Here at Praxis we are of the belief that training media will inevitably be forced to adapt to the same industry dynamics that are affecting mass media. While the analogy does not hold in all cases, it does serve as a valuable source of new product development ideas.
RSS-creator, Dave Winer, and his ‘River of News’ concept have been a big inspiration in the design of our new sites, from the new conversation architecture to the personal lesson feed. Today, he has a post theorizing on how the future of TV news might work with subject check boxes (varying over time) controlling the content flow.
In Dave’s words:
I think this is another form of the River of News, the check boxes represent subscriptions. I could see MSNBC including stories produced by CNN, and sharing revenue with them. The goal is to get the best news experience tailored to the interests of specific users.
I read this with a training filter:
“…another form of a River of Training, the check boxes represent subscriptions. I could see Praxis including learning objects produced by others and sharing revenue with them. The goal is to get the best learning experience tailored to the interests of specific students.”
This clearly overlaps with our Praxis Pass framework here and I would be interested in other thoughts on how this concept might be applied to training.
Source: Scripting News
April 25 Update
Few updates overnight. Dave follows up with:
To implement this style of news, two things are needed:
1. The news has to be unbundled, each segment, each story, has to be available as a separate unit.
2. Each item needs to be categorized, needs metadata, to fit into a folksonomy.
and Podcasting News continues…
Winer doesn’t go far enough, though. In this day and age, a progressive news service needs to be:
* Customizable - you should be able to easily add or subtract entire sections, a la Google News
* Personalized - There should be a thumbs-up/thumbs-down option for each story, so that you can give the system feedback on whether or not you’re interested in an article. Give a couple Anna Nicole Smith articles the thumbs-down, and no more stories about who fathered Dannielynn.
* User-driven - Digg has showed that there’s something to be learned from the thousands of other people that use news services. Any modern news service needs to incorporate some form of collaborative filtering to help uncover niche news that may actually have broad interest.
* Respectful of your attention - One of the reasons that Google’s approach to Web advertising has been so successful is that it respects your attention. AdSense takes into account the content of the page it is on and the context of what readers actually click on and uses this information to display the ad that it thinks you’re most likely to be interested in. While this system is far from perfect, it’s blows away most other approaches to advertising. News systems need to be smart enough to show you the content and the ads that you’re likely to be interested in and the ads.
* Source-agnostic - most news systems do a poor job of integrating content from blogs, podcasts and video podcasts. Smart people want to read about the things they are interested, regardless of the news source. Instead of having to use a news site and a blog search and and iTunes to get information from various types of sources, the news service should be intelligent enough to bubble up good content from all sources.
* Multi-platform - an intelligent advertising system needs to be multi-platform and multimedia. People still want to read newspapers - just not newspapers that use yesterday’s technology. News organizations need to harvest information from the activity of users at their websites to create a new form of newspaper that is user-driven, customizable, personalized, source-agnostic and paid for by advertising that serves your needs. The same approach will be applied to television or video news, too.
Again, all these updates could equally apply to training media.
中文 Chinese
Michael Butler Says:
April 24th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Hank,
I think the fundamental difference between media and training is that one is scaffolded (for the benefit of the listener) and one isn’t. When the news comes out it is fixed in a single form but when education is consumed it is molded and altered so the student can understand it.
This of course is where the teacher comes along. The role of the teacher is to make things comphrensible to the student. It is assumed that when news goes out that it is in a consumable form to the people in a given channel. People choose channels because they find the news they like but also because it is consumable at a level they can understand.
Education must have the property of being adjustable to the level of the student. When we throw education out there we don’t just hope it sticks, we have to help make it stick. This is not currently a property of media for the most part and I doubt it will be in the future.
Your service will work for those people who can consume education as they would consume media. While I don’t know how big a group this is (learning independents) I don’t think you can generalize to all training settings. As you probably know, there are probably more learning independents as a percentage of the population in the West than there are in China. So, this kind of service would need to be tuned to culture, educational level, etc.
