Oh no!  Someone let the cat out of the bag - using Facebook too frequently saps your intelligence and degrades your academic performance.  OK, maybe not an exact translation of Dr. Karpinski’s recent study out of Ohio State University, but it’s not as far off as you might think. According to this recent study, "Facebook is frequently used by 85 percent of undergraduate students; and 52 percent of graduates. Furthermore, Facebook users, who usually studied between 1-5 hours a week, had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5; as against GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0 of the non-users, who generally devote 11-15 hours a week to their studies." While Dr. Karpinski avoids drawing a direct correlation between Facebook usage and academic performance, her data suggest that the amount of time students spend on Facebook versus homework impacts GPA.  Go figure.  Which begs the question:  Is Facebook anything more than an online watered-down version of the public square?  And more specifically, would the closest real-world metaphor for Facebook be the library or the mall? The real-world mall experience is primarily about community- a place where stores instantiate the public square to move product.   In the case of Facebook and many other web 2.0 sites, it’s hard to not see the parallel. When was the last time you found a better deal on something in a mall compared to Amazon.com (holiday deals aside) or some other online retailer? I know, I know, everyone is doing it- Facebook is one of the most visited websites on the planet, but, pushing a product? First, let’s compare the business model of the mall and that of Facebook, Twitter, Digger and other web 2.0 sites.   Revenue is generated by "tenants" and advertisers to offset the cost of public square upkeep, i.e. the food court, roofs, benches, air conditioning, walkways, and other areas where people interact.  Interestingly, it appears that like many failed malls, Facebook, Twitter, Digger and other sites are spending more to maintain and expand their infrastructure than they are taking in.  Sure, these sites might become profitable some day, but let’s deal with reality in the here and now.  When thinking through how educators might leverage sites like Facebook, Twitter and other web 2.0 sites, it’s important to put things in perspective and remind ourselves that technology has always been the vehicle and not the destination (when kept in perspective), and it can be a challenging endeavor when we put the cart in front of the horse and begin to prioritize the private good (corporate objectives) over the public good, especially within higher education. TV is the ultimate venue for showcasing the pros and cons of this type of partnership.  Devaney and Weber’s article on private versus public good is also a solid touchstone to help frame this type of discussion. Not that everything has to be educational, and for me personally, I find Facebook extremely helpful to message people or receive notifications about upcoming events.  However, when my list of Facebook contacts grew too large, I began to feel "Facebook fatigue" and the word that came to mind as I watched more and more trivial user status information fill my profile was "communotainment."   Assuming that I’m not alone and that there are numerous people who care about their friends’ moment-by-moment Facebook or Twitter status (tongue squarely inserted in cheek), is it that surprising that "communotainment" sites like Facebook ultimately end up displacing activities like homework when its usage is left unchecked?  Not entirely convinced? Watch the recent program from Frontline on how South Korea is trying to help their tech-savvy youth to balance "communotainment" with the rest of their schedule.   This issue of maintaining balance is something worth pondering as we look towards how best to "program" or shape tools and new media that enable virtual community and more important, retain elements of "public good" beyond just social interaction. For those of us who work as technologists in the world of higher education, I think we have an important part to play in helping demonstrate how virtual community can be leveraged to meet educational objectives and meet the need many of our students have for community.  This could be more clearly demonstrated by providing online, compelling content that has been vetted by the university and allows students to quickly and effectively form associations with each other.  At present, the tools of choice in most distance education programs are usually Blackboard, Moodle or other content management systems.   While it is true that this software has evolved, many of these tools resemble the distance education tools I was using 10 years ago when I was in graduate school with some web 2.0 add ons.  Where is the new paradigm to build more robust community in the world of online higher education?  In higher education, we often balance privacy requirements against the other needs of students, and for justifiable reasons, privacy requirements trump most other considerations.  Fast forward to 2009 and we are now assessing the consequences of this imbalance between privacy, access and relevance and how we should respond to market conditions that are not very tolerant of our predicament and are demanding more agile and innovative approaches to meeting our user’s needs—community being perhaps the most important. With the continued encroachment of the private sector into the world of higher education, I am very optimistic that new ways of doing online instruction and building community will take hold.  Having said that, I think that it’s more likely that in the not-so-distant future, the toolset that makes up a standard distance education course will include not just the core course management system, but will include a larger virtual community site built with an authoring tool that resembles the feature set found in Ning (micro-community tool), more Instant Messaging capability among students and more explicit access to larger groups of past students via virtual communities and repositories of relevant student-produced content, especially video.  