Off Course-On Target

Cool Tools I Use: Digital Pen and Paper

I truly believe that every one of us (yes, that includes YOU!) has cool tools that we use on an everyday basis and stories about how we use these tools and how we came to find and use them.  I'd like to hear about yours.  Meanwhile, here's another one of mine:

This tool is one of those great examples where the very best attributes of the past can be updated with the advantages of today's technology. In this case, it's by combining good old pen and paper with digital technology.

I use Logitech's io2 and have been using it for over 5 years, pretty much nonstop.  It does require that you use special "digital paper" but it comes in a good variety of sizes, pads, sticky notes etc., and they don't cost much more than regular paper and last a long time. The paper itself is very interesting and uses technology licensed from Anoto, one of the first companies to really break through with this type of digital paper, and is licensed by many makers of digital pen and paper. The Anoto-based paper works by having a very fine almost invisible set of little "dots" on each page.  Each of these dots has a unique identifier and so as you write on the paper with the pen, a sensor in the top of the pen keeps track of which dots you are passing over, so it knows exactly what your pen movement and motions have been and stores this digitally.  Then every time you insert the pen in its small pen holder base that hooks to your computer via USB, the software creates a full digital image of everything you've written or drawn on the paper. Think of it as digital carbon paper (if you're old enough to remember!)

Sounds complex, but the beauty is that you just have a very plain looking "regular" note pad and a slightly larger than normal pen that you use exactly as you would any other pen and pad. However, now you get a complete digital copy and backup of every page, which is not only handy, but also enables you to send your pages of notes and diagrams to others.

You also have the option of converting your handwriting to digital text by doing some "training" to recognize your personal style of writing, and this is working better with each release. I don't tend to use this feature too often, since my purpose is to have a visual archive and I'm the only one who needs to read it. Good thing, since I'm often the only one who can!

The Logitech/Anoto paper I use also has a bit of "smarts" to it, so you can use areas on each page set aside to automatically create, for example,  a calendar item or an e-mail.  Or you can take other specific actions based on the notes you take. This is extremely handy, and it can be setup to take these actions automatically every time you put the pen into its cradle and upload the contents to your PC.

This same technology has also been used to create some other fun and interesting devices such as the "Fly" pen from Leapfrog.  This cool tool let's you do things like write a word in one language, and then hear it translated into another language through the speaker inside the pen. You can also literally draw a small calculator on the paper, and then start using it as a fully functional calculator!

Of course, what I'm really waiting for is truly digital paper and paint, where we have surfaces that are digital displays with resolution at the molecular level, but I'll save that for another posting and hopefully it will be a Cool Tool I'm using in the next year or two!  In the meantime, consider trying out the currently available digital pen and paper to help you preserve and share your notes and diagrams.

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Have  "Cool Tools" you use and want to share?  Send me your favorites with the following information:

• Name of the tool and source for getting one. 
• What does it do? 
• How did you come to discover this? 
• How do you use it? 
• Why is it on your top ten "Cool Tools I Use" list?

Google Oceans: Another wish comes true!

While I  can neither take credit for nor claim any influence on Google's recent announcement, I'm pleased to say that some of the things I wished for last year in my posting "New Perspectives; Looking Down and Under" are about to come true!  In that posting, I wished that we would soon have similar capabilities as those provided by Google Earth and Google Sky, but these would vary in that they would look down and under to the earth's oceans and seas. Well, the title of this posting pretty much says it all, and you can read about it in the WebWare article "Google Diving into 3D mapping of Oceans".

Google Ocean (the name is tentative), shares similar goals, as well as the potential of increased collaboration, mass contribution, and "networking" that Google Earth and Google Sky present.  See my previous posts "New Perspectives: Looking Up" and "New Perspectives: The Third Wave" for more details and context about how powerful this can be. These views were summed up in the article:

"In addition to the 'wow factor" Google Ocean will no doubt have for amateur oceanographers, marine enthusiasts, and anyone fascinated by the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the project has the potential to promote more collaboration and advance research."

They also reflect my previous comments about how little we know about the 70% of our planet that is covered by the seas:

"'We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored,' said Miller of Scripps. 'We know far more about the surface of Mars from a few weeks of radar surveying in orbit than we know of the bottom of the ocean after two centuries.'"

Unfortunately, Google Oceans is not yet released, and Google is not saying much officially yet.  I'll be watching for the first chance to start using this new capability, and let you know as soon as it happens.  Since I live full time at sea now, this announcement is particularly relevant and practical for me. I already use Google Earth extensively for surface information, such as exploring a port or anchorage I'm about to put into.  In addition to my charts of the area, the photos and the ability to fly over the area before I get there have made a huge difference in terms of safety and in my confidence for sailing to new places, especially at night or  in poor weather with low visibility.  But I suspect that many of you would have similar fascination with the earth's oceans and be just as anxious to learn more. Perhaps some of you will have research or other information to contribute, and we can add yet another way in which mass contribution and the power of networking helps us all get better at getting better.

This announcement about Google Oceans is yet another great example of the power of wishes and how they often do come true (you might want to read about another wish come true in my recent posting "The Future is about Winning!", which highlighted the wish that turned into Pangea Day).