You could of course increase the size of this “learning independent” market by conducting learner training as I mentioned in other recent posts. You could also tweak your offerings so they can be linked to teacher led training (as I’m sure you are thinking about doing).
It is the tendency of every business to want to expand if they have met with success. I think one way you can do this is by offering courses for learning independents and helping to turn more class or teacher bound students into learning independents.
Lantian Says:
April 24th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
PARTNERS - I’ve been perplexed for quite some time why Cpod hasn’t embraced other content providers, from a simple Links Page to now this more sophisticated arrangement of revenue sharing, and iterative personalization.
I think it would be quite scaleable and Cpod certainly could dial up or dial down it’s involvement based on it’s own available resources. There are now many many various offerings made by Cpod learners, and other Chinese-learning’preneurs, but they truely are scattered. Some organization, some revenue would be �?�赢 for everyone.
Create a small team of three-people to devote 25% of their time to developing an area on the Cpod site to create a market and organize products. Include the ability for Cpoders to rate and review the products and I’m sure it would be a revenue center that also helps people to gain new tools for studying.
Michael Butler Says:
April 25th, 2007 at 9:56 am
Lantian,
I don’t think Hank was thinking about accomodating downstream Cpod based partners with this new approach. Instead I think he meant to draw in other content on either a piecemeal or entire course basis. Or, am I reading you wrong here Hank? I agree with Lantian that it might be an interesting idea.
Lantian, the protential trouble here is that whatever is created by associated partners might be an area that Cpod eventually wanted to go in. I see conflict of interest problems.
Hank Horkoff Says:
April 25th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Michael,
I would agree that education must be adjusted to the level of the student, but it does not need to be sequential. With ChinesePod, we have designed 6 academic bands, within which a student can pick and choose as they prefer - similar to Dave’s model. A newbie student to the site can start with any one of 150 newbie lessons. With 40% of ChinesePod students absolute newbies and one-third of our content designed for them at that specific level, levels become less important as newbies only get newbie content and can focus more on choosing lessons they are interested in.
Second, it is not just the role of the ‘teacher’ to make things comprehensible to the student, it is increasingly the role of software to automate that process. In a world, where there are thousands of learning objects, students are going to want more options than just the favorite lessons of their teachers. That is where software is going to help.
Lantian,
We have been open to people promoting their own services in most of the discussion areas of the ChinesePod site, but I agree it is disorganized. Most of the inquiries we get tend to be from on and offline schools hoping for us to re-direct traffic. The concept of the Praxis Pass (it is only a concept right now) would be to incorporate, other compatible learning objects within the same standards-based (based on micro-formats?) architecture. I think the idea of developing an ‘ecosystem’ is an important topic and will try to devote a full post to it.
Michael Butler Says:
April 25th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Hank,
The argument of whether to go linear or non-linear is an interesting one and I think you guys are an exemplar of the latter. I think this issue is an involved one that depends to a large extent on whether you assume a teacher is in the loop or not. Without a teacher-as-a-guide then I think the non-linear model has a LOT of advantages. Novice teachers however need structure and a linear framework often seves them best.
Interesting, hmmm…..who is served most by a linear program, the teacher or the student?
I find it interesting that you have introduced a teacher-as-a-guide option as well (as recorded in the Newbies blog). Maybe this whole thing is all about providing choices as Ken so aptly points out.
We look forward to hearing more about the ecosystem.
Lantian Says:
April 28th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
ECO - One of the pleasures of living in China is that I actually have a larger variety of fruits and vegetables than in the U.S. The development of large US agri-business has definite advantages and benefits, and I’m not trying to argue against it. I see large media, however, as a similar system and the technology that is developing can grow into a large mono-crop farms or something different.
If we think of learning content as food sources, then we can ask, are we building systems and tools to grow a variety of foods or just Big Macs. If Cpod, in it’s pursuit of learning technologies, provides mechanisms for others to farm, then I think we will see may boutique fruits, ample amounts of subsistance crops, and small home gardens.