This is how more and more of our students experience the world and where the center of their epistemology finds expression. Students will and should become more involved in collaboratively architecting classes and providing some sort of historical memory to a class as it develops over time and grows to accommodate the work of past and current students.  I found some very compelling examples of this in the Pachyderm links referenced in my last post.  This is where web 2.0 and new media hold amazing potential and where we should expect more student involvement in the traditional and non-traditional class experience. Just as we see happening in the private word of virtual communities, interest in content domains and student needs relative to these domains will drive engagement, growth and retention rather than the exclusive student-side requirement to receive course credit.  While I’m sure that this is already happening in various educational institutions, I am guessing that this is still more the exception than the norm.  My fear is that until we provide this level of community and education to distance education students (and ultimately to our on-campus students)  we will see "communotainment" sites like Facebook gain more and more popularity and continue to exacerbate the difficulties our students face as they try to balance their need for community with completing their homework.

Using small, modular components as the building blocks of educational programs is nothing new to curriculum developers. But many relatively new technologies such as widgets and micro-blogs now provide greater options for delivering educational content in tiny sizes to massive audiences. In nearly every media, "the short version" seems to have growing cachet as users experience growing demands on their time and attention. The 60-second "microlecture" has recently gotten some attention as a possible viable new format to replace to the traditional college course lecture. Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station has responded to the needs of the short attention span culture with "Microdocs": 2-3 minute video documentaries. These videos demonstrate that the minute is the new hour. But do they go far enough? Is the second is the new minute? Widgets—with their ability to disseminate small packages of regularly refreshed content—lend themselves well to educational "fact of the day" applications. Other technologies focused specifically on mini-learning applications are growing in availability as well. For example, educators can use commercial technologies such as Nanolearning to package their educational material into small learning objects. Where does that leave the educational prospects of text on a page? Writing-for-the-web guru Jakob Nielson has studied how users scan web pages.  He found that online reading follows an "F" pattern—that is, people read less and less as they scan down the page. Users often read only about the first two words or 11 characters of a website’s links and headlines. How can educators teach people to write sentences and paragraphs if people don’t read sentences and paragraphs? Meanwhile, the average American adult has at best an 8th grade reading level. So, should materials targeted for the general public be written at a grade school level? Does teaching to these trends (giving them the short version) lead to reinforcing short cuts? What about the value of inspiring attention and aspiring to depth? How small is too small? And how can one microlearning experience be connected to larger educational outcomes?

I recently had a family vacation turn into a nightmare. But that nightmare was mitigated in part due to the power of social networking. There is a lot of discussion about the value of Web 2.0 tools in educational settings. But I want to share this decidedly personal experience about how a social networking tool—a blog— helped my family make it a through a time of extreme emergency and stress, both physically, and emotionally. My wife takes her first sip of water after surgery. While staying with friends in Bonaire (in the Lesser Antilles, part of the A-B-C islands, 50 miles north off the coast of Venezuela) my wife suffered a life-threatening infection to her lower intestine. While Bonaire has a relatively effective local hospital, it quickly became obvious that my wife would need more sophisticated health facilities if she were to survive. Skype was literally a lifesaver in the resulting frenzy of phone calls to contact our stateside insurance carrier and coordinate international communications between the hospital in Bonaire and distant health providers. Within eighteen hours, I was able to arrange an air ambulance to retrieve us from the tiny island and fly us to the nearest qualified medical facility in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. But now I found myself three thousand miles from home in an unfamiliar place with no friends, no family, no connection to the community, and my unconscious wife going into surgery. That’s when I found a whole new dimension to social networking. A friend called to offer support, and told me about CaringBridge, a nonprofit, free online service developed to keep friends and family connected during critical illness, treatment and recovery. CaringBridge offered what amounted to a well-designed blog where I could publish our story to friends and family, keep them informed of progress with journal entries, and post pictures taken with my cell phone. As much as I liked phone calls from concerned friends and family, it would quickly become exhausting to repeat our drama to each caller. The blog solved this problem elegantly. And most importantly, the blog provided a means for others to post messages in a guestbook, that I (and later my wife) and site visitors could read. It was here that I recovered my connection to friends and family that sustained and guided me through some very difficult emotional terrain. The power of a social network lies here, in developing community. I have been very involved with Web 2.0 technologies, both at work and in my private life; but this particular incident will stand out in my memory as the most powerful on-line experience I have ever had.

