Learning and Technology

What is a Salesforce Admin?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 4 Sep 2017 09:52:00 -0400

In my role at CentralApp, I have the opportunity to talk to folks who are brand new to the Salesforce ecosystem. So one thing that I do is talk them through the role of Salesforce Administrator.

Salesforce marketing has a great way of capturing the essence of things and presenting it in an enjoyable video. I think the video below does that well with the Salesforce Admin role.

Davina, does a nice job here, talking about a typical day and listing the responsibilities of the Salesforce Admin, including:

Business Reviews & Recommendations
Research & Vetting New Tools
Manage the Salesforce Platform
Configuration and Integration
Documentation & Training

My approach to sharing what is involved in the role, was to go back to when I documented it out for a former client who had recently implemented Salesforce and was looking to hire for the role. I broke it down into two areas, business skills and technical responsibilities.

Salesforce Administrator Business Skills

Excellent communication, motivational, and presentation skills

The desire to be the voice of the user in communicating with management

Analytical skills to respond to requested changes and identify customizations

A solid understanding of your business processes

Lead/opportunity pipeline management

Knowledge of the organizational structure and culture to help build relationships with key groups

Salesforce Administrator Technical Responsibilities

Support and Train end users

Manage List views, reports and dashboards, and business analytics

Manage Users

Add picklist values

Modify page layouts

Manage Lead & Case routing rules

Manage Email templates

Develop and maintain validation rules

Design, Develop, and Manage Custom workflows and process

Manage Service requests, feature requests, and bugs

Conduct Testing and QA in Sandbox

Monitor Data Quality

I think it is a reasonable list, but there is always room for improvement. What do you think? What would you add to my list?

Salesforce Object Relationships: Master Detail

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 8 Jul 2017 08:24:00 -0400

You can think of Salesforce as a large database. You can think of Salesforce objects as spreadsheets within that database. In order to be able to relate on spreadsheet to another spreadsheet or really one object to another object, you need to build a relationship.

Salesforce has created a formal way to establish those relationships with the following areas.

Master-Detail
Many to Many
Lookup
External Lookup
Indirect Lookup
Hierarchical

These are detailed here.

Let's take a closer look at the first one.

Master-Detail

This relationship "closely" connects the two objects that you are trying to relate. It establishes a parent - child relationship between the two. This is important because it extends the relationship to the sub-detail. This means there are certain behaviors that you need to be aware of for this type of relationship.

In this diagram, there are two custom objects, States and Cities. If you wanted to closely relate each City to the state that it was included in, you could build a Master (States) - Detail (Cities) relationship between the two objects.

Deleting Behavior
Deleting a detail record moves it to the Recycle Bin but leaves master record intact.
Deleting Master also deletes the child.
Undeleting restores the master and the child. (and sub-child)
Deleting a detail (child) then deleting master you cannot undelete, because the relationship is gone.

In our example, if you deleted West Virginia, then all of the cities associated with West Virginia record would be deleted.

Reparenting
By default, records can't be reparented.
Admins can allow it when defining the relationship.

This would be if you would want all the cities that were associated with West Virginia, to be re-associated with Ohio. Doesn't make a lot of sense here, but in some cases it might.

Owner
The detail record is automatically set to the parent owner and it not available on the detail record.
The detail can't have sharing rules, manual sharing, or queues because this requires an owner field.

Every City associated to West Virginia in our example would have the same record Owner as the Owner of the West Virginia record. This means if I share West Virginia, I share all the cities.

Security
Detail records inherent the Master security settings.

If you have access to West Virginia, you have access to the City records.

Page Layouts
The field linking the objects is required on the detail record.

On the Cities object page layout, you might have the field that allows you to associate the parent. In this case, it associates to States.

Standard Objects
Standard objects can be a master.

Number of Records Related

Less then 10,000 child records is best practice

Number of Relationships on Custom Object

Each custom object can have up to two master-detail relationships and up to 25 total relationships

The Related To entry can’t be changed after you save the relationship.

There are some additional benefits of using the Master-Detail relationship within Salesforce, including Roll-up Summaries that allows summaries of the detail records to be displayed on the Master record. This would allow you to see how many cities that there are associated to West Virginia (3 in our diagram).