Although we may want to be careful what we wish for, I could not be more serious or sincere about my wish that you'll keep believing in the power of wishing and do some of your own!  I'll continue to share some of mine. I'm also interested in knowing what are some of YOUR wishes for positive change.

More on Mashups

Last week I was honored to do the opening keynote for the symposium on Mashups put on by the New Media Consortium.  NMC, in collaboration with Educause, recently released the 2008 version of "The Horizon Report" which is "... a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe those emerging technologies that are likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations." 

There is a full download of the Creative Commons PDF version here, which I recommend reading.  The report covers key emerging technologies, critical challenges, significant trends, and what they refer to as "Meta Trends", which have emerged after 5 years of producing The Horizon Report.

The Symposium on Mashups was a fun experience in and of itself, since the event was conducted entirely online using a parallel combination of the virtual world of Second Life and a more "traditional" online environment using Adobe Breeze. Sessions, where conducted live, lasted generally about 45 minutes with about one-third to one-half of that time devoted to dialog with participants using said audio tools.  And to add some additional uniqueness, I delivered the keynote from my "floating office" (a.k.a. the good ship Learnativity) while anchored near La Paz in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico.  I connected up via a combination of a web connection via my laptop data card and a cell phone for the audio portion.

For the past few years, I've been emphasizing and championing the power and potential that a more holistic perspective of mashups can offer, and you can refer back to some of my previous posts, such as "Mishmash of Mashups", "Mashed Up Snowflakes" and "The Future is a Monstrous & Marvelous Mashup", to get more about my views on this topic.

For this most recent opportunity with the NMC audience, I had the benefit and challenge of an audience who were very well versed on the topic and practice of mashups, but were still focusing and limiting their use of mashups to that of technology and content.  My objective was to take advantage of their expertise and experiences with mashups, and help them see how mashups can best be understood and used as an almost universal conceptual model that can be applied to almost everything and everyone.

In the slides below, I suggested that a simple definition of mashups should be something like, "A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole."

| View | Upload your own

Therefore mashups are also another powerful implementation of the LEGO block model of modularity. In the Q&A session, I highlighted the importance of understanding that mashups require the use of modules rather than raw resources.  This concept focuses on the challenge of using components that are "just right" in size by ensuring that they are as small as possible, but not one bit smaller. I suggested that, in my experience, optimum size  is when two fundamental criteria are met:

1. Each component is large enough and complete enough to exist on its own.
2. By itself, each component is too small to be useful.

For example, each LEGO block is complete and exists independent of any other block, yet any one block is unlikely to be useful all by itself.  It is therefore important to note that mashups are not the same as creating something new "from scratch".  Buildings today are largely "mashups" because over 85% of the materials used to create a building are pre-built components, such as windows, door units, light fixtures, heating and ventilation components, cupboards, etc. These are then delivered whole to the building site.  Manufactured goods such as computers and cars are no longer created in factories that build them from raw materials. Instead they are assembled from pre-existing components, such as hard drives, keyboards, engines, wheel assemblies, etc., in flexible manufacturing plants. 

We are already seeing how large shrink-wrapped software applications are being replaced by unique collections (mashups) of small modules of code in the form of widgets, utilities or the combination of two pre-existing applications, such as Google Earth and your database of places visited, pictures taken, or customers served.

Mashups have huge economies of scale and speed of creation because they are are new assemblies created from pre-existing components or "blocks". And yet, each assembly will most likely be unique, because that specific collection of components has never been assembled that way before.  Therefore mashups offer the promise of enabling truly exponential scaling and mass customization or personalization, which is at the heart of my passion about a future based on the Snowflake Effect, where everyone of us can increasingly have just the right people and things at just the right time, in just the right context, etc.

Based on the questions in the discussion segment at the end of this session, as well as the follow-on comments I've received, I think that most of the audience seemed to really understand how mashups can be and are being applied to everything from software code to events and conferences, projects and even people.  By "people", I'm referring to such things as the finding just the right combination of people for a successful project team, or the mashup of your skills, knowledge, and abilities (also known as the description of your real job!).

Now that we have more and more examples of mashups around us, I'm hoping that many more people will see this as a conceptual model, rather than any one form of implementation.  As you consider this much broader view of mashups, what applications and uses can you see?  How are you perhaps already applying the concept of mashups to a more diverse range of problems and solutions?

Getting back to the NMC keynote, I had just enough time to close out the session by telling a short version of my story about "flapping", which cautions against the trap of trying to design innovative new solutions by copying old models.  I've received a tremendous follow-up response from many of the attendees, telling how powerful this perspective was for them and how much it helped them, both in the rest of the sessions at the NMC Mashup Symposium as well as back on the job.  Please see "Confusing Flapping with Flying"  for the full story. You too can see how much you are flapping versus how much you are flying.

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Moving aLOM

If you are a regular visitor here at Off Course - On Target, (OCOT) you know that metadata—characteristics that describe anything and everything—has been a major part of my life and a major focus for many years. If you'd like the full story of my initial recognition of metadata and its value, you can listen to or read my previous posting "Wayne's Wine Epiphany".

What is metadata?