Many people think of Twitter as ego-centric micro-blogging: "Hey, world, I’m at McDonalds eating a Big Mac for lunch." Yeah? So what?!! Twitter is called micro-blogging because it limits the user to just 140 characters, and as the above example illustrates, most tweeters use these precious characters to provide the world with a slice of their life. The reason Twitter keeps tweets to 140 characters or less is that it uses the cell phone text message standard, providing anyone the ability to tweet from their cell phone. If you are really interested, here is the Twitter article at How Stuff Works. Twitter can be used as an effective communication tool. Many people tweet with interesting factoids or websites they stumble upon. Others use Twitter for customer service questions or to listen in on what others are saying about their company or organization. Take a look at Lifehacker’s blog post on Six Ways to Use Twitter. An Oregon company, GoSeeTell Network, is enabling visitor bureaus to use Twitter to answer tourism questions from the general public, letting brand enthusiasts (i.e., local citizens who follow the visitor bureau) tweet to answer the questions. Someone might post a question like, "I’ll be in your city this weekend, where is a cheap place to go for a few hours?" A potential response might be, "Take the light rail to Forest Park and walk through the award-winning rose garden or take metro bus #12 out into the valley and taste some amazing wines." University admissions departments could use Twitter to let current students answer potential student questions about the school. The Extension Service could enable Master Gardener volunteers to answer gardening questions via Twitter (and reach a younger audience at the same time). Many universities around the U.S. are using Twitter to keep people informed about campus-based news. For example, Oregon State University is leveraging social media with a Powered By Orange campaign (essentially a what’s happening at OSU campaign) that encompasses a website, Facebook group, Linkedin network and a Twitter account. The campaign is intended to educate current and potential students, their parents, alumni and faculty about the cool things happening at OSU (including news items that don’t make the traditional news media). And Online Degree World has created a list of the Top 100 University Tweeters where you can find out what other institutions are doing with Twitter. Written by Mark Crossler and Dave King

Here’s a PowerPoint presentation I posted to Slideshare about how the generations in the U.S. move through time, from 2000 - 2030, based on Census Bureau population data and projections: U.S. Generations: 2000-2030 By Mark Crossler, OSU

What did I learn about E-learning development when I worked at Netflix six months ago? Before I share some thoughts, let’s look at the numbers.  Just this year, Netflix sales have topped 910 million dollars with 414 full-time employees at the helm. Seem improbable? Welcome to the 21st century and the consumer side of information management as a service—as these numbers suggest, it can be extremely profitable. Sure, Netflix also pays workers who ship DVDs and answer customer service lines, but the main focus of the 414 full-time employees is ultimately to tame the customer-facing website that enables the latest movie titles to land in your mailbox or play on your computer.   Is it possible to design viable E-learning courses at a company like Netflix where business moves at the speed of light? The quick answer is "yes," and "no."  Having an amazingly short development timeline constantly forced me to isolate the most important steps of the deliverable creation process and collapse as much of my process around these key areas.  Content review, prototype evaluation, user testing? Check, check, and check.  High-end aesthetic treatment, dynamic navigational scheme, lots of formative evaluation? Not so much. A lightning fast development model is usually the only option on the table for an environment that is adverse to process and time expenditure since its web-based "storefront" reorients itself as quickly as a desert landscape in a windstorm.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model: Who doesn’t love the service that Netflix brought to the market? The reality of unreasonable time-to-market timelines can be a bit painful for E-learning professionals who generally prefer a highly detailed and systematic approach, which assigns equal value to each phase of a project. However, the reality is that the overlap of business and audience needs shift in sync with the rapidly changing technological environment—the audience demands more as technology affords more; and both are in constant flux when it comes to web-based information media and services.  In terms of E-learning at a company like Netflix, this usually meant the approach and toolset needed to accommodate quick content adaptation, incorporation of highly modularized "just-in-time" content, and tweaking assessments post release (usually a major faux pas) to accommodate newly prioritized learning objectives (ouch).  