Taken from the Smithsonian Institute HistoryWired Project

“Nose Cone, Pigeon-Guided Missile
1944

From Pavlov’s dogs to Skinner’s pigeons
This experimental device was developed during World War II by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who experimented with harnessing pigeons’ pecking movements to steer missiles. Skinner divided this nose cone into three compartments, and proposed strapping a pigeon in each one. As a bomb headed towards earth, each pigeon would see the target on its screen. By pecking at the image, the birds would activate a guidance system that would keep the bomb on the right path until impact. Skinner’s idea received initial support, but the U.S. military finally dismissed it as impractical.”

Pursuing my thoughts around Google personalised home pages pages I was reminded about some software that Alex (I think) introduced me to a couple of years ago. It was called the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus and a Alex was musing on how it might prove to be a useful approach to navigating online communities.

The Smithsonian Institute were also playing with this software and since they have come on somewhat. It is well worth a look at the approach they are taking to putting their collection online. You can see how they link images of their artefacts and descriptions/stories about them within a themed and temporal framework.

If they moved a stage further and allowed us to get at the data and tool itself so that we could re-purpose and add our own content then they would really have something interesting along the lines of the BBC Sare It Project that is making content available for us to reuse and re-purpose.

I am sure that meta tags do all of this automatically for the Smithsonian but I need more.

Take these ideas of and produce a personalised ‘portal’ that gives me control of these features and enables me to make sense of my online world. This is what I really want from the likes of Google homepage. That is the ability to create my own visual map of my online world that gives me the ability to:
- categorise
- make connections
- have a sense of time
- allow access to different parts of my online world to friends, and the world at large

The Smithsonian project reminds me of two things:
1. Tracy Emin quilts that have large embroidered words that stand out at a distance and as you move closer in smaller and smaller patches of text come into view revealing a rich detail of thoughts and ideas – brilliant stuff!

2. Every Object Tells a Story . An Ultralab project with the Victoria and Albert Museum where members of the public are encouraged to share their own stories about V&A artefacts and also share their own artefacts and stories online

I have just set myself up a Google Personalised Home Page. I was interested in this because the idea seemed to have lots of potential as a tool for lifelong/professional learning if they get it right. At the moment the features are limited in that I can only select from 11 pre-determined RSS feeds (Beeb, Weather, Slashdot, etc.), but I can at least drag and drop to arrange them as I chose.

What I want is a page where I can aggregate all of my online stuff. For me this would include blasting straight through to my FIrstClass accounts (won’t happen because FC is not open standards), integrate my personal Blog (can happen), add other RSS feeds, collect interesting URL and other resources, pick up my various mail accounts (mac.com, Ultralab), host discussion forums, link through to online courses that I am participating in at Universities around the world (could happen), and link to my LAMS account, and see all of this on my yet to be purchased top-of-the-range mobile phone. None of this new or original thinking I know, but the potential for a lifelong learning tool with the notions of personalization and choice at the heart is powerful.

However, the important part for me is the granularity in all of this. I want three spaces:
- for me only, this is private (email, account information, etc)
- for me and my friends, I can control who has access (a place to work collaboratively on projects, this could be with Ultraversity researchers or colleagues)
- for me and the www, a free for all where anyone can communicate, leave resources, take resources to re-use and re-purpose, read my Blog and things I have found that I think are interesting – a shared Kete!

Much money is been spent around the world on developing national solutions to the above, but do we need it? Will Google (or a competitor) end up being the lifelong learning tool of choice in the same way as it is the search engine of choice. True, it is a commercial product that generates revenues through advertising which is a potential downside. However, if I buy into the Government developed solutions I am also buying into bureaucracy and control and generally less than responsive and nimble service provision and development.

I came across this whilst ‘blog browsing’ and it seems to me to be a radical approach fro the BBC to address copyright issues for all the right reasons. Put simply, the BBC makes available to Brits its archive of things that it has commissioned (copyrights cleared) to re-mix and reuse, and generally play around with for non-commercial aims.

They have a creative archive licence that is something like a creative commons licence but not quite as open. Still not bad eh?

A follow up workshop proved to be very illuminating as we began to delve into some of the nitty gritty of the enterprise solution. I have no experience on running such projects so my observations are from the end users perspective and no doubt miss some of the complexity. However, there were two distinct work-flows to the process. The first and focus for the workshop concerned the setup of the platform solution purchased. In other words taking the product out of the box and setting it up to meet the needs of the invited stakeholders. This blurred somewhat with the issue of customisation which involved more substantial and, therefore, expensive work that would result in some new or additional functionality that didn’t come out of the box.