Sometimes metadata is more commonly called "tags", such as the information you provide for things like photos that you upload or blog entries you create and search for. At a simple and personal level, metadata would include your name, phone number, address, family members, your likes and dislikes, skills, knowledge, etc. These are all of the literally millions of characteristics that describe, and to some extent, define you and the world around you.

Among many other benefits and uses, metadata is critical for improved "findabilty" and discovery, as opposed to searching. It is largely via metadata that we are able to find the "right"  people, places, and things (with "right" referring to our individual situations, context, and needs). This also works in reverse by enabling other people, places and things to find us, where appropriate and wanted.

What's been my involvement?

One of my more significant commitments to metadata started back in 1997 with the creation of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee or LTSC, and within this committee, the formation of the Learning Object Metadata Working Group or LOM. LTSC is a group of volunteers who are devoted to development and implementation of standards for interoperability for use within the worlds of Learning, Education and Training (LET). LOM is a set of standards focused on the metadata required for more effective learning and performance.

I've had the honor of being the Chair of the LOM Working Group for over ten years, and this has afforded me the privilege of working with some of the most dedicated people I know. They have worked tirelessly, and often thanklessly, to produce several fully completed standards for metadata such as the IEEE 1484.12.1 standard for the LOM data model and the IEEE 1484.12.3 standard for the XML binding of LOM to enable the exchange of LOM instances (metadata records).

You may not understand or even be interested in these specifics, which is as it should be for most standards. How much do any of us care or know about such things as TCP/IP, HTTP, or the other standards which make the Internet possible? In a similar way, standards for metadata—of which LOM is but one—are part of what has enabled the improvement  of the creation and interoperability of metadata (though much is still needed).

To our surprise, LOM standards have been implemented broadly, both within the context of learning, education, and training, as well as within an eclectic and extensive list of other domains, including art, history, archives, and human relations. I know of no way to count the amount of such LOM-based metadata nor the number of implementations of LOM, but the numbers are globally dispersed and easily numbered in the millions and beyond.

What's Next?

Now it's time for both LOM and I to move on into our respective next stages and hence the title of this posting. As of January 1, 2008, I will be stepping down as Chair for the IEEE LOM Working Group, and I'm delighted to publicly congratulate Erik Duval for being appointed as the new Chair of LOM. I am about to make some significant changes in my roles and responsibilities, both personally and professionally (more on this in a future posting), and it is time for LOM and metadata overall to evolve to best fit the "Brave New World" we now live in. In spite of his relatively young age, Erik Duval has been one of the longest serving individual experts focused on metadata for learning, education, and training. Based on his work in metadata since the early 1990's, such as the creation of the ARIADNE project which is a large European based consortium focused on knowledge sharing and reuse, Erik was instrumental in the creation of the IEEE LOM WG from its very beginning.  Officially, Erik has served all this time as the Technical Editor of LOM and, along with Tom Wason, they created the initial kernel that grew into the full LOM standard. I could not be happier or more optimistic about the future of LOM and of the advancement of metadata than I am with turning over the leadership to such a capable individual and someone who has become one of my closest professional colleagues.

While those of us who first began to put this focus on metadata knew it was important for the future, I'm not sure that any of us could have imagined the degree to which this would be true or the scale of use and generation of metadata. To meet these new needs and scale will require both the evolution of metadata as we know it, as well as a complete rethinking. Some new leadership and energy will be of great assistance in making this happen. As such, the other main purpose for this posting is to bring your attention to some important and recent developments in the area of metadata; the first is a series of new activities within and related to the current LOM standards, and the second is addressing the longer term future of metadata developments—it's worth keeping your eyes on.

Where is LOM heading?

Here's a short overview of the new activities related to LOM:

• Reaffirmation of the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which is largely an administrative action required by IEEE for all active standards every five years.  As the name applies this is merely a check that an existing standard is still in active use and will continue to be so. As the millions implementing LOM can attest, this is very much the case.
• Corrigenda for the 1484.12.1 LOM standard, which will provide a list of all the minor (but important) technical corrections and edits to the original LOM standard, which have been discovered by those previously implementing LOM.
• Two New Parts for LOM:  After several years of work led by Mikael Nillson, the Joint DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) / IEEE LTSC Taskforce has just initiated work on two new IEEE standards.  The previous link will provide you with access to all details of the work to date, previous meeting notes, and ways to contribute to these efforts.  As briefly and coherently as I can put it, these two standards are for:
  • Developing a Recommended Practice for Expressing IEEE Learning Object Metadata Instances Using the Dublin Core Abstract Model to meet the growing demand for interoperable definitions of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) metadata terms and IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data elements, which allow these to be used together in metadata instances.
  • Developing a Standard for Resource Description Framework (RDF) Vocabulary for IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Data Elements. In simpler terms, this standard will  address the increasing demand for definitions of IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) data element semantics, which allow the expression of IEEE LOM instances in applications using Semantic Web technologies such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF). For some data elements, this expression can be achieved using existing, stable RDF vocabularies. The purpose of this standard is to define the semantics of data elements not covered by such vocabularies. This standard forms an important basis for making IEEE LOM useful in this larger metadata context.
• LOM next:  Over the last year or so, we've discussed how we want to make LOM evolve over the longer term. The time has come to consolidate that discussion, gather requirements, and start thinking about how to meet those. Erik and the LOM Working Group have begun a series of open, regular, synchronous discussions in order to first bring everybody up-to-date on these activities, develop a plan of action, and then to begin the necessary new work.
  • These meetings are open to ALL and will be virtual meetings accessible both online and via phone.
  • If you are interested in participating, please either contact Erik Duval directly via e-mail (Erik.Duval@cs.kuleuven.ac.be ) or subscribe to the LOM mail list on the LOM web site. 
  • While those with metadata expertise would be especially welcome, it is equally valuable to get input from a diverse range of others who want to use and benefit from significant improvements in metadata for LET in the future. Please consider adding your input to this important effort.

