Sorting out photos from Learning Technologies. Story for OhmyNews should be ready over the weekend.

Found this link from Google blogsearch. Seems that "informal learning" is part of the main conference.

This is a draft for a story around Learning Technologies for OhmyNews.
Comment welcome

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Adobe presents a case study in e-learning
"We always had confidence in the leadership" says researcher


draft story for OhmyNews around Learning Technologies -28/9 Jan


Next Generation Learning @ Work - driving business benefits

probably this will cover leadership, change managements, organisations.

Adobe have a stand. Last year the word Acrobat was visible but the messages were all about Flash, almost nothing on PDF or Postscript.

So a possible story could look at Adobe as an example of an organisation. How has it learnt over time? What is going on at the moment?

My guess is that the "towards maturity" research will not show top management as a major pressure for e-learning. Mostly it seems to be something that slips in through HR or somewhere over time and eventually is accepted. To be checked in conversation on the day.

Adobe is different. They are interested in software. Started in Xerox Parc a long time ago. Warnock and Geschke still seem to share being Chair. What is the influence of this?

Geschke to Knowledge at Wharton-

[running a company] can feel pretty lonely. Who do you talk to? That's one thing John and I have always tried to do for Bruce and Shantanu. We don't keep an office at Adobe. I don't want to be perceived as looking over their shoulders. [But] we make ourselves available anytime that they want to sit down. We usually have breakfast once a month with Shantanu to chat and see how things are going. If he wants to call, we'll be there immediately.

Around the time of buying Macromedia there seems to have been a shift in Adobe as if the entire Postscript / PDF project had been traded in. How would Warnock or Geschke think about this?

from same interview-

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think is the biggest challenge Adobe is facing going forward?

Geschke: Inventing the future. We'll never succeed unless we continue to open up new vistas.

I honestly believe that our technology and what's happening in the market -- where essentially all visual communication is going to the web -- is the sweetheart point in our whole envelope of products and technologies. Shame on us if we can't figure out a way to take advantage of that shift in the way the world is moving with the distribution of information.

A lot of what are there today -- the limitations of browsers and of the web imaging standards -- are things that we think we have a solution for. As they become the primary delivery mechanism, that value is going to differentiate.


So "all visual communication is moving to the web". Is print just part of visual communication?

YouTube link to Warnock on newspapers in 2007

The Chief Technology Officer is now Kevin Lynch. I cannot find through Google that he ever mentions PDF.

So there could be a major shift here. I am still interested in print and PDF and find it quite hard to communicate with Adobe. The description "paranoid" sometimes makes sense but in a formal technical sense as described by Andrew S. Grove in his book - Only the Paranoid Survive

Look out for the inflection points. Move out of declining products fast.

Adobe may be right about this but I find it hard to keep up. Academic journals for example. What will happen? There is still a lot of text there but maybe future students will just not be very interested.

Am I making this up? Recent Adobe blog entry

many of you may have heard about Acrobat.com and simply dismissed it as some kind of PDF-Mecca

so being interested in PDF as such is not very cool.

I think about the change as Adobe Classic and Adobe(FLSH). Thsi Adobe(FLSH) comes from a blog after Max that I can no longer find.

Another sign is the lack of promotion for MARS or PDFXML. No blog updates since September and there is no other promotion.

Back to organisation theory.

At BETT I found a stand for the LSIS hidden away on a balcony. They merge quality and learning, though this ssems a slow process. I have worked on quality systems but find it hard to get people who study learning to be much interested. Maybe the academic theory relating to NSIS will be written down later once the practice is sorted out. There is a model here that includes leadership but I still have doubts about how many case studies it would fit.

In my story for OhmyNews about BETT I did not go into much detail about Adobe or Microsoft. I think both are looking too far into the future. Silverlight may serve a purpose later, but currently there is still interest in text and flat graphics. I did get some email response to earlier drafts so this may be included in a story about Learning Technologies. See below.

I think the ePUB format is interesting. There may be signs of devices at the show. However Adobe are not doing much to promote the Digital Editions Reader. Can't remember any sign of it last year. It turns everything into Flash.

