My Dad was always proud of his ability to do arithmetic in his head. This is not a trait I inherited. For a long time, I believed that I should develop this skill, and I devoted a fair amount of energy to doing so. But, alas, it’s just not my gift. It’s frustrating, because I’d like to be able to understand and compute things, like how far I have to run to work off this cookie, or the probability that I have a winning poker hand.
Enter Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com). This newly released product is to computations what Google is to information search. Indeed, the geniuses at Wolfram Research call it a computational knowledge engine. Their goal, as stated on their Web site, is to “make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” To be sure, they are a long way from that goal, but they sure have achieved a lot so far.
For example, enter the word chartreuse. Wolfram|Alpha asks for clarification: color, or word? “Color” gives you sample swatches of chartreuse and related colors, along with many different written representations of the color, e.g., RGB, hexadecimal. “Word,” on the other hand, defines both the color and the liqueur, gives date of first known usage, synonyms, and other interesting data.
Enter your birth date to learn how many days you’ve lived, what phase of the moon you were born under, and what holidays fall on that day around the world. Try weather [your birth date] [town you were born in] to learn the average wind speed that day. Put in your IP address, and you’ll be able to get a satellite map of your location. These guys even compute the meaning of life!
Why is this relevant to e-Learning? First, Wolfram|Alpha shifts online search to online research. No longer is it a user’s job to search for all the data, and then interpret the results. W|A does (much of) this for you, and does the necessary calculations to boot – in a fraction of a second.
Secondly, this browser-based tool is free, and available to all. If the datasets that your users or learners need are available through the public Internet (the database is already impressive, and they expand it constantly), W|A can handle much of the tedious research and calculation required. Is your sales force having trouble with calculating the ins and outs of factoring discount rates? Are your estimators challenged by computing the properties of a stockpile? Do your marketing people know how to use statistical analyses of socioeconomic data to do market projections and strategic sales plans? With this powerful tool, you can focus your training on when and why to use these various calculations, rather than the mechanics of the calculations themselves.
If that doesn’t leave your head in the clouds, get ready for cloud computing. In this case, “cloud” refers to the Internet; cloud computing refers to the data storage and processing that happens outside your corporate firewall. Cloud computing is a very hot topic for IT, so your company may even have a cloud strategy in place, or have an initiative going to make the move.
In the most comprehensive view of cloud computing, a company stores its data offsite at a data warehouse. In addition to storage, security, and high-speed access, the data warehouse is provisioned with enterprise applications that your company uses or supports for your work. You and your colleagues access the applications and data you need through your desktop or laptop computer browsers. All new data are added dynamically to the corporate databases-in-the-clouds, just as happens now.
One can quickly see the advantages to this approach. The dramatic reduction in required hardware and real estate is extremely attractive. The consolidation of many companies’ computing resources to a single location can also have the effect of greatly reducing energy consumption. Across the board, cloud computing seeks to provide a great leap forward in bringing the costs of enterprise computing into a far more manageable realm.
From an e-Learning developer’s perspective, cloud computing should give rise to interesting discussions. If your company is moving in this direction, do your IT people understand what the learning and development implications are for the employees? For the development and deployment of e-Learning programs?
A few important factors to consider: Some LMS vendors have begun the shift toward this new service model – make sure yours is one of them. If it isn’t, what are their plans? Does your migration schedule match with theirs? If not, what are your options? Is it time to start shopping for a new provider?
Many of the tools e-Learning developers use are desktop applications, although some are server-based. Further, as cloud computing advances, one of the hoped-for outcomes is that users’ machines will need less processing power and will, therefore, morph into something akin to the dumb terminals of yore but with really great screen displays. As that shift occurs, what will your company’s policy be about storing and using local applications versus cloud apps? How are your tools developers planning to upgrade their products to conform to your upcoming requirements?
While Wolfram|Alpha knows the meaning of life, it can’t yet say how quickly shift happens. We all know it does, though, so better start thinking about these things now. And when someone tells you your head is in the clouds, you’ll know what a forward-thinking compliment that is.