Trends in Metadata

Metadata is often unnecessarily limited by the popular "data about data" description, but it is so much more than this.  Metadata is perhaps most often applied to "nouns", and my simple minded recollection of the definition of a noun is a person, place, or thing. To date, most of the focus has been on metadata for content (which has been very beneficial and for which much more work is still needed), but the future will include much more attention on the other "nouns"—people, places and things. This post would go on for much too long were I to do justice to any one of these or countless other areas that would benefit enormously from improvements in their related metadata aspects, so I will only list a few areas and provide you with a glimpse of the future potential within. Watch for future developments in metadata for some of the following:

Metadata about PEOPLE

This kind of metadata, especially pertains to our skills, knowledge, abilities, experience, attitudes and competencies.

In one small example, the IEEE LTSC Working Group 20 recently completed a standard for "Reusable Competency Definitions" or RCD, and this Working Group is now looking at other aspects of competencies that would benefit from standards. 

Metadata about PLACES

For example, we are seeing the recent surge of metadata in the use of maps, and GPS metadata is being added to things like Google Earth", which will enable us to answer questions such as:

• "Where are you now?"
• "Where was this photo taken?" 
• "What does this location look like?" 
• "What happened here in 1782?"

Imagine the possibilities as more locations become "smart" with metadata about them and related to them. Photos and video might show what they look like now and in the past. Metadata will be increasingly available for every building, its contents, furniture, features, hazardous materials, fire extinguisher and escape information to name but a very few metadata elements.

Metadata about THINGS

Metadata about things provides the characteristics of all the physical objects in the world, such as machines, parts, equipment, food, furniture, music...well you get the idea. 

Add to this all the non-physical things, such as objects created in virtual worlds. Now imagine if all these "things" were connected and could start to share this information and "talk" to each other.

You are already familiar with bar codes, which contain the metadata for everyday things, as well as the more recent use of RFID tags to electronically capture and broadcast all of this metadata. This is sometimes referred to as "the Internet of things". See the 2005 executive summary of the Internet of Things for one perspective and more detail on this concept.

For example, imagine if all the ingredients in your kitchen made all their metadata available, such as how full or empty they are, when they are about to expire, which combinations might let you make a dinner along the lines of what you desire, and without a trip to the store.  It's all just metadata!

To learn more:

• Wikipedia provides this brief overview on the related topic of object hyperlinking.
• This short BBC article from 2005 discusses how the United Nations was predicting such a "network of everyday objects".

AUTOMATED metadata generation (AMG)

Once you start to consider the massive amount of metadata that is required and possible for each and every person, place, and thing, you quickly "do the math" and realize the overwhelming problem of "How will all this metadata ever be created?" Our initial tendency has been to assume that metadata is all human generated—literally "typed in" to forms. If this were true, there would not be much of a future for metadata, since there is most likely more metadata than data and certainly more metadata than there are people, places, or things! 

While human generated metadata, especially the more "subjective" metadata elements, will always play an ever more critical role in the future, it will become the minority of the overall volume of metadata. Increasingly, metadata will be generated automatically.

To learn more:

• See this article on AMG which comes from one of the many groups that Professor Erik Duval leads at KU Leuven, a prestigious Belgian university.

USER GENERATED metadata

Did you know that literally all the metadata for all the CD's and music you see displayed on your MP3 players, iPods and computers, artist name, title, album name, etc. is generated by other listeners, such as yourself and NOT by the record companies or publishers? What if we could tap into the metadata that each one of us (eventually all 6.6 billion of us) are probably generating every day, such as the tags and captions we add to photos, the PowerPoint slides we create, and search terms we use, to name but a few?  Such is the power of user generated metadata and there will be much work in the future to increase the generation of, capturing, and putting to effective use the flood of metadata that will result.

ATTENTION metadata

Attention metadata is a common term for all the metadata that captures your likes and dislikes, and which can help you find everything from great music to listen to, people to get together with, TV shows and video to watch, etc. We can think of it as the things we "pay attention to"...hence the name.

Attention metadata is what recommender systems are based on. One such effort to address some of the needs for better capturing and interoperability of this type of metadata is that of the attention.xml group. You can listen to this 2004 podcast with some of the originators of attention.xml and this podcast and blog from Alex Barnett discussing attention related topics.