Ultimately, it also meant that if I had 40 hours to create an E-learning project, as much time as possible would obviously go into content creation and review. For those readers who aren’t familiar with nuances of rapid E-learning development, Tom Kuhlmann has one of the best blogs on this topic—The Rapid E-learning Blog.  For a deeper dive into trends shaping 21st century training in the content of information complexity, buckle your seatbelt and check out this post by Harold Jarche and Jay Cross. Thankfully, E-learning professionals have an increasingly larger tool box to help move an organization towards being responsive to this kind of fluid environment.  Non-linear, needs-based approaches to organizing content have become more popular and this has been fortuitous for E-learning developers as this can often help solve some of the aforementioned challenges.  So, my first suggestion for those working in this kind of E-learning environment is to have an up-to-date awareness of what rapid E-learning authoring tools exist.  Check out Tony Karrer’s blog for a nice list.  For those of us working in higher education, the same need to qualify and constantly update your tool set is as important.  For digital narratives or short stories, it’s hard to beat Pachyderm, especially with the new version around the corner.  Beyond the world of the learning management system (Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) relatively new systems-oriented platforms like eXtension are offering up more opportunities for Web 2.0 content. Compressed timelines forced me to rely more often on tools like Captivate, Presenter, Camtasia, and Pachyderm than my favorite application, Adobe Flash. I also learned from my time at Netflix that I truly did not initially grasp the depth of fluency the Millennial Generation has with technology.  My E-learning deliverables were developed primarily for Netflix Customer Service employees (about 300 individuals) who were generally in their early 20s.  I quickly found that this audience did most of their problem solving using virtual tools like IM chat (even though they sat a hundred feet from each other), demanded participation in creating the content and were exceptionally quick learners with all forms of technology.  The only consistent competency gap with this group was in writing skill. It’s not entirely surprising to me that the current trend at many universities is to pump more money into writing programs in an effort to help improve the writing skills of the incoming Millennial Generation students.  Case in point, St. Johns University recently converted 20 writing instructor positions to tenure-track (Subscription required).  Also, check out Mark Crossler’s recent Electronic Papyrus post on the topic of cross-generational characteristics. Netflix as a whole encouraged participation across job roles and I found I was often able to leverage the technical savvy of the Millennials to help create modules and job aids for larger E-learning courses.  For example, a larger project focused on Silverlight technology forced me to temporarily manage a group of 7 or 8 technical support agents to help me develop web-based content over a two week period.   This collaboration allowed me to meet short deadlines, increase participation and helped me allocate more of my time on being more thorough with key project milestones like content creation and review, prototype creation, and usability testing—a win-win for all parties involved. Looking for creative ways to leverage the unique technical fluency of the Millennial Generation while recognizing some of their limitations with text-based content is extremely helpful.  I see this same potential here at the university.  The Millennials can and should be more active participants in actually creating digital content that has a place in a course or the larger university’s content repository.  It goes without saying that Web 2.0 tools like blogs, YouTube, Tweeter, Ning, wikis, and IM are all familiar tools to this generation and allow much greater collaboration between student and instructor. What are some approaches you have used to empower the Millennial Generation via your E-learning content?  How about Generation X and the Baby Boomers? You might start by asking your audience what types of web-based tools they use outside of your academic or business environment and whether or not some of your students, co-workers or audience members might be interested in contributing to the development of your E-learning content.  Who knows, it might just be a win-win. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies, American taxpayers invest billions of dollars every year into research to improve health, safety, the environment, scientific understanding, etc. The accountability of whether these investments have real impact for Americans is tied to the education and communication of research findings. It is the education/communication set of activities that "maximizes the return on the research investment; it provides value to the research product, which is intrinsically worthless" (Charles Wallace in Transportation Research Circular 488). Everett Rogers’s famous "diffusion of innovations" theory describes the process of new discoveries moving into practice through a sequence of adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Rogers emphasized the importance of communications in implementation. Cuts to public education funding present a challenge to the ability to broadly communicate research discoveries. While increased tuition may be justified by the private benefits that result from a college diploma, will the benefits of publicly funded research be associated disproportionately with those who can afford higher education? Or can we figure out a way to utilize technology to provide open access educational materials for the benefit of the population as a whole? The cultural movement for open (free) educational resources continues to grow. MIT received a lot of press about making its course videos and learning materials available online at no cost.  Many other institutions have also gone the open courseware route.  Stan Albrecht, the president of Utah State University, makes a strong case for open courseware: "In the tradition of land grant universities, Utah State University … provides an unprecedented degree of free and open access to the knowledge and expertise of our faculty for the benefit of every citizen of the state of Utah and every person in the world. As we enter the 21st century, services like OpenCourseWare will enable land grant institutions to more fully accomplish their missions."  An additional wave of focus on open access is starting up with Curtis J. Bonk’s soon-to-be-released new book, The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education. Bonk offers more reasons why universities are offering open course materials. For example, "They are in the business to generate, archive, and disseminate knowledge." He also adds, "It is a major marketing tool for the university."  The open access movement is especially strong in the area of scholarly publishing, gaining momentum from mandates from research funding sources such as NIH.  Meanwhile, Academic Earth makes video lectures on a wide range of subjects freely available.  And the Creative Commons has a learning center with free educational resources. But what about full courses, not just course materials and videos?  Yes, that too. Several free (albeit non-accredited) universities are sprouting up under the "peer-to-peer learning"/"learning by teaching" pedagogy:  the University of the People and Peer 2 Peer University.  Ann Michael recently reported from the Society for Scholarly Publishing conference that the Google generation expects "information to be free (they see open access as their birth right)." If we (the public) are willing to publicly pay for the discoveries of research, it seems reasonable that we should demand open diffusion of the new knowledge so that it has impact for the public. Our institutions of higher education could provide these free resources side-by-side with tuition-based, degree-granting programs. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I think it is safe to say that for most of us the personal computer is the first place we go when we are looking for web-based information; however, new web-ready mobile devices are emerging with increased speed and are blurring the line of what traditionally constitutes a viable endpoint for digital content. Have you seen the new Verizon netbook? Is it a laptop, a souped-up PDA? Neither, it’s a "netbook"—netbooks have been around for awhile now, but the fact that this one was selling for under $200 definitely caught my eye. As the computing power of mobile devices improves and they become more affordable, the demand for content that works well on these platforms continues to grow.  Consequently, new possibilities for delivering E-learning content to mobile devices are redefining the E-learning industry in exciting ways. While many user interface and usability people have given lukewarm reviews of the Kindle, the popularity of this E-book device has revealed what appears to be strong evidence of consumer demand for this type of technology. It’s hard to find fault with the practical benefits of having an ultra-lightweight E-book that holds up to 200 books, connects to the Internet wirelessly to download content and displays text in a relatively familiar format without the flicker of the CRT monitor. A sign of things to come? Many think so, like Steve Brotman in his Vcball blog. How might a ubiquitous E-book like the Kindle and other new mobile web-ready devices reshape the world of instructional content? Smartphones like the iPhone and Palm Pre are quickly building a loyal following of application developers and end-users. The iPhone 3 will be released soon and Apple recently stated they have over 50 thousand applications for download in their App Store where over 1 billion applications have been downloaded by their 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch customers.  