However, more of an issue still were matters concerned with policy although not the focus for this particular workshop. It proved challenging to discuss the former ‘technical’ requirements without getting into the ‘how will we use this’ as they are so closely linked together. It was here that differences began to surface between those stakeholders employed by the commissioning organisation and those stakeholders who were external customers or suppliers of services on behalf of the organisation.

As in the previous workshop, I detected great tensions around issues of ownership of content particularly in terms of risk and control. We all wanted a place where discussion could be stimulating and creative, but where we would draw the line between acceptable and not acceptable content is I think going to be extremely difficult to work out. Clearly, inappropriate content that for example promotes racism or sexism should not be tolerated. However, I would argue that innovation requires risk taking and the permission to think the unthinkable. Answers to questions like who owns content (particularly in private forums) and how material is censored will impact upon the kinds of discussions and, if using more sophisticated measures, the success of the part of the project that is around networking and communications.

ICT enterprise solutions is a term that encompasses large and complex networks that span multiple sites and may include both intranets and outward facing internet services. Clearly this is a complicated and challenging problem from a technical point of view, but even more difficult are the complex issues surrounding the people who actually have to use the solution developed. Because of these difficulties we turn to consultants who can advise on the various options such as choosing one ‘best of breed’ solution or integrated systems – there are of course many pros and cons in both directions.

I attended a presentation the other day that explained one such solution. In essence a large organisation wanted to update its systems to provide a coherent ICT solution across its operations. The technology impressed me, but I am no expert in all of this. The solution would cover:

- content storage and enforcement of policies (version control, process/workflows, security, classification linked to communities)
- portals (both internet and intranet, presentation and personalisation, and choice, context oriented, reusability and repurposing of parts of the portal)
- search (content, communications)

Content includes word-processed documents, web pages as well as the communications between individuals and groups through online forums and email exchanges. XML standards offer the potential to render into multiple and different formats from pdf. to web, to that which can be accessed through hand held devices.

The overarching concepts around implementing the above were identified as security, classification, and Social Networks . I got to thinking about this and what might be some of the implementation challenges :

1. How to persuade the customers that they should move from the current web based forums that they run and manage and set up camp within this system? For example, who owns the utterances/written words that are contributed to the system? Do customers want the vendor to access what they are saying, especially when the vendor is a powerful organisation that could potentially influence the customers’ future viability.

2. The training of staff is an immense undertaking. Not only do they need to learn technically what they have to do, they have to change work practices that will be enforced by the system.

3. Innovation and risk taking are to be encouraged. However, in such a document management system everything is filed and stored in such a way that it an be accessed and attributed. Will individuals either staff or customers be prepared to share thoughts when they think the unthinkable and hopefully arrive at those innovative solutions to problems, or will that seem like it is too risky for them?

4. Is the organisation prepared to let its customers discuss openly its products and services warts and all on its own websites? Not everything said will be complimentary nor in-line with the goals and aspirations of the organisation.

I was thinking the other day about how I could best explain what the difference is between digital learning object and an asset. First, as many people already do, I would drop the prefix digital as it distracts from the important principals that are involved.

When I used to work as a geography teacher in a humanities department colleagues and myself would spend many hours producing programmes of study, lesson plans, and devising learning activities, etc. Although I didn’t know it then, in some circles this kind of activity is known as instructional design.

However, two activities I remember involved a set of photographs (the assets) of cities in more and less economically developed countries that were kept in a brown paper envelope (a repository). The task of small groups of students was to throw the pictures on a table in front of them and then devise categories into which the pictures could be placed and then using ClarisWorks create a database (it really was easy in ClarisWorks) of the classification and descriptions of the photographs. Of course, some chose factors like the height of the buildings, the materials they were made of, etc.

In a second work booklet the same set of photographs were used again but this time to consider the possible impact of an earthquake on the different places……….

Generally we would run lessons in a carousel of activities and to manage this organisationally we would produce work booklets (learning objects) to glue the asset and processes (sequences) together with a specific intended learning outcome in mind. These booklets were shared (reused) by many classes with different teachers across year groups. Of course all of the booklets were word processed and stored on floppy disks in a disk box with sticky labels that identified key information (meta-data) about them so that they could be easily found and developed (repurposed) by any teacher in response to our evaluation process. To make this possible all of the teachers had to adhere to a set of pedagogical beliefs, software packages, and format for schemes of work, etc. (Standards).

So unbeknownst to us at the time (1993) and for several years before teachers all over the world were getting down making their own reusable and repurposed learning objects, adding metadata to make retrieval easy from repositories, and adhering to common standards so that all of this could work. Least, that’s what it seems like to me……