By now, almost everyone has heard about Google Wave™, the new collaboration tool just “pre-released” by Google.
Not everyone is able to catch the Wave yet, as Google is releasing invitations to join the Wave community at the pace of a slow drip. At this point, the best way to secure an invitation is to snuggle up to someone who’s already gotten theirs – if their invitation came directly from Google, chances are they may still have one of the six pass-along invitations they got as part of the promotion. You can go to the Google Wave site (www.google.com/wave) to request an invitation, as well.
But if you aren’t on the pre-adopter list, don’t worry. First of all, Wave is still very much in development, and not ready for large-scale rollout. More importantly, while Wave is a fascinating and rich application, best usages and practices are not yet immediately obvious. Will it be a real-time collaboration tool? A content reservoir? A mechanism for content distribution? A social outlet? Time, and a lot of shake-out, will tell …
Lists of resources – contacts, papers and presentations, links, tools, learning materials, and programs – help everyone do their jobs more efficiently. Often, e-Learning materials have such lists associated with them, either as part of the learning product itself or as an ancillary element of a program. Done well, these lists are perpetual, dynamic, and interactive; less helpful are lists that are nothing more than a series of text-based entries.
Social networking tools, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, introNetworks, and others, have made it starkly clear that connections between people are complex and multi-layered. As new networking tools come online and uncover previously unknown connections, we are challenged to exploit these connections in useful, usable ways. Finding, connecting, and making meaning out of data is equally perplexing and taxing.
One limitation to a list’s utility is its linear nature. For a set of resources to be truly useful, the reason for a resource’s inclusion should be (made) obvious and relationships between resources should be explicit. Ideally, then, list creators should present resources in a database with a dashboard that lets users control what data they access.
So what is a resource-constrained e-Learning developer-on-a-deadline to do? How does said developer assemble a defined set of data to match a program requirement? How does she build a database into which she can deposit these data? How should the database be designed so that many disparate relationships between data are clear and useful to the end user? Where will IT, programming, and data entry resources come from?
The first stop for our harried developer might be www.freebase.com, Metaweb Technologies’ Freebase. In their own words:
Freebase … is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their Websites.
Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics … all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.
By structuring the world’s data in this manner, the Freebase community is creating a global resource that will one day allow people and machines everywhere to access information far more easily and quickly than they can today.
If the data sets you want to work with aren’t part of Freebase yet, you can add them to the mix – anything in the public domain is allowed, and you can upload whatever you have rights to. In true democratic and egalitarian fashion, and unlike Wikipedia, for example, Freebase grants contributor and editorial rights to all registered users, so content accuracy and updates are monitored by all.
Best of all, this sophisticated approach is free to all. Metaweb is well-funded, so we shouldn’t have concerns about Freebase – and our IP – going up in smoke.
If a living and dynamic database of resources isn’t your cup of tea, you might consider Freebase as a collaborative learning tool. Its robust community element may give your learners the boost they need.
By the way, after uploading several different spreadsheets from different authors, the above-mentioned developer might need to validate the accuracy of the entries in her Freebase. One way for her to accomplish this (and a number of other clerical tasks) is by submitting the job to Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome).
Mechanical Turk is an exchange for clerical tasks that can’t be automated, like testing Website copy or evaluating an image. Mechanical Turk breaks work down into Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, each of which equates to a discrete activity. Requesters submit HITs to be performed by Workers. Each hit has a Reward associated with it, usually a few pennies. Workers select from among the tens of thousands of HITs available. Amazon pays the Reward to the Worker upon successful completion of the designated HIT.
Amazon is targeting Mechanical Turk for groups doing catalog and data management, search optimization, database creation, and content management. This could be a very nice fit for a number of e-Learning development companies I know.
