don’t think blogging is as obviously a useful tool to technical writers. I think, as with any group, a blog is a fantastic place for like people to gather, obtain information, and chat. You can do that with emailing lists and discussion boards too. What about a blog? Let’s say that company A has released Cool Software Package, complete with documentation. Imagine if the developers blogged the progress along the development path, taking suggestions from readers. Once Cool Software Package is released, the tech writers can monitor the blog, informing the world of addendums, updates, and such. The Help Desk could chime in and direct folks to the correct places for support. Suddenly, the manual, support, and development process are all very interactive. The users are part of the process.
Just some thoughts. I think blogs are here to stay, and it’s time we all got familiar with them. Here’s some great articles for you to peruse:
Linked Out: Blogging, Equality, and the Future
Lead Blocks to Web Logs (Xeni Jardin)
Hail to the Blogs:a new movement in journalism
Blogs Welcome at Democratic Convention
Bloggers Suffer Burnout
Notes from Technorati Meeting on Blogs
Bloggers Landing Book Deals

The Fast Company blog has an interesting article on a new book detailing jobs in our future. Will yours stick around? It’s an interesting take on outsourcing overseas and electronic kiosks.