Until the Kindle can withstand the rigors of being tethered to a 3rd grader and Mom and Dad are willing to pay for little Johnny’s new iPhone, it’s hard to imagine these types of devices displacing the book on a large scale for the K-12 demographic (although there are numerous educational applications available for this group).  Nevertheless, let’s look at some examples of how mobile devices are already enabling new ways of delivering educational media. Michael Hanley, in his E-Learning Curve blog, offers some compelling examples of E-learning applications for the iPhone and  one need only look at the diversity of these educational "mini" applications to see how E-learning developers are already finding new opportunities for reaching a wider audience with their media. While much of the educational content developed by iPhones is created by individual developers, some companies, like Modality Inc., make it their business to transform reference materials into iPhone compatible media. Is the Kindle too bulky or a bit too expensive for your tastes? No worries, the iPhone has an E-book application for under ten dollars and a growing list of book titles. Do you want to learn sign language or how to fly a plane? Sure, "mini" apps for mobile devices can at best augment some larger and more robust instructional activity that normally occurs on a standard personal computer or within the classroom (or an airplane), but considering their cost (many are free) and convenience, it’s hard to ignore their value to both the learner and the content developer. In many ways, the popularity of the iPhone and these educational "mini" apps lends credence to the idea that smartphones will continue to take on increased importance in the educational media space. The take away for those of us who work with instructional technology? Outstanding content is still the starting point, but before disseminating this content, much greater care must be taken to understand rapidly changing audience needs and the growing use of web-ready mobile devices. Shaping content for a specific digital endpoint should obviously incorporate some level of instructional design and in many cases a basic feasibility study attached to your needs analysis. In the past, some of my projects have warranted the extra effort required to develop ancillary E-learning content or modules for mobile devices like a smartphone, whereas other projects have not. As these devices continue to become more ubiquitous, it’s probable that more and more E-learning projects will be developed exclusively for a specific mobile device like a smartphone or netbook. So, what does the E-book and other web-ready mobile devices have to do with academic institutions? Interestingly, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, states the main difference between the Kindle and Sony’s E-book is that the Kindle has wireless networking capability and this access to the Internet means their device enables a service.  In private industry, the survivor of a "technology battle" is not always the company with the superior technology or the deepest pockets (although the latter does prevail quite often), but oftentimes the company who can sustain their product via the most appropriate business model and make progressive adjustments to that model when needed. The Kindle may indeed be the superior product, but the main reason it has become a viable technology for end-users is primarily because Amazon utilized a superior business model to support the dissemination of Kindle-based content, i.e., a service-based model. For public academic institutions, these trends can and should encourage more attention to intentional and strategic content design. Additionally, there are surely lessons that we can learn from in this domain as public universities grapple with how to progressively translate content dissemination into a more privatized business model. As the funding from public sources dries up and the privatization of our universities seems to be shifting into high gear, discussions of what type of business model will support meaningful movement toward new methods of delivery for educational media will be more and more relevant if we hope to avoid some of the missteps taken in private industry and want to reach our audience using the devices that our end-users or students prefer. What do you think? Do you think web-ready mobile devices provide new opportunities for educational media? How might the business and revenue models used for disseminating mobile device educational content in private industry be relevant for academic institutions who are moving towards privatizing their funding sources?