If you are new to Salesforce, you will be using the Master-Detail relationship a lot and it is good to really spend time understanding these behaviors.

Learning Analysis of Social Networks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:31:00 -0500

This is my first look into social network analysis for learning. We are starting with the idea that there is value in understanding how interactions happen during learning regardless of the context. This sets the stage for digging in deeper and conducting analysis on the social networks that learners participate in such as twitter or a blog.

Dragan (our instructor) mentioned that researchers have often thought social networks may be the most important component of learning. And the analysis of social networks is based on various research fields. He mentioned some key characteristics that will be of focus include density, centrality, and modularity.

Network Elements

Social networks have some key structural elements that can be identified in order to establish a common language and conceptual model. This allows us to analyze them. In this mooc we discussed three key elements, the actor, relations, and data sources.

Actor
The actor is a node or vertex within the network. In social networks this is typically a person or learner, but I don’t think it would necessarily need to be a person.

Relations

The relation in the network refers to the ties, edges, arcs, and links that connect the actors. Relations can be undirected and weighted or they can have a direction, meaning that an actor can be the sender and any actor that receives data can be the receiver. So, actors can be senders or receivers or both.

Additionally, the relation between two actors can also be labeled or categorized. This means they can represent something, such as friendship, advice, hindrance, or can be a form of communication. I would imagine this could be a very interesting component of network analysis to try and identify and define these relations for the purpose of understanding the learner, the network, or the context.

Data Sources

The third element discussed in the mooc was the area of how the data was collected. I think the idea of how you gather your data will have an impact on what filter you use to analyze the data. Is it you own data such as email or is it from twitter? This collection process impact what you can look at and create a potential bias on how you analyze the information and what conclusions you may be able to make from that analysis.

As a reflection, I don’t think this third element is well articulated within the mooc materials.

Analysis

There were three key areas of analysis that we are looking at which include density, centrality, and modularity.

Density is the degree to which actors are connected to all the other members in the network. Centrality is the extent in which the actors are organized around a central point.

Modularity is the way that you quantify the modules within the network or community, by counting and analyzing the ties between the actors. (It can get more complicated quickly, but this is the core.)

Potential Benefits

My first approach to considering how studying social networks might be beneficial to enhancing learning, is impacted by traditional classroom instruction. As a facilitator you often lurk about your classroom or learning environment and just listen. What are they saying, who is saying it, who is dominating the conversations, and do they have a grasp of concept? Should I step in and correct something that has been miss-communicated? Do I need to provide clues to a small group to get them headed in the right direction? Did they understand anything I said?

I would think if you could monitor a social network of a group of “actors” all with similar learning goals (i.e. a class or group of employees) you could begin to get a sense of how their learning was/is progressing. I would also think that it meet even create a safer environment for learners who struggle with social settings.

Here is a link to some great additional discussion by Franziska Müller.

Getting Started with Tableau

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 1 Nov 2014 21:40:00 -0400

Collecting Data

To begin working with Tableau, I decided to pull some West Virginia Department of Education data. The WVDE has a limited set of data that it makes available here. The dataset that I grabbed was around graduation rates. I particular, looking at the percentage of students that graduated in 4 years.

The website defines it here....

defines a high school graduate as "a student who has received a regular diploma in either four years or five years as part of the four-year adjusted cohort or the five-year adjusted cohort." Students earning high school credentials by obtaining a high school equivalency diploma or a modified diploma are not considered graduates for the purpose of the graduation data.

Integration
There wasn't really any integration with the base data set.

Analysis in Tableau
The first step is to connect Tableau to your data. I did that be simple by connecting to the excel file. I did edit the column titles to help me once it was in Tableau.

(sorry iOS users this is in Flash, I will try to find a better tool)

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

In this video I walk through a very basic set of configurations to be able to see some data. No real analysis, but it shows you what you can do pretty quickly.

The Learning Analytics Data Cycle Breakdown

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 1 Nov 2014 10:25:00 -0400

What is the Learning analytics data cycle?

In our mooc week 2, @gsiemens presented the data cycle shown below. It represents a cycle of what you would need to do to work with and get insight from learning data, leading to understanding that should lead to an informed action. Therefore, a data loop. I will break down my understanding of the data cycle below.

