Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I just can't miss the opportunity to share this amazing lecture with you. It's the last lecture given by Dr. Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon whom expects to die from cancer in a couple of weeks. he delivers this powerful 1 hr lecture to share his life journey, with a dark humor. Some may already watched it, but if you haven't, watch the following preview and decide for yourself if you want to watch the entire lecture on Google Video.

Click here to watch the entire lecture recording. [1hr25min]

Randy Pausch is the Director of Carnegie Mellon's Stage 3 research group, where he oversees the development of the open source 3D programming environment - Alice.

Some of my favorite quotes from Dr. Pausch:

Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

So. How do you get people to help you? You can’t get there alone. People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest. I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.

Show gratitude. When I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week. And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that? I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life. How could I not do that?

Don’t complain. Just work harder.

Be good at something, it makes you valuable.

Find the best in everybody. One of the things that Jon Snoddy as I said told me, is that you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out.

And be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.

Julian posted this video on his blog over the weekend and it is quite funny to watch. It's a demonstration of the Second Life avatars and social networking behaviors using first life avatars. Make sure you turn on your speak, it makes a bit more sense with the SL sound effects. :)

Julian points out that the virtual communications in the massive multi-user 3D world are some what limited due to the mis-leading avatar figures. This is an interesting point. When we introduce SL to faculty members, we often say, "it's not a game, it's a simulation". But is it really? A simulation suppose to be an imitation of some real thing, but the avatars in SL reminds me too much of the game Sim...

He also points out that the Croquet SDK offers developers an opportunity to change whatever they need about the way people are represented with virtual environments. It looks like people at the University of Minnesota are working on some interesting Croquet Avatar R&D, would love to find out more about their development.

In case you don't know yet:

Any company or organization can now establish a profile on Facebook and solicit support from other users.

I first learned about Face Book’s new “company” feature in the beginning of this week. It was simply massively spread across the Flash designers’ blog community which I follow on a daily basis. There were quite a few “Adobe Product Profiles” set up already: “Adobe Air”, “Adobe Flex”, “Adobe Flash”, and “Adobe Photoshop”. Pretty much the entire Adobe CS3 product line is now in Facebook! Then of courses there is “Microsoft Silverlight”, “Microsoft Education” blah blah blah… I have to admit this is an extremely smart way of “advertising”. Instead of blast random ad banners to the members, and wait for their clicks, have them form “brand” groups and show “support” to their favorite products! Voila, there is your new sales team! What a great idea! This is almost like handing everyone in the world a free T-shirt and asks them to print any product logos on it and walk around and try rubbing your logos to your friends’ T-shirt! 

What really bothers me is how much more surveillance do we need in the online social lives. I already feel that Google knows me way better than my mom does. But Facebook is giving me an X ray every time I log on!

My co-worker Joel sent me a link to a great CBC article on this new Facebook move, read it and don’t sell our soul!

A thirteen years old boy (Zhang) in Tianjin jumped off from the 24th floor and committed suicide after playing the game - World of Warcraft for 36 hours straight in a Chinese Cyber Cafe. His mother has decided to sue the local Blizzard game distributor for the cause of her son's death. She claims the boy took his own life after being exposed to the violence and being extremely addicted to the "virtual world" in the cyber space for over a year or longer.

According to the Chinese reporters (NetEase), Zhang left 4 pages long death will where he wrote how he worships the hero in the World of Warcraft and will miss his co-players from the game. His only wish is to give the "virtual equipment (weapons, books etc.)" to his classmates and hope his spirit will follow the legends in the game into the virtual world. However the game distributors claim that there are clear labels on the box indicating the game is not suitable for teenagers that are under 13. It's a fact that the cyber cafe owners in China totally ignore the notice and never care about what game the computer users play in the facilities. I remember my experiences in the Chinese cyber cafes: heavy cigarettes smokes over a crowded and dark space, isolated with poor ventilation system, filled with of teenagers between 12 to 16 playing first person shooting games or war games. This is very disturbing. I think the first thing should be done is to have some clearly written and strictly enforced regulations over these cyber space owners. Parents and educators should work together to help the teenagers from being overly addicted to the cyber space.

I share my sympothy to the poor mom in the incident and wish the tragedy does not repeat itself. Happy Mother's Day!

There are fair amount of K12 instructors in China use blog to communicate and exchange information with the students' parents.

Today's China has a rapid growing economy where parents are often experiencing lack of communication to their kids and the school. Blogs become the best and most efficient tool for them to learn and understand more about their own children. Parents also use blogs to send their feed backs, questions and concerns to the school and teachers. This helps to avoid Unessasary misunderstandings and assures the transparencies when conflicts occur.

According to a recent report, there are over 60% parents surf on Internet in the major cities of China.

Another study came out yesterday to warn the young generation to back off from the intensive digital sound listening using headsets.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today recommended that further study be performed on the use of ear buds and their possible contribution to hearing loss. That doesn't necessarily point fingers at Apple -- other companies peddle MP3 players, too, including Sony (NYSE: SNE), Sandisk (Nasdaq: SNDK), and Creative (Nasdaq: CREAF). On the other hand, given the iPod's popularity, well, it kind of does mean Apple, for all intents and purposes.(fool.com)

This makes me wondering about the Podcasting community. Some studies indicate the high volume and pitch sound causes the hearing loss. But others suggest as long as you are listening to digital sound using headsets, your hearing is fading. This is why I normally play back the podcasts using speakers instead of my MP3 player. My personal experience tells me headsets do kill hearings, so, be aware!

A student of mine now works for a company in Beijing. Called me half an hour ago and asked for a favor. She is suppose to submit a short essay(200 words in both Chinese and English) for a corprate training exam. The essay should talk about the benefits of Competition. Here is what I gave her, wonder which version sucks more, the English or Chinese. :)

According to the scholars, competition is a form of conflict in which individuals or groups confine their conflict within agreed upon rules. Competition is a common form of interaction in the modern world, in sports, the market, education system and the political system. Competition is a very important and essential concept in the business industry across the globe.

从学术角度讲，竞争是一种发生在个人或集体之间的矛盾冲突，而这种冲突是受具体条约束缚的。竞争在现代社会里是一个普遍现象，在体育界，商界， 教育界和政界， 竞争都无时无刻不存在。 在世界经济发展中， 竞争也是一个不可缺少的，重要的因素。

Competition is also a rivalry between two or more businesses striving for the same customer or market. It allows each of the businesses to see it's own weakness and thus seek for improvement. A healthy competition helps to keep the innovation within the company in order to success in the market today. The excitement of wining an competition is the best reward for the participants in the process, it is the most efficient catalyst in