When I was a kid, the whole world was one giant "Learn-O-Rama." For the most part (outside of the standard classroom), I picked what interested me and learned my way through it. It was a nonlinear process, much like a bloodhound follows its nose to sniff out new information. Nonlinear learning suggests that how we work our way through information can itself contain information, and frame our learning. "It’s the road not the destination," said Jared Bendis, a multimedia developer who works and teaches in the area of nonlinear multimedia storytelling at Case Western. This may seem like a new concept to many: the idea that the learner chooses the sequence in which they learn new material. But the idea on nonlinear learning isn’t new. It’s been discussed in the literature for some time. It’s only in the past few years that tools have emerged to take advantage of a nonlinear approach and put it within reach of educators, not just programmers (remember Macromedia Director and Toolbook? Yikes.) One tool we’ve discussed here before is Pachyderm, a multimedia web-based authoring program that creates highly interactive flash presentations without having to be an Adobe Flash programmer. (See Chris’s Pachyderm post.) Most online learning remains linear with learner choices limited to "next-page-previous-page." What nonlinear learning offers is a model based on self-organization of ideas by the learner where, as Eleanor Duckworth points out in The Having of Wonderful Ideas, "the individual has done the work of putting [ideas] together for himself or herself, and they give rise to new ways to put them together." "Learning often takes jumps throwing new light on and affecting much that has been learned before," says Dr. Uri Merry of the Institute of Organizational Consultation. "In learning sometimes a small input can have enormous reverberations. We learn with disorderly jumps between whole and parts, parts and whole." (Nonlinear learning LO14329.) When you combine this nonlinearity with the power of these disorderly jumps in learning, you arrive at a place of wonderful chaos. The kind of chaos that made learning so effective and compelling to us as kids. A nonlinear approach is not for every learner; there is evidence that learning styles can predispose a learner toward or against it. And some material is intrinsically linear, as in step-by-step procedural knowledge. But the potential for a nonlinear approach to impact e-learning is too good to pass up as another tool to add to the mix. It all boils down to the potential for nonlinear multimedia storytelling. But that’s a story we’ll take up at another time.

Crowdsourcing has become a popular mechanism to generate innovations and harness the contributions of mass volunteers for a specific purpose. Crowdsourcing often takes the form of a company or agency placing an open call for help to solve a problem. Individuals respond with potential solutions and in some cases receive cash rewards if their solution is selected. The concept is that the company placing the call receives a greater variety of solutions at a lower cost than would have been possible by retaining dedicated problem-solving specialists on staff. Innovation Exchange is just one of many Web sites that have sprung up to facilitate crowdsourcing of business solutions. MIT’s homepage design refreshes everyday, thanks to crowdsourcing. But there is another type of crowdsourcing—one that seeks public participation not so much because of the distributed expertise but because of the sheer power of the masses. The Galaxy Zoo project, for example, crowdsources volunteers to help classify galaxies according to their shapes. Over 200,000 people have contributed to date. The recent tweet, blog, photo, and video feeds from Iran’s disputed presidential election could be considered a perfect storm of crowdsourcing, citizen participation feeding into the traditional news outlets. The application of crowdsourcing to education has been discussed before—for example, by Rob Jacobs on the Education Innovation blog. Jacobs makes the case for teachers to leverage, through crowdsourcing, professional learning communities in what he calls the Professional Networked Learning Collaborative approach. Tony Karrer’s eLearning Technology blog has also discussed crowdsourcing and e-learning technology. Exemplifying the very concept of crowdsourcing, Karrer initiated brainstorming on a new term to replace "crowdsourcing;" suggestions included "peersourcing" and "experttapping." The type of collective input Karrer refers to appears to be focused on getting help from peers or others who have expertise in a certain area. Another type of crowdsourcing that could also be leveraged in instructional media development is the wisdom of the masses, the potential learners who may not have any expertise in instructional design or educational curriculum development. For it is only the learners who possess the secret to how they learn. The key to crowdsourcing is matching the need (what you are seeking) with those who can address the need (provide solutions). That is, seeking help from appropriate sources. In publishing, for example, content experts are appropriate sources of accuracy review and end-user representatives are appropriate sources of usability review. While there may be value in an educator seeking help from other educators and professionals, as Jacob’s model suggests, there may be equal or greater value in seeking input from the learner him or herself—for it is ultimately the learner whom educators are seeking to change (that is, we want the learner to learn). Enter crowdsourcing. Here is the idea: Basic educational materials (publications, podcasts, learning objects, etc.) are placed in an online environment. The public is invited to enter the environment and experience the existing educational materials. They are then challenged to create and post a summary of or response to what they just learned, using whatever medium they prefer. Some users might create a short video, some might choose to write, some might create a Pachyderm. The learner-created media would supplement the teacher-generated materials, and could enhance other learners’ experiences through social learning. Have you tried something like this? Would you be willing to?