Data Collection and Acquisition

This is the specific process by which the data is collected. This is very critical first step. You can start by considering what data you have, but should very quickly start to consider what data you want, but don't have. If you don't figure out how to collect it, you won't get it.

For example, do you want what time the learning activity started? Not when it was scheduled, but when it actually started. How do you get that information? Does the data have to be auto-generated or is it acceptable to have a person manually take an action to collect the data? For me, this is more trial and error then strategic thought, but I'd like to be more proactive in the future. Can we create simple, reliable data collection points and gather all the data this already being generated?

I am hopeful that I can start to map some of the Internet of Things (IoT) "offerings" to this stage. Can we put a sensor in the learning environment to help collect information?

Storage

Where will you store the data. This will quickly become another "big" consideration. When you set out on an ideal journey, you want all the data to be stored in a single location. But you quickly realize that this is just not possible. For many organizations, the LMS was put into place with this purpose, but all systems have limitations... i.e. when did the class really start? 9:02, 9:15... when did the students login? Does that matter to you enough to store it in another system?

Once your in a two system world, then you are starting to into the next phase....

Integration

Data integration can get tricky, you don't want to have to keep managing the your learner demographics, but depending on your organization, even who you are measuring can be pretty fluid. Learners can enroll, not participate, enroll late, leave the learner population all together, and a million of scenarios that can drive you crazy like sharing devices, leaving in the middle of the activity... If you have a lot of data sources, this can quickly become challenging and complex.

This is were the Data Wrangling comes in. How do you start to get data that you can structure and use? So far, for me, this has not been a fun activity. It takes some patience.

Analysis

Once you have integrated your data, you can begin to conduct your analysis of the what is happening in the data. In my world, you will typically have some ideas of what you want to seek out, at least initially, however once you start to (try) to answer questions, you can move into new areas, look for new trends, look for outliers, or correlations.

It is a little interesting, most best practices seem to point to some version of the scientific method, develop a hypothesis from which to work. What questions are you trying to answer? Do students who show up 15 minutes late perform as well as those who were present at the beginning of the class? As an educator, you hope not. :) Just Kidding. Of course, there are an endless number of questions and you should really spend some time writing them down, showing them to others, and try restating them differently. I also like to tell people to think about what action they are going to take when they get the answer? Kind of a "so what" test.

I am not yet that familiar with the concepts in the map above. SNA, NLP, Concept Development. I will have to do some research to see what these things can do for the analysis process.

Representation & Visualization

This process is about portraying your analysis in a why that enhances or at least explains your analysis. Can you see trending data? Can you see relationships in the data? Can you compare volume or velocity? Can you look at a map and quickly know what has happened or is happening?

This can be a very powerful moment for a group of people working together. Again, spend time looking at the story with your team, peers, or force you significant other to look at it and tell you what they think. You will be surprised at what they tell you it means.

If you can start to see these things then it is time to take action.

Action

If you are engaged in Learning Analytics to "enhance learning" (see our original definition) then you are almost obligated to take action. What are the next steps? Based on the data that you have, what actions can be taken to enhance learning? How does the action get implemented? Knowing what we know now (through the analysis) can we take action and continue to measure the impact of that action?

This will take us back to "data collecting"

Defining Learning Analytics and the Insights it Can Bring

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 31 Oct 2014 09:00:00 -0400

A Definition

My task here is to define Learning Analytics. What is it? I think the easiest and broadest answer is (my definition):

Learning Analytics is the analysis of any data that was created as part of a learning process.

This definition is really wide open. It allows, or even forces, the observer to interpret almost every aspect of what that might mean and how it might be useful. Where do you start? However, it is very non-judgmental. If you think any data relevant to learning in anyway and you want to conduct an analysis of that data, then go for it.

SOLAR came up with this definition:
(note: it is not easily found on their website)

Learning Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their context, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.

The first part of this definition allows you to look at four initial things you can do with data:

Measurement

Collection

Analysis

Reporting

Measurement is about the size, length, or amount of something, as established by measuring. With the data that we find in the digital world today and what is coming in the near future, we will want to leverage many measurements of data that we haven't probably thought about before in the learning context, such as those being pushed by big data volume, velocity, variety, and veracity.