Story will be based on what is actually displayed on the Adobe stand. The implication could be stark for how comprehensive an organisational change can be.

Questions

Will the price of Postscript and PDF products be reduced? Acrobat Elements any time soon?

Is there a business plan for Adobe Cloud?


Below, from replies to previous draft ahead of BETT

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while EPUB is fast on its way to becoming the standard for reflow-centric eBooks, I think it's a bit mixing apples and oranges (ok, chalk and cheese to you) to compare with PDFXML (Mars) or XML Paper. EPUB is designed to represent in a single file the structure of a publication, but not a particular final-form paginated appearance. Speaking only for myself, I think the reason that these other formats are not taking off (in the case of Mars, I will add "yet") is that PDF has ably occupied the fixed-format document standard, and now is a fully open ISO-level standard, which does not leave a compelling reason for another format standard to be broadly adopted to do the same job. While there's some advantages to XML-friendiness over the binary PDF format, and a more modular approach to packaging (ZIP vs. COS), on the flip side there's 1000s of software programs and libraries that grok today's PDF. EPUB is not a competitor since it is at a different level of abstraction (with with the addition of page-templates over time there will be EPUB publications with a reasonably polished preferred presentation, the intention is that different devices may still render quite differently, and I doubt that print/prepress workflows will ever work with EPUB, otherr than as an input format a la MS Word, RTF, etc.).

Our Digital Publishing team has a blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions, and there's an Adobe DevNet digital publishing technology center that focused on EPUB best practices etc. at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/ . My own rather non-technical blog is at http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy.

Cheers,

--Bill

Bill McCoy
General Manager, Digital Publishing Business
Adobe Systems Incorporated
bmccoy@adobe.com

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Will: I do not think that Adobe views the business of communicating information broken into two distinct camps as you have portrayed. I think we view it as a spectrum with "old" printing at one end and "new" rich internet applications at the other.

Most of our Creative Suite (CS) component products are used throughout the information communication industry. We estimate that 85% of all web pages have had some of the content processed in Photoshop. And Photoshop, well even the complete CS, is the primary tool for traditional publishing/printing.

Although in enterprise there was a split at first between the web team and the traditional print marketing materials team, nearly all companies have realized that there is so much in common that they have brought those teams back into one management structure. Companies are interested in getting their message out using whatever means is the most effective. And the most effective way for them to do that is to have people responsible for the objective and free to use whatever technology and tools work the best. Adobe serves that more general audience.

Just my thoughts,
Jim King
PDF Platform Architect

OhmyNews have now published my story on BETT.

More on this later.

I have sent in a story about BETT for OhmyNews. Not edited yet.

BETT has changed shape I think. The Grand Hall Entrance is still the main way in but the immediate space has lost a lot of buzz without the BBC or Apple. BBC is still there on the Pearson stand but nothing like the scale of previously. Jam was cancelled after pressure from competition. Maybe this is the reason for the absence. Apple have cut back on shows as the mobile devices are aimed at a consumer level. They are more likley to open another shop than turn up at Olympia. A group of Apple dealers are in the smaller National Hall so the Mac fans head there.

The Netbook or whatever you want to call it is getting a lot of interest but some of the new companies cannot book into the smae area as Dell and Microsoft so some are right at the back behind the cafe- Asus, Acer, Sony and Intel.

So the overall effect is that most of the sp[acehas the same sort of attention. Open Source is hidden away though on the balconies - Moodle N2 near the Leadership Lounge and the Open Source Precinct SW104 in the software area.

The UK print journalists still have enough influence to prevent BBC projects such as local video and educational resources. It remains to be seen what happens next. Long ago Greg Dyke spoke of an open archive of video for the public. What happened?

Another item on open source. If Portugal, why not UK?

I'm at the easyInternetcafe on Kensingtom High Street, checking Google News ahead of BETT. Top link is about netbooks. I think that is still the right word.

Eugene Hsu is the director of the education ecosystem enabling team at Intel. So far I did not realise Intel was there.

It seems to me that Linux has a chance for this kind of situation. Yesterday the Guardian had an insert from Dell with one offer with Ubuntu. The price was only just a bit more than a Sony Reader. Sony is at BETT but no news yeton the Reader being displayed. If book publishing is goind digital there could be more evidence in school books.

