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E.learning Age - Monkeys typing
11/29/2008 - By Admin What is the impact of the cult of the amateur on e-learning?
This year Andrew Keen, a British internet entrepreneur living in California, published a controversial book The Cult of the Amateur - how today's internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy. It's worth a read on your next train journey, but for those who are curious but don't have the time, let's consider how it impacts on the e-learning industry.
Neglecting the old media stalwarts
Most Popular Job Interview: What Not To Do How To Write A Strategic Plan: A Simple Outline SWOT Analysis - To Make Your Business More Profitable Moving Beyond the Employee Lifecycle: Talent Solutions for a New Workplace Business Plan SampleHis main premise is people are creating and reading too much user-generated content using the tools of Web 2.0 and so neglecting the old media stalwarts that they used in the past such as printed newspapers and encyclopedias and original music CDs. What then happens is that the audience for these old media decreases; making them less profitable and so they start to atrophy and could disappear altogether. He gives examples of how the internet is "assaulting" our economy: layoffs at Encyclopedia Britannica (partly due to competition from Wikipedia), layoffs at the BBC (partly due to competition from new media) and closure of the High Street stores of Tower Records (partly due to Illegal file sharing).
He uses T.H. Huxley's (the father of Aldous, author of Brave New World) infinite monkey theorem. The theory goes that If an infinite number of monkeys are typing into a typewriter, one of them will eventually come up with a masterpiece in the vein of Shakespeare. However, rather than being confident that one of the world's 53 million bloggers will eventually come up with a masterpiece, Keen believes that today's amateur monkeys are creating a "endless digital forest of mediocrity".
Disintermediation of the expert
According to Keen, people are not going to houses of expertise and experience (i.e. old media) but instead are seeking out amateur-generated content. Expert information is being "disintermediated" by "amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers and attic recording artists".
We liked disintermediation when the internet allowed us to bypass the holiday tour operator and book cheaper hotels, flights and cars. But disintermediation of expertise should be a concern for the e-learning industry. We have seen the start of it with rapid e-learning development tools, which allow learning and development departments to create e-learning materials for their audience without the expense/expertise of e-learning consultants.
There is no good and bad learning?
Keen believes that the democratisation of the internet facilitated by Web 2.0, allowing anyone to create content and add it to the web rather than simply read what others had added, has led to "less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information".
Combine democratisation of the internet with the moral equanimity of old media like the BBC and we have a recipe for disaster. As Philip Stephens in The Financial Times commented, the BBC website is so keen on impartiality that they give a "moral equivalence" of any group's viewpoint, even if that group commits violence to express their views.
Apply this philosophy of democratisation and equivalence to learning, and we have a situation where there is "learning equivalence" for all types of learning. So reading an anonymous blog or a wiki created by a small section of people with an axe to grind, is regarded as just as valid as taking an online course produced by one of the top training employers.
Imagine a situation where, as Kevin Corti, CEO of serious games company PIXELearning, puts it: "A teacher walks into a classroom of 16-year-old history students, gives them all a blank exercise book and a pen and tells them to write an account of the English Civil War and tells them that whatever they come up with will be the "collective wisdom"... then walks out the door never to return".
Now, if this version of the English Civil War was then posted on the internet by a student, would it really be a good idea if other history students around the world regarded it as valid study material for their history class?
Managing user-generated content within e-learning
Corti welcomes the fact that Web 2.0 tools "lowers" the barriers to entry and enables anyone with experience and knowledge that is of value to an organisation or wider community to be able to share what they have with others. However he believes that quality control in the form of an empowered editor or instructional designer can "ensure staff are consuming content that leads to performance improvement rather than being detrimental to the cause".
We need to recognise that we can't disinvent user-generated content tools, so it is important to leverage what is there. We must leverage both for the "trainer" and the "trainee" sides. So from the trainer side we ensure there Is a quality control process in rapid e-learning content development and usability.
Clear learning objectives are agreed at Chief Learning Officer level and a learning champion ensures these objectives are covered in a way that satisfies the subject-matter experts. And a usability-testing team, picked from the target audience, continually checks the functionality of the developing materials to ensure they would make sense to the target audience.
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