Collection is about capturing the data in a format you can use. What is generating the data? Who is generating the data? How is it stored? How "clean" is the data? Can you perform an analysis with the data you have?

Analysis is about being able to pull insights for the data. What does it tell us? Are their patterns? Correlations to be made? Can items extrapolated or variables be isolated?

Reporting is about sharing. Can you effectively communicate the insights that you found in your analysis? Can you tell a story?

The second part is about Learners (the person or people learning) and the context (I am assuming this is everything about the learner and/or the learning)

The third part is about the purpose.

for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.

Maybe this will be discussed later in our mooc, but I am not completely sure why Learning Analytics would have to be for the purpose of understanding or optimizing? I do disagree with this being the grand noble cause, but as a definition, I think it is more part of the mission of SOLAR. I could measure learning data just know how long a module took me to do it? Or how much it cost?

I'm not recommending to change it, but something to think about.

Insights

This one is pretty open. What insights would measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their context, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs... provide the educator or the learner?

Much like having an open definition of learning analytics causes you to think broad, the insights of what we might get from learning analytics is also very broad. I would start to build out different areas of focus, based on traditional learning analysis.

What do you know about the learner? Prior knowledge, Prior Experience, current level of performance, etc... However, today's connect world, we can learn so much more. If are learners are engaged in the digital realm by using a smartphone or a tablet, engaged in social media, or using an organizational system such as a learning management system or a recognition system (think business here) then we start to gather a lot more information.

George talks about this in our mooc video. He indicates that we can start to learning this things about the learner.

sentiment
attitudes
social connections
intentions
what we know
how we learn
and what we might do next

It is interesting that the "how we learn" topic continues to surface. If we really have insight to how you learn or your learning style, can we do anything about it? Can we create a design approach or even a smart system to individualize your learning.

While learning for learning is awesome, my day job pushes me to have a particular interest in how learner experiences impact performance. This would help us start to have a story about how effective the learning activities were to help someone complete a task. (aka do their job).

Other Insights might include data about the environment. Classic argument of classroom vs online? When is the best time for learning? Is it better to play music when learners complete group activities? (All of these feel backward looking) Is it better to allow learners access to a smartphone throughout the learning experience?

Wrap Up

I am sure as we move forward we will be digging much deeper into these topics, but it is good to have a definition to build on. I am going to go with SOLAR for now. And to start considering all the different insights that we might get from learning analytics.

Areas of Focus for Learning Analytics Tools

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 21:00:00 -0400

I am participating in a MOOC around learning analytics. We are in week 2 and I am already a little behind, but one of the week 1 competencies was to be able to identify proprietary and open source tools commonly used in learning analytics.

We were provided a tool called Learning Analytics: Tool Matrix and our activity is to add to it. The tool identifies the following five areas:

Data Cleansing/Integration

Prior to conducting data analysis and presenting it through visualizations, data must be acquired (extracted), integrated, cleansed and stored in an appropriate data structure. Given the need for both structured and unstructured data, the ideal tools will be able to access and load data to and from data sources including RRS feeds, API calls, RDMS and unstructured data stores such as Hadoop.

Statistical Modeling

There are three major statistical software vendors: SAS, SPSS (IBM) and R. All three of these tools are excellent for developing analytic/predictive models that are useful in developing learning analytics models. This section focuses on R. The open source project R has numerous packages and commercial add-ons available that position it well to grow with any LA program. R is commonly used in many data/analytics MOOCs to help learners work with data. We opted for Tableau during week 1 & 2 due to ease of use and relatively short learning curve.

Network Analysis

Network Analysis focuses on the relationship between entities. Whether the entities are students, researchers, learning objects or ideas, network analysis attempts to understand how the entities are connected rather than understand the attributes of the entities. Measures include density, centrality, connectivity, betweenness and degrees.

Linked Data

If Tim Berners-Lee vision of linked data (http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html) is successful in transforming the internet into a huge database, the value of delivering content via courses and programs will diminish and universities will need to find new ways of adding value to learning. Developing tools that can facilitate access to relevant content using linked data could be one way that universities remain relevant in the higher learning sector.

Visualization

The presentation of the data after it has been extracted, cleansed and analyzed is critical to successfully engage students in learning and acting on the information that is presented.