Why would you need this? Consider shopping sites that track your buying patterns, and your opinions and preferences after such purchases, and use these to help you find additional items that you may want (if you let them). How does the system know if you are buying the item for yourself or as a gift for someone special? Currently they do not, and therefore the recommendations become less relevant and you likely stop using them. However as these issues begin to be addressed, there will be more and more "decision support" to help us deal with the growing problem of an economy of abundance and too much choice for those of us privileged enough to live in such situations.

Metadata UNIQUE and SPECIFIC to LET

While some of the metadata standards, such as LOM, are intended to cover the application to LET, most of the initial work to date has been much more general and largely applied to content. There is an enormous need for much greater focus on metadata that is unique and specific to learning, education, and training. This would include metadata to assist with evaluation and assessment—matching learning styles with teaching styles, and helping each of us as unique individuals to have LET options that are just right for us at just the right time and in just the right way.

And trust me, this is but a minor scratch on the vast surface of but one slice of metadata and its very exciting future! 

So LOM, for now....

I certainly have mixed emotions about reducing my direct involvement in LOM and the development of some of these future metadata related topics. However, I can't imagine leaving LOM in better hands than those of Erik Duval and the many, many other dedicated individuals, old and new, who have such dedication and passion for improving learning, education, training, and performance and indeed the world in general, through better use and generation of metadata.

Whether or not you consider taking an active role in this future development of LOM and metadata standards and specifications, I certainly encourage you to pay more attention to the role of metadata and how it serves as a fundamental principle in the future of your life, both personal and professional, and the future of the world around us.

Wayne

The Encyclopedia of Life and the Network Effect

We are rapidly evolving towards a networked world—NOT "network"  in the technical sense, but the concept of networks wherein literally everything and everyone is a "node" and is connected to every other node. As this degree of connectivity becomes more and more pervasive, a whole new set of characteristics begin to emerge and our world as we've known it changes dramatically. 

One of these characteristics or traits of a networked world is what has been referred to as the network effect wherein the addition of more "nodes" multiplies the value to all the other nodes and to the network overall. Historical examples include technology such as the telephone, cell phones, FAX machines, e-mail, IM, etc., where we can easily see the power of the network effect as each new "member" or node of these networks multiples value of the overall network of all the other nodes.  For example, the value of the first cell phone, FAX or e-mail was essentially zero, and the addition of each unit multiplied the value for everyone else in the "network".   As a result, as soon as you had one of these items you immediately started persuading everyone else to get one because otherwise the value to you was diminished.  An early example of the so called "viral marketing" effect we are seeing much more of now.

The term "network effect" was first coined by Robert Metcalf, a brilliant mind and the founder of Ethernet, among many other things. But what is becoming clearer is that the network effect is not limited to technical networks and is, in fact, extremely pervasive. The Encyclopedia of Life is one such application of this network effect.

Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is best summarized by the opening text on the site:

"Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of web sites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

And here is a good review of EOL by National Geographic News as well as the ubiquitous Wikipedia reference.

Of course pictures and video are even better so be sure to check out their video clip that will quickly show you how EOL works and and this collection of demonstration pages that show how rich and extendable the data will is. 

If you have a bit more time  (about 22 minutes) I highly recommend that you watch the following video:

As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we're still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.

But EOL represents even more than the two themes I've touched on here and in my last post. More about this next time.

The Encyclopedia of Life and Exponential Change

The day after posting my thoughts on "New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under" and Third Wave, I serendipitously came across a New York Times article called That's Life, which reviews a new project called "The Encyclopedia of Life" or EOL. This project is very similar in scope and importance to the study of the oceans, but also focuses more on life forms and the planet as a whole.

But what's particularly interesting about this project is how it's such a great example of a number of themes I've discussed here at Off Course - On Target.  For one thing, it presents more evidence of how we are "Living in a World of Exponential Change".

The opening of this article picks up right from where my previous postings left off:

"In one sense we know much less about Earth than we do about Mars. The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered, and their significance for our own species remains unknown. This gap in knowledge is a serious matter: we will never completely understand and preserve the living world around us at our present level of ignorance. We are flying blind into our environmental future

Since the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus inaugurated the modern system of classification two and a half centuries ago, biologists have found and given Latinized names to about 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms — an impressive number but probably 10 percent or less of the total. Rough estimates of the number of species that remain to be discovered range from 10 million to more than 100 million.

But a new project in biology, an ambitious effort to create a vast new electronic database of known species, should make it possible to discover the remaining 90 percent of species in far less than 250 years, perhaps only one-tenth that time, a single human generation."

Sound too audacious? Impossible? Keep in mind that a related feat, that of cataloging the human genome, initially perceived as too big to solve, happened in a mere 10 years.

There's lots more to say about this fascinating project and I'll talk more about it next time.

Memories of Philip Dodds: We've Lost a Great Navigator, but Not Our Way

It was a sad weekend for me and many others as we received the news on Saturday morning that Phil Dodds had slipped away peacefully after a long and valiant battle with cancer.

It has taken me awhile to be able to write this, but I join the many others who share in the wide range of emotions and memories invoked by thinking of Phil. 

Referencing one of Phil's many claims to fame when he starred as a young man in the classic movie "Close Encounters of a Third Kind",  (center person in the screenshot from the movie), Elliott Masie wrote this typically thoughtful message:

"What are we saying to each other?"