Generation Zed approaches autonomy
Educational institutions respond to learner choice


draft notes for a possible take on BETT

depends on finding enough quotes and evidence to convince OhmyNews editors that there is a genuine story here

Z comes after X and Y, at least that bit is ok with the fact checkers

from the Wikipedia

Net Generation

In his book Growing Up Digital, business strategist and psychologist Don Tapscott coined the term "Net Generation" for the group, pointing at the significance of being the first to grow up immersed in a digital--and Internet--driven world. Accordingly, some say the final year of Gen Y is between 1993 and 2000 because they would be the youngest people to appreciate the changes of the Digital Revolution

(citation needed, adds the Wikipedia)

So if z starts in 1993, some of these people could be aged 15.
Sometimes students make choices about the courses they sign up for. This gets attention from the people who plan budgets. So some of the interest at BETT ( and in how universities are presented to potential students) follows the views of generations y,z.


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"autonomy" was a central concept in research by Taylor Nelson for the IT Economic Development Council in 1987. They predicted that the "Inner Directed Group" could reach 55% of the UK population by 2010. So what happened?

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Learning Zone, Alexanderplatz, Lancaster

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Theory on Networked Learning. Has it changed since 2002? Can it be related to practice? Has it been explained in language that is easy to understand? Where could anyone find out more about it?

Some of these ideas are from the 1960s or earlier. May still relate to conversation at BETT.

BETT background

Long ago there used to be general purpose computer shows. In the UK these were often at Olympia. Part of the attraction of BETT is to recover some memories of Olympia at capacity with computer conversation. My friend Gary may remember the names of the previous events so more on this later, after Thursday or Friday, possible days to meet up.

In the USA the show was called COMDEX but is now about Consumer Electronics or else only one survived. From the UK we only get the search results anyway but it seems that consumer electronics set the pace.

Slightly off topic- Last time I was at Lancaster University I had hoped to check out Waterstones and ask about the Sony Reader, implications for literary culture, resource planning for teaching and learning etc. But it turned out that the Sony Reader was only in stock at the Waterstones in central Lancaster. The traditional university has deep links with the print industry so it is slightly surprising that the latest publishing technology is not launched from campus. But maybe the reasoning around this will become clearer.

Heading back on topic but cannot find the blog from around the time of Adobe MAX when there was discussion about Adobe changing their stock symbol to "FLSH" in the same way Sun changed to "JAVA". I like this idea as it clarifies a change and leaves Adobe Classic as a way to describe what I am more familiar with. Relevant to BETT Adobe(FLSH) covers video on mobiles, animated websites and other stuff that students use at home or when moving about while Adobe Classic covers books, academic journals, basic word processing as most schools require.

I don't mind watching video but it is the Adobe Classic area where I think there could be some immediate progress. As Adobe have lost interest in this sort of thing there may be lower prices for software quite soon. Open source alternatives are pretty good for document creation. Open Office has the features most people use. Also I think the people who write open source code are as likley as anyone to make the connections between open document formats, XML, and ePUB or other formats for e-books and mobile devices. Vista is still not established despite the large Microsoft stand at BETT. So the XML paper spec is not really doing that well. Adobe do almost nothing to promote PDFXML so my impression is that the current PDF format is likely to continue. It turns out that the PDFXML Inspector works just as well with ePUB so ePUB has potential as a way to publish from XML-friendly sources.

The ePUB format has some wide support. The Sony Reader and the Digital Editions Reader from Adobe. However it is not that easy to create. Should be possible from InDesign but it is hard to find much about this. Will Microsoft offer "export as ePUB" in Word? More likely they are worried about Silverlight and video. A couple of years ago they announced Grava and the news link is still from 2007. Probably they will concentrate in this area, not just text.

I have discovered the eCub EPUB creator by doing some searches between paragraphs. See the blog from Julian Smart. Not tested yet. On the TeleRead blog David Rothman has invited the open source community to develop an ePubWriter as part of Open Office. At the moment I am not sure how this will work out but open source and XML have grown together so far.