My next focus will be to identify key tools within each area.

Are you aligning Training with Performance?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:36:00 -0400

Focus Training on Performance

As a learning leader it is important to understand how to best align your training activities with the performance goals of your organization. To do this, we need to be sure that we always keep performance as the goal, communicate transparently and clearly, and think of learning as a process, not an event. This can be challenging, because a lot of we do looks and feels like an event.

It feels like those of us who analyze roles, design and develop curriculum, facilitate a course, and evaluate the success for that course, assume that we have "performance" as our main focus. But unfortunately, it can be elusive. We can find a great concept and really focus on delivering that concept, hoping the learner will take it back to the workflow they live in on a daily basis.

Measure the Learners Performance

We also have to be careful that we don't get caught up in worrying about measuring ourselves. When we look at the data we have, we tend to want to focus on how training activities went, how did we do, did they like us. But this takes the focus away from the performance of the employees. Can they perform the task(s) we taught them?

Communicate their Performance to the Field

We need to be able to communicate clearly to the business unit...

here is how your staff is performing and if at all possible, be part of the performance communication when they are back in the field.

Are you aligning your training with performance?

Learning about Big Data

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 12:43:00 -0400

The emerging field of big data is being hyped everywhere. I too, am pretty excited about what is happening and even more excited about the potential it represents. The big data movement is primarily about leveraging unusually large amounts of data in a way to make better decisions.

Some of the more notable examples being referred to include Moneyball, where the data showed that on-base percentage was a better predictor of runs, then the traditional batting average in Major League Baseball and the NetFlix competition for a movie recommendation system and similarly Amazon’s website. Others that may not be as notable, such as IBMs work with a beverage retailer that looked at hyper local events (social media postings about soccer practice ending), the weather (sales above 70 degrees), and other relative data points. In this case they analyzed over a billion points of data that could potentially impact consumer behavior.

Today, there is more and more investment in capturing and analyzing data. Communities like these are getting more popular. These are interesting times.

You've Got Mail, A Business Model?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Jul 2013 17:52:00 -0400

I tend to have a lot of business ideas, some good, some not so marketable. For example, I once thought of an idea to create a bar or restaurant built around a go-cart track where patrons were able to drink and drive. Think about racing a go-cart around a track after having a few drinks, your friends cheering you on... anyway... I don't drink or would ever encourage folks to drink so I'll probably leave that to someone else...

My latest business idea is one on a much smaller scale, but I think it is a real problem. Most enterprises won't let you enable your work email on your personal phone citing security issues. So that forces many of us to carry two phones. Yuck.

However, most still allow access through their email service web access. So, you can browse your work email through the browser on your smartphone and still be within your company's security policy. The downside to going through the browser is there is no alerts to know if "You've Got Mail". It takes time to go through the login process just to see if you have new emails.

I think an iphone/android app be created that could connect to an enterprise email service and just get the meta-data of an email. name, time, unread.... and that is it. It can't access any additional information.

I guess providing your credentials to the service would be the problem. Maybe you could leverage some type of single-sign-on solution. I'm not sure.

I would get that app. so I could go to the go-cart racing bar with just a single phone and still get a ping when my boss had sent out a weekend update.

Kahn at Google

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 5 Oct 2012 19:29:00 -0400

Great video of Salmon Kahn talk about his Khan Academy and his thoughts on education as a whole. I that it was interesting to hear his thoughts on credentialing.

Thanks Steve

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 5 Oct 2011 22:41:00 -0400

Not that I will have anything to add to the news that Steve Jobs has passed away, but I will say that I certainly admired his passion from afar. Many times, as an entrepreneur I turned to Apple to look at how they did it, and made myself determined that this was the standard I wanted to set. I wanted to make something that people would be passionate about, something that was better then anything they could have asked for or even known that they wanted. I rarely achieved, let alone hit that standard time and again.

I am so impressed with the commitment to excellence.

Thanks, Steve.

Using the new MacBook Air

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 2 Aug 2011 22:26:00 -0400

I made the jump and spent money that has taken me years to save and bought the new 13" MacBook Air. After two days.... I love it. It is so nice. Of course the form factor is great and the new Lion OS is really nice. I have been downloading Mac Apps and Chrome Apps and podcasts.