That was a single line, spoken by the sound engineer at the end of Close Encounters of a Third Kind, as he played chords and a friendly alien spaceship played music back.

The role was played by a young sound engineer who was spotted by Steven Spielberg and given the on-screen role as the interface between these two worlds. That man, Philip Dodds, was still young and inventive, when he passed away this Saturday morning.

Philip Dodds was the Chief Architect of SCORM and the force behind sharable and reusable content. He was deeply involved in the evolution of interactive multimedia and expanding the possibilities for learning via technology.

If you use a Learning Management System, author an interactive learning module, or talk about the future of Web 2.0, take a moment to thank a man who you probably never met. Philip's work was KEY and CRITICAL to the exciting world of learning, knowledge management, and collaboration that we take for granted.

Philip's dreams were to create a global set of standards and specifications that would allow content to be searchable, reusable, and expandable.

Philip, we thank you for all that you have done, and we'll keep asking that question: "What are we saying to each other?"

With respect and sadness,

Elliott Masie

For those of you who knew Phil well and are feeling a bit melancholy, as Tom King put it, you may want to head over to this thread that Tom started on Phil on the AICC blog. Phil may be most publicly remembered as "the father of SCORM" or Shareable Content Object Reference Model but there is so much more that Phil accomplished, and Tom kindly provided links to some of many other ways that Phil left his imprint on this world. As Tom reflected in a recent e-mail, "perhaps reading the comments will be a bit uplifting for you too." Please add your memories of Phil to the thread as well, and here are a few of mine:

My Memories of Phil Dodds:

I remember all those late night and early morning meetings working on what Phil usually referred to as "the devil is in the details" and his quips about "working code trumps all theories". 

While many of these meetings were held in conjunction with a standards meeting of IEEE or AICC or ADL or ISO meetings in yet another city in yet another meeting room, we also had many of these meetings out at Phil and Sue's wonderful and historical Weems family farm house in Annapolis, Maryland.

I dug up this photo as it is so very fitting of Phil and these memories.  Not only does this show Phil (on the left), beaming as always, in front of a flip chart full of notes after one of these many meetings at the farm, but this is the photo that Phil chose to send me a few months ago when we were dealing with the loss of another great contributor, Claude Ostyn who is in the middle of this picture, along with Tyde Richards on the right.

Sue and Phil always encouraged us to stay over for the night, and though part of Phil's ulterior motive was to get more work done, it was also to have more time in the evenings to play music, enjoy a good Scotch, and discuss some of the wonderful history of the original Weems house and family. 

If the name Weems is not familiar to you, in the days before there was Global Positioning Systems or GPS, it was Phil's grandfather and namesake, Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation" who modernized celestial navigation with the ingenious "Weems System of Navigation" and who invented such things as the Second Setting Watch.

I fondly recall Phil recounting some of the of the Weems family history and tales of his grandfather as we were taking a break from SCORM work and sitting in the study in the farmhouse which would more accurately be described as a wing of the Smithsonian navigation museum. Phil told of how Charles Lindbergh studied with Weems before attempting his 1928 transatlantic flight, and Admiral Byrd, a classmate of Weems at the Naval Academy, came to Weems for instruction before setting out for the North Pole.

Whether he knew it or not, Phil admirably carried on this family tradition by acting in so many ways as the "grand old navigator" himself for so many of us.  It was like a déjà vu experience for me to read in the following tribute to Captain Philip Weems:

Captain Philip Van Horn Weems, the "Grand Old Man of Navigation," is renowned as a pioneer in the field. He modernized navigation by simplifying techniques; invented and adapted new, time saving methods; and most significantly, shared this knowledge through the tireless teaching of his discoveries and insights. His pupils were naval officers and adventurers. His advancements, which began during his career as a naval officer, now stretch across all types of navigation - from maritime to aeronautic, from underwater to outer space.

Just as with his grandfather before him, Phil too was a pioneer, inventor, engineer, and teacher who worked tirelessly to convert his visions to explicit form and share them with all of us so passionately.  Phil has left us with a plethora of navigational instruments, tables and maps in the form of things like SCORM documents and tools, ADL-R and so much more to help chart our way forward in the often confusing seas of learning, education, and training.

On Saturday, we lost our "grand navigator" but Phil Dodds has left us well equipped to find our own way now.

Thanks for the memories and the navigational aids Phil!

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Brazil or Bust! (Part 1 of 2)

Despite the travel gods’ best attempts to keep me from my goal, I finally made it to São Paulo, Brazil 52 hours after leaving San Francisco.

It all started with an emergency landing in Denver due to an electrical fire, which caused me to miss my connecting flight. I was rerouted through Newark, then shuttled to JFK, where the next leg of my journey was delayed because of fog in São Paulo.  Two flights later I finally arrived at my destination.

I had been asked back to São Paulo for the third time to emcee and facilitate the eLearning Brasil 2007 conference at the beautiful São Paulo World Trade Center (see photo at right).