XML is also the basis for JDF, a way to describe print requirements. the printing industry has yet to find a way of promoting this to print buyers. But it may be that a combination of PDF and JDF is the only way for print media to respond to e-books for speed and cost.

BETT is not advertised as a show about publishing and e-books. But the issues will turn up somewhere.

Open source promotion at BETT will be in the gallery. Moodle for knowledge management or document storage or whatever term fits best is at N2 with Synergy Learning. Open Forum Europe is at SW104 with links to most open source software.

I will be at Online Information this week.

Posts mostly to the Exetreme blog as this is on my card.

Cards by Moo by the way. Last year this is mostly what I was asked about.

The ISO Survey for 2007 shows decline in the USA and UK for ISO 9000 certificates. I have done a story on this for OhmyNews.

My impression is that quality theory is moving with manufacturing outside where the business schools have been. There will be another story for OhmyNews next year but meanwhile there is plenty of scope for speculation and anecdotes. The survey is based on info from a year ago so things may be different already.

Financial Times at Online Information

So far as I can tell the Financial Times will not be at Online Information as they were last year.

All will become clear at the real event but meanwhile please add a comment if I have looked in the wrong place or they will appear with another name.

My impression is that the Web is getting more viable but particular information offers may not be. No other newspaper appears at Online Information. Would they gain much in cover price sales? Is advertising the main prospect for newsprint?

Last year I had a discussion about the Chinese version of the FT, almost entirely a Web operation. Limited print but mostly to promote the Web. Hope to find out more about this.

ePUB at Online Information

At the publishing panel on Thursday I hope to find out more about the ePUB format. There is more interest in e-books this year with a conference at the start. The ePUB format is supported in both the Adobe Digital Editions Reader and the Sony Reader. there could be more announcements from publishers with new titles.

So far there has not been much publicity for the open source aspect. There could be more public domain or creative commons content. Creating an ePUB file is not impossible but could be easier. Maybe the bookselling industry is unlikley to promote the fact that there is so much free stuff available but the cost of a Sony Reader is a bit of a block for many people so the whole cost structure needs to be explained.

Adobe seem to prefer ePUB to PDF for reflow on small screens. Also Stanza have a reader for the iPhone. Some numbers suggest that the downloads of Stanza compare with sales for e-reader hardware. So do people read texts on an iPhone for any length of time?

Feedbooks can create ePUB from a blog or RSS feed. So is this a book?

There will be probably be more on this in a story for OhmyNews after Online Information. Any text, links etc. welcome.

Thinking about things cloud. The Microsoft move gives it some momentum. Strated to look for cloud managemnt but can only find this blog.

I added a commentInformation show I will try to find out other ways to assess how much knowledge is available for management practitioners outside of paid journals.

I have been checking out some social networking sites. Started with Linked In as I am getting more messages there recently. Found the Deming Forum India though it has moved to Multiply as far as I can tell or at least has more content there.

Then I found a link to Orkut where the QUALITY MANAGEMENT group has a large number of members. There is a Deming group as well. The discussion seems to me to be based in practice.

I have started a topic as I have recently started to think that the connection between learning and quality is obvious. Still not sure how to present this to academics however. Text as below. Comment welcome here or on Orkut.

Learning with quality systems, is this obvious?

I have just found this group so the topic may have come up previously.

Is it obvious that learning is a large part of what happens through people in a quality system?

I have tried to get interest in quality theory from people who study management learning. In the UK the people who know about learning tend to have a critical opinion about quality. Perhaps their experience in UK universities has not been pleasant. See "Making Quality Critical" by Wilkinson and Wilmott for example.

So far there has not been much UK academic interest in relating quality theory to researching learning organisations. Peter Senge recognises the connections, see his mentions for Dr Deming in the update for The Fifth Discipline.

My guess is that for most practitioners the links between learning and quality are obvious. Maybe academics just have to be organised in disciplines. Maybe it is just an issue in the UK.

Following previous post about how topics are studied by academics, here is a list to run through on rotation

Knowledge Economy

Leadership and Further Education

Learning Organisations

Technology Enhanced Learning

Protection Science

Competitiveness

Each one is the sort of thing that should be studied.
The end state often seems to be revealed as rhetoric from the dark side.