It is so thin, I slid it into my laptop case, with the other monster Dell laptop already in there. This is the first "personal" laptop I have bought for myself in over 12 years, because I always get them through work.

Also a quick note on the Apple Store experience, it is amazing. I just spent the last 6 to 7 months working on a customer service training project and let me tell you, Apple has it down. We spent hours just talking through the new features of Lion.

I really hope that this laptop will allow me to get back to writing and even allow me to start programming. I want to create web content and build my own apps one day.

So, I am an Apple fanboy. Always have been. And with cool technology like this.... always will be.

All about Dynamic Views for Readers - Blogger Help

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:42:00 -0400

All about Dynamic Views for Readers - Blogger Help

The Dynamic Views in Blogger is really cool. I don't know if it is new, but it let's you have an overview of blog content.

Great Animation on Motivation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 1 Jul 2010 08:41:00 -0400

This video is going round the web, but very interesting.

The message is that higher incentives lead to poorer performance on even basic cognitive tasks. Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose lead to better performance, once you take the issue of money off the table.

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

The main point is to think about how you can provide your team with more autonomy, more time to achieve mastery on specific skills, and provide everyone with a clear purpose.

UPDATE: Check out this long and interesting post from Michael Feldstein Sakai Conference: Kamenetz Keynote http://bit.ly/cNigzC He takes the ideas from a keynote from Anya Kamenetz at the Sakai Conference and compares them to Dan Pink's ideas. There is a lot of information here, but some interesting things to consider if you are familiar or have time to go through them.

Dan Roam: The History of Visual Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:36:00 -0400

Here is a great short movie by Dan Roam on the history of visual thinking. It is a great example of how we can improve learning.

SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

I would love to see more trainers put this type of thinking into their presentations. Specifically on ideas that can be abstract. I wonder if we can convert the iPad into a tool to make these types of presentations. Does anyone know of a specific tool / app for presenting through the iPad?

Home vs School: The best 21st Century Learning Environment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:16:00 -0400

I was thinking about a comment I heard on Rocketboom from an Intel employee discussing the release of their classmatePC designed for the classroom. His comment was something to the effect that since students have broadband and computers at home, they are set back 20 years when they enter the classroom. (I am paraphrasing). This is an interesting idea on a couple of levels.

At School

From Flickr

The school technology experience often looks like working on a document, creating a presentation, researching a planet, or maybe even blogging if you are lucky. Most technology at school is limited to controlled weekly or maybe even daily time slots working in locked computing environments on very structured lessons. All for seemingly good reasons - equal access, meeting learning standards, protection from harmful content. These types of situations are a good start, but they just don't support the kind of deeper learning that happens in a more open online environment.

Compare this to Home.

I think it is certainly true that the majority of our youth now has internet access at home. Many have multiple devices that are connected to broadband access, including the traditional desktop that is typically in the home office area, at least one parent as a laptop from work (if not both), they may have a netbook that maybe a grandparent got them for Christmas, an ipod touch for their birthday, many have iphones, and then many have game consoles like the xBox360, Wii, or Playstation that are connected. (not to mention the PSP and iPad). Soon, we will be able to add AppleTV and GoogleTV connecting our TVs throughout the house. So, while a few homes have all these things, most have at least one.

We are beginning to see that students have more open access to the web at home then they do in the school. With this in place, the home learning environment looks a little different then what kids see at school. This open learning platform is more like having a constant feedback loop with repeated opportunities for reading, listening, and watching content and on-going collaboration.

Of course, this more open approach can be in conflict with the more controlled school environment, particularly when access to technology is limited and lessons are focused on specific outcomes and I think some of that tension represents an important value that educators bring to the process.

When our youth are given more freedom to work through a reinforcement loop that happens when you surf the web, they are able to accelerate their own, self-driven learning.

Now I don't want to create a stereotype that somehow our youth are in this constant mode of multi-tasking and can somehow manage all these things simultaneously for hours on end, because that is not really what I am seeing. What it looks like to me, is that my 11 year old is switching among these various activities, waiting for feedback from a particular activity and filling the down time with content consumption or some other engaging activity.