And in spite of the unique challenges I faced getting there this year, once again I found it well worth all that I went through to be part of this annual event. In fact, the whole experience fit right into the theme of this year’s event, The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

Here are some extracts of how my adventure played out and how it fit into this year’s theme on learning and performance:

• While I was stuck in the JFK airport in New York, I used phone and instant messaging to contact Francisco Soetl, MicroPower CEO and the wonderful mastermind behind the “eLearning Brasil” events, to update him on my changing itinerary.

• Over lunch at a JFK restaurant, I made an Internet connection on my laptop with my Verizon wireless data card and downloaded a very effective new collaboration environment called MicroPower Presence that Francisco and his talented team have developed. We used this to provide VOIP (voice) and share some slides for a quick meeting with his team in Sao Paulo to set up a series of different plans, depending on whether I got there on time, late, or not at all.


• I also connected with Elliott Masie, who was going to be doing a keynote at this conference via video from his home base in Saratoga Springs, New York, and did some planning with him. Elliott, via his shiny new iPhone no less, was on his way to the opera at the time, but we quickly set up plans for my interview with him, whether it would be from the stage in Sao Paulo or by driving from JFK up to the Masie Center in Saratoga Springs where both of us could be beamed into Sao Paulo via video and the net.


• Boarding the plane (finally!), I sent Francisco and Elliott a text message update that I was on my way and when I was scheduled to arrive in São Paulo. (6:50 am).


• Finally on the ground in São Paulo at 6:50am local, but since no phones were allowed during the 90 minutes in the immigration and customs lines, I had a tense bit of non-communication time. By the time I was in the taxi the conference had begun, so I switched to text messages and mobile blogging using my phone.


• If you’ve never been to São Paulo (and you really should go!) then just try to imagine traffic in the world’s second (or fifth) largest city (depends how you count). Picture a city with about the same population as New York City (19+ million), but with only one fifth the land area, and about ten times more cars and trucks, and a thousand times more bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles. Got the picture?!


•   If you are imagining a lot of smog (among the world’s worst) and lots of helicopters (the most per capita in the world) and lots of high rises (7th in the world), you’ve got it about right. Oh, and did I mention this was all during morning rush hour?!!


• Fortunately a good colleague, Eric Shepherd, was also attending this conference and was in the audience. Eric is the CEO of QuestionMark Corporation, one of the world’s leading developers and suppliers of assessment systems and services for education and training related assessments. He was going to be on the Socratic Panel I would be facilitating in a few hours. Eric and I were able to do some mobile blogging while I was in the taxi, which enabled him to send me continuous updates on what was being said on the stage, what were the audience reactions, etc., and provide me with the much needed context once I was on stage (let’s hope) and facilitating conversations with the other keynoters and panelists. In return, I was able to keep the organizers updated via Eric, on my whereabouts and ETA at the convention center.


• When it became doubtful that I was going to make it to the conference in time Eric kindly offered to take the stage on my behalf and start the interview with Elliott when he finished his keynote address. Finally, in what I think is the closest I’ve ever come in almost 20 years to being late for a speaking engagement, I dashed from the taxi as it pulled into the Sao Paulo World Trade Center, caught the elevator to the convention center, and ran onto the stage 3 minutes late and in time to thank Eric as he handed me the microphone and I started the interview with Elliott.

That counts for close right? But it also counts for just doing what it takes to make things work. I thought this was a good example of how the combination of great people with the right “can do” type of attitude, and the clever use of whatever tools and technology we have around us, can overcome unexpected situations and still get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction.

I'll talk more about the conference itself in my next posting.

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Paying Forward Really Pays Back!

I’m sending this post out to those of you who have been giving unselfishly of your time helping others, whether formally as a teacher, coach, instructor, club leader, or more informally as a parent, mentor, trusted advisor, or friend. I suspect (and hope) that this includes most of you. I’ve tried to do my best at this, formally for over 15 years as a high school teacher and university instructor and more informally since then for the past 20 years.

I know firsthand that there are times when you wonder if it is all worth it. “Am I really helping? Does it matter? Am I making a difference? Am I having an impact?”  My hope is that this post will help you to answer these questions with a most emphatic “YES!” I’d like to share a recent experience that puts the exclamation point on that answer, so I can encourage those of you who may be questioning your efforts to keep up the “good fight”.

Several weeks ago, I received one of those wonderfully unexpected and rare notes a teacher gets from a former student. One of my high school students from the class of 1988 (my last year of teaching before I decided to try out the private sector “just for a year” and came to work for Autodesk Inc.) This former student tracked me down last month via an online search and sent me an e-mail that said in part:

“Dear Mr. Hodgins,

After all these years, I’ve finally tracked down an email address for you. I hope you remember me, ….I graduated from your career prep drafting/ CAD class in 1988.

Although I never really applied myself in your class, nor any other for that matter, I wanted to let you know how much your classes affected my life. It not only gave me a solid foundation for which to grow on, but it also gave me a wealth of useful everyday information – like how tall standard door frames are for example. Immediately after completing high school I really didn’t know what I wanted to do – so I went to work at my Dad’s automotive shop… which I stayed at for several years. It wasn’t something that I really enjoyed, but at the same time I didn’t want to let my Dad down either.