The next one could be the Creative Economy. My hope is that the study includes something that practitioners could relate to.

Notes for a future chat show.

Background for discussion in a space moving from technology through academic to public

This started as a route from Infolab 21 across the campus. Assume some technology innovation is possible, through a method linked to quality theory. Will motivation survive "critique" past Lancaster Management? The Spicy Hut is the destination for connection with a wider public.

The recent UK launch of the Sony reader is an example of technology that could disrupt the print basis of university libraries and is also in stock at Watersones at the centre of the route.

I find points of view around e-books that are similar to those on other topics. Universities claim resources to make a study of something practical, implying there will be some contribution to a project. Then the academic status is reinforced by a distance from practice and forms of "critique". I have found a particular problem with quality ideas that could relate to "learning organisations".

A blog found through Critical Management explains a view that universities now relate to "excellence" while they used to represent "culture", often national. Many academics do not like the "excellence" approach so reverting to culture has an attraction.

It would be helpful to be clear about the purpose of Business Schools. Sometimes research status seems to depend on distance from practice.

There is a problem in getting permission to video and also many people are reluctant to talk on camera. In principle a similar sequence to the move across Lancaster campus could happen on other sites or there could be various edits. Another possibility is to use a virtual set such as Twinity Berlin. The Sony Center would be a technology launch and there is a courtyard in front of Humboldt University. also many cafes and open spaces. Experiments continue on how to add sound.



Meanwhile this is the start of a sort of script or starting point.

I have started to study Twinity Berlin in some detail. More later on how this might help learning. The main problem is still that the people who designed it know Berlin very well. There are no signposts or street names. I have bought a map but still need Google maps as well.



This is a bustop, but where? No timetable I can find.



Sometimes there is a clue, such as the name of the hotel on the side. Maybe this is only for a select few, but more of this would be helpful. with a map it gives some idea where you are.



So if you find the Unter den Linden from the Brandenburg Gate (one of the places you can teleport to) then keep going ahead thill the trees come to an end. Humboldt University is on the left. There is a large square that would be suitable for lots of avatars to meet up for discussion.

Today I returned to Twinity Berlin via Life Bytes opposite the Odeon on sidwell Street, Exeter. I have managed to rent an apartment at Auguste-Hauschner-Straße 4 but am not sure how to find it from the street level. I got to the Brandenburg Gate, turned left but then fell off an edge. So far as I can tell the address is near the Sony Centre and a film museum.Maybe this has yet to be built in Twinity.

Meanwhile I have been posting to Guardian Talk about quality etc. Will I find work as a quality manager online?

Technische Universität BERLIN is on the Times list on universities

Not sure how to find the site on Twinity

The Twinity Berlin is so complicated I have bought an actual map. So Waterstones need not fear about the consequences of online worlds.

I still cannot get it to work at home. But at Life Bytes all is well. They must look after the equipment more carefully. My PC is full of clutter and there is almost no spare disc space. Still, I am finding real photos to cut and paste so exploring Berlin can continue.

The idea at Lancaster campus is to start from a techno base such as InfoLab 21, take the ideas through critique, and try to reach city society. Something similar could happen in most cities or campuses and as my friend Jo says, it could all be edited together subject to budget. So far in Berlin a chatshow walking journey could start at the railway station Alexanderplatz, (see previous post for teleport to Alexander Square). Then to the Sony Centre for inspiration and Humoldt for critique or whatever would be said. Back to catch a train unless an apartment can be afforded.

The avatar this time is Stephen Ingram, previously found in Second Life near the Apple Store in Exeter. He is the most experimental shopping orientated avatar on the staff of Rougemont Global Broadcasting. Others may travel to Twinity Berlin later.




Uncropped versions of these photos are on Flick- Sony Centre Humboldt

Originals from Wikimedia Sony Humboldt

Meanwhile exchange of text could be the way to develop content. I am still collecting backgrounds and photos of chairs for conversations. The TV prog can be created later.



My avatar near the Twinity reception. Could meet you there sometime but need notice so i can get to Life Bytes first.