So, it might be that he is maintaining an on-going chat session with a couple of friends online, while he switches back and forth with the realtime stats feed of an NBA game that is on the TV. When the announcer mentions something that is happening in the sports world, he jumps over and reads an online article about that event. Then after the chat has ended or at least paused he will launch an online game and play for ten minutes or launch a YouTube video to checkout. If it is funny or compelling in some way he will send the link to a friend.

Each of these activities are in their own way a feedback loop and must be compelling for the young learner to stay engaged or they will simply move on and try something different. If the activity is compelling enough they will engage at a deeper level, reading it completely, making a comment, sharing it with a friend.

The determination of what is compelling is made on the fly based on a variety of factors including the topic, who is involved, and the emotional component of the content. (think baby laughing on YouTube). My son is a frequent online visitor of a guy who makes up parody songs about the NFL and it is really an emotional connection with that content and he always wants to share the with me.

Provided with enough "free time" learners will begin to build reading and collaboration skills and hopefully at some point start to take the role of creator. If you want to really help today's youth, encourage them to be creators on the web. Post a video, write a song and post it, blog, and even engage in Facebook and Twitter (Note: I won't let me 11 yr old on Facebook and his Twitter stream is private to friends). These are great skills they will use for the rest of their life.

Some Early Programs

So there may be some interesting things with the way kids use technology at school vs the way the use them at home. I have been fortunate enough to have been involved in two programs that are changing this reality for school kids.

The Globaloria program that has been implemented throughout West Virginia (I was the Program Manager for a year) and promotes this more open exploration of learning and extend computer use.

The second program, is a program that I am involved in is a 1 to 1 computer to student program at a local elementary school that will be entering it's second year this fall. Students each have a netbook computer to use for the entire school day, everyday and get to take the technology home for homework assignments and hopefully to explore additional content.

What do you Think?

I think that next question is, if the above is actually happening at some level, what impact will that have on our youth? Who will thrive in this new environment? Is a single computer with internet access equal to many devices, or does having a mobile device at an early age give you an advantage? Maybe you completely disagree with this assessment of what is happening?

iPhone 4 Announced

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 7 Jun 2010 16:57:00 -0400

The new iPhone was announced today. Of course the hype is impressive. The phone will have Facetime (wifi-based video calling), a 960x640 display, multi-tasking, and HD video editing and playback, all on a new OS (details here).

Of course, it will take time to decide if it is open enough for those who value openness and I do at some level. No announcement on adding cellular carries that I saw or heard.

Over the next few days I will try to consider how the iPhone4 might be used as an educational tool. What type of learning can it enable?

What is your initial reaction to the announcement?

Adobe comes back with an answer for the iPad.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 6 Jun 2010 21:57:00 -0400

Adobe's new software is designed to build content for the iPad. I think it was a great idea for Adobe to come back with an ipad solution. A great example of bringing something positive to the market amid negative discussions with the HTML5 vs Flash issue.

In addition to bringing something positive to the market, they came with very specific influencers, Wired and Toy Story. I am not sure I am ready to pay $5 an issue, but it does show that Adobe wants to story top-of-mind in the new digital space of mobile computing.

Tweeting on-hold Wait Times?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 4 Jun 2010 09:11:00 -0400

So I have had the idea that I think would be a great service to allow people to tweet when they are being asked to wait on hold on the telephone, or at the doctor or dentist office. Something like #onhold or #waiting and then the company that you are waiting #onhold ATT or #onhold Frontier or #waiting Walmart. It would be important to really think about how to handle the formatting of the tags and support information. I realize you could just start doing it on twitter and see it would take off, but it might be interesting to build a site designed to aggregate the data and provide the Zeitgeist in a human readable way. If you could add an estimated time, that would be great as well.

I haven't thought it through, but it seems the service would be valuable to consumers if linked to Yelp or other consumer services and it could provide insight into customer service for many companies. It might also be more of a mobile app, but I think there wouldn't be strong adoption if people had to download an app.

Is there anything out there already? I haven't looked.

One positive angle would be to allow people to log something productive or positive they were able to do while waiting.

#waiting dentist 10min brainstormed new twitter service

UPDATE: Bob Coffield twitter stream reveals something along these lines in healthcare...