Today I am one of the General Managers of a global packaging company that is based in Tokyo. I still do a great deal of design work and use AutoCAD on a daily basis. I am solely responsible for this location and only report occasionally to the owner in Japan. Our facility here is 40,000 square feet and employees about 25 people.

It is very rare in life that we get a chance to say Thank-you to people that make a difference in our lives – I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss out on this opportunity to Thank-you and to let you know how much you contributed to my life. Without the education that I received from your class, I really don’t know what I would be doing today.

Next time you’re down this way, please let me know as I would enjoy buying you dinner and listening to whatever you’ve been up to in the past 20 years.”

Wow! Does this guy know how to make my day/week/year! I did indeed remember this student, in spite of the accuracy of his statement “I never really applied myself in your class, nor any other for that matter”. But as those I’m addressing here would know, you learn to never judge students (or anyone for that matter), especially ones at this age, by their outward appearances and behaviors. You can imagine how proud I am to learn about his great story and his success in life. He is a perfect example of why it DOES make sense to just give of your time without knowing when, how. or if you will ever be rewarded or what effect you will ultimately have. This one took almost 20 years to get back to me, but boy, did it ever come back!

We are all in this together and it is a rare one amongst us who doesn’t know that we owe a great deal of our success to those few special people we’ve had in our life to give us guidance, instill confidence in ourselves, and help us see and believe in our true potential, which is usually much greater than we’d otherwise imagine. I know that this recent example has inspired me to work ever harder and to lead by example.

So, to all of you who are currently doing your best to help guide and support others, and to those who are having some doubts about continuing or starting down such a path, I hope this small example will help you keep the faith and trust in the power of paying it forward.

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Dangerous Assumptions

My good friend and colleague, Erik Duval has a blog that I recommend you read regularly, as I do. Erik is a professor in the research unit of the Hypermedia and Databases Group, in the computer science department at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, located between Brussels and Antwerp. 

In his recent posting “Learning and Libraries”, Erik tells the story of the wonderful new library that has recently been built on his otherwise quite old (founded in 1425) campus, but notes that he and his students never use it!  As he puts it:

“I never go there. Neither do my colleagues. Nor my students. Why would we? All our material is available on-line. If it isn’t, it kind of doesn’t exist.”

He continues by asking why libraries don’t do some things that he would value highly, such as:

“Why don’t they inform me when someone is downloading my papers? Referring to my papers? Why don’t they alert me to papers I will probably want to know about?”

I could not agree more with Erik. Here is an important role that libraries lack. I suspect that their failure to take on this role comes, in part, from the fact that they have confused their value proposition—delivering the services that library users need—with what a library is and does on a day-to-day basis. Erik points out:

“This is an area that is very much in flux: the conservative reflex with many librarians is easy to understand but they really risk “perfecting the irrelevant”, as my friend Wayne Hodgins would say.”

As his example so clearly illustrates, many libraries seem to believe that they are there to be a physical repository for very physical objects, such as books, journals, and periodicals, and to provide a great place to read, study, find books and other materials—all of which, of course, still has some value.

However, as Erik so rightly points out, their real value proposition is the SERVICE they can and sometimes do provide. Most of us have had a least one experience with a great librarian who was able to help us find just what we needed—to help us solve a problem, to research an assignment, or write a paper. This service is an invaluable asset—one that I desperately need many times every day!

Erik’s questions highlight several other good examples of the kinds of services that would endear a library to most of us, yet are ones that very few seem to be considering. Hopefully his post and others will stimulate more awareness of this situation and we’ll see more librarians addressing these issues and offering these services.

My other concern is the prevailing assumption that Erik mentions at the opening of his posting about information and materials: “If it isn’t [online], it doesn't exist.“ Although I very much want this to be true, and believe that we are on a path toward this end, I also believe that we are far from attaining it.  For example, although I don't have the exact statistics, I believe the vast majority of the world's books, and even their metadata, is not online. So those who assume that an online search will find "everything" that exists on a topic are probably missing out on a lot, perhaps even the majority of relevant resources.

Less than 10% of the world’s population has access to the web. Therefore, the majority of the world’s population, as well as their content, books, customs, etc., are missing. You quickly can see that what we can currently find on the web is a very small percentage of who and what we can discover by other means and benefit from.

I agree that this situation is improving and that the more interactive and social nature of networks forming on the web help to resolve some of this. For example, another person can point you towards something you formerly missed.  But it is dangerous for us to assume that when we search, we have the majority of resources available to us.

I touched on this topic in a previous Off Course – On Target posting called “Books – the NEW old medium” To some extent, this is a known problem and  enormous efforts are being made to remedy it. Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” project, Google Book Search and Microsoft’s “book search” project, to name but a few, are scanning and digitizing more of the world’s books and printed content to make it available online to all.

More projects are being added all the time. Techshout.com just announced that around 800,000 books and manuscripts from Mysore University in Karnataka, India will soon be digitized by Google.

However, for the foreseeable future, I hope that we remain very aware of just how limited online searching is and that we continue to check our assumptions that “everyone and everything is available online, otherwise they don’t exist. “ Let’s work on this as a goal and understand that until we get much closer to realizing this, we will need to supplement our online searching with more finding through other means.

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