To give this analogy something more concrete, imagine the current V3 interface with another tab after Discussion, Dialogue, Exercises, etc., a tab called BigBrain Content. In this tab, there is software that allows users to create, edit and submit ‘content’. And let’s say other users can rate and critic it. Somebody might write up like in YahooAnswers their best description of the perplexing variations of how to say hot in Chinese. The best ‘content’ gravitates to the top as rankings come in. In other words, a system is created for creating the best explanations. And of course the old saying, to understand is to teach, creates for each contributor a learning environment.
If there’s something I’ve noticed in the time I’ve spent learning from Cpod is that the users have a tremendous amount of different needs and also capabilities. If Cpod technologies allow others to farm and create content, it would only make the community resources richer and more diverse. I doubt Cpod would feel any threat as in essence they would be providing the water, sunshine and land.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 29th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Michael,
Your first comment gets to he heart of a key issue.
“The role of the teacher is to make things comphrensible to the student.”
That used to be the case, but now I see it mainly as the job of the instructional designer. For example: a teacher in a classroom making newspaper article comprehensible is probably a very unrewarding experience for all - it would be very laborious to go through a Chinese newspaper making it comprehensible, particularly as he would have to ‘explain’ the whole thing. This is why great TESOL teachers (like yourself) spend hours prepping their classes - so they can select, limit, and present input in a way that makes it comprehensible, without having to explain every element in it. After that he facilitates the interaction and the communication, aka, the speaking, the skill-getting, call it what you will.
This is exactly what we try to do with our content. It can be consumed by an independent learner, or used to inform classroom activities. Those activities should involve less explanations, and more practice. (It’s kind of like facilitating the facilitator.) I beleive this mirros the changing role of the teacher as facilitator, rather than explainer. (I’m very doubtful that explanations do much for actual knowledge transfer - only active engagement does that.)
This is related to the debate we had with Steve Kaufmann some weeks ago. On one hand we absolutely have to have an understanding of how people learn languages, but that kind of knowledge in itself wouldn’t constitute, er, a business model. The real value, I believe, lies on organizing, presenting, and aggregating the content.
Ken
Lantian Says:
April 29th, 2007 at 11:51 am
LECTURES - I think universities used to make sense in the past as the ‘organizing’ entity. It helped create an environment to bring students and teachers together. The unit of competition became the ‘university’.
There are still needs for this level of organization, however, a lot of learning can occur in newer clusters. There are some key elements that need to be in place however.
For example, widespread ability to adopt broadband is necessary. A competitive need must exist, ie. to get into schools. Subjects for jobs, ie. MSCE. Etc.
There is no doubt that if these elements exist that the possibilities are very large. In Korea, which now has installed the broadband infrastructure, http://www.megastudy.net, which offers online lectures is capitalized at $89 million.
The founder, a popular lecturer, was doing lecturing at a private after-school cram school, and decided to put his lectures online. To quote him, “Korean students…are very picky in choosing their teachers…if they feel like my lectures are not very useful, they’ll look for another professor.�?
He spends about three hours to produce a one-hour lecture and has a panel that watches the filming to give him immediate feedback.
I don’t see much difference between this and Cpod. (except for a few million here and there)
To take it one step further, we can all remember from college the ‘learning’ that occurred with teaching assistants in smaller 5-8 student meetings, learning (well saying we were) with other classmates, and writing our own projects and papers. University curriculums also help to organize this, and the best universities have well structured offerings of labs, tutoring, mentoring, and project opportunities.
I think this kind of ‘community’ or ‘participant’ learning and content generation can also occur online, but there is yet to emerge a true competitive organizing structure to channel the energies of participants. For example, creating a Wiki like environment to produce content for each podcast rather than just being a nebulous encyclopedia, or having Forum like services for each ‘lecture’ podcast, rather than just one big rec room, which is the analogy I would apply to it today. Even the comments could gain value from further editing into ‘notes’ for the podcast.
Cpod now has the ‘campus’ eyeballs, students, and the core content blocks of ‘podcasts’, it’s only a small step (and a giant leap for people kind) from blooming into a full fledged learning environment.