@iHealthBeat new web-based tool called @MedWaitTime
to check wait times at hospitals and doctor's office: http://bit.ly/9r56Lo#health20

iPad App for Mixing Beats: BeatWave

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 2 Jun 2010 23:51:00 -0400

My daughter and I have had fun creating four layered beats with BeatWave. I free iPad app that allows you to select a series or patterns of tones to make a cool collection beats. The really cool part was when we started experiment with the patterns that make the visual representation of the beat. It did have a feature to email the beat, but I am not sure how it worked once you received the email.

If you want to have some fun find a friend when you might check it out!

A Billion Users, But a Trillion Sensors

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 1 Jun 2010 07:29:00 -0400

The web is starting to bring on new sensors that will change the way that we interact with the internet, data, and the world. By connecting the items of the world to the web, we will be immersed in a (insert really big metaphor like sea or galaxy) of data and information. This will change things once again. To get a grasp on what that looks like and to make a case that we will have to rethink how we build technical infrastructure and design user interfaces, the folks at MAYA Design created this video.

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

I really like to the simple approach in the video, showing how big a trillion things are and how they begin to consider where we will probably have to look for our own design inspirations. It is interesting to think about how this will impact science, education, marketing, collaboration, etc. These changes also once again underscore the need to improve content aggregation tools. We will have to have better ways to handle this data. Finally, for the first time, I think it has made me think about how cloud computing will become a real necessity for leveraging all the data of the future. This is going to be interesting.

Google TV for Education

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 May 2010 09:25:00 -0400

Earlier, Google showed their new Google TV solution. Some pundits dismissed it due to the fact that much of this technology exists, but I think that Google has a pretty good feel for timing. I think the timing feels right for integrating television programming with web-browsing. There are so many factors that play into how TV is consumed and how people use the Internet in that same environment. The Google solution may address that many people are trying to find a comfortable way to jump between the internet and TV in a simple way. In addition the physical considerations, Google has taken a search-centric approach to content. I think that this represents a shift in culture that many won't "get" for some time, but eventually, they will really come to appreciate the simplicity of the Google approach. True, Microsoft Media Center tried to pull this off and was able to do some cool things, but it just seems to be a completely different environment from the web, that it just doesn't always feel right.

Of course for me, I immediately started thinking about the learning implications of GoogleTV. Can you imagine every student with a tablet at their desk and the teacher controlling the large flat panel TV at the front of the room? Then have the students push their work to the front of the room or the teacher by selecting it. Seth Godin's Blog post: iPad killer app #2: fixing meetings talks about making meetings better by suppling every attendee with an tablet with certain functionality, most of these ideas would work in the classroom as well. Then, having GoogleTV integrated in for the instructor would be awesome. The ability to search for rich video content, bookmark it, and pull it just at the right time during the lesson or presentation. Have students respond to the video by answering the 10 questions on their Google Site.

I know, there is a lot of infrastructure required for such a scenario, but it is a lot closer then it was before. Google continues to work to bring things to consumers to drive technology use. Yes, they want to sell advertising and we have to monitor what our learners are exposed to, but if GoogleTV turns out to serve as a centralized search tool connecting content on television with content on the web, our world probably just got a little more integrated.

If you are not familiar with what Google is proposing, check it out here.

PowerPoint Tips from Seth Godin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:29:00 -0400

There are nine, but this is my favorite. -Lee

Pay by the word.

Here's the deal: You should have to put $5 into the coffee fund for every single word on the wordiest slide in your deck. 400 words costs $2000. If that were true, would you use fewer words? A lot fewer? I've said this before, but I need to try again: words belong in memos. Powerpoint is for ideas. If you have bullets, please, please, please only use one word in each bullet. Two if you have to. Three never.

-Seth Godin
http://bit.ly/b07syq

Using the iPad for Work

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 4 Apr 2010 21:44:00 -0400

I thought it would be cool to hammer out a blog post from me new iPad. The device is very responsive. I have been amazed at how quick I have gone from web to the other. I also really like the iBooks app. I have been able to download several apps and they all seem to be working well. It will be interesting to see if I can actually use it for work. I think that it should be pretty useful.

It appears that the compose mode in blogger won't function so I can't post the image that I wanted to include. I may have to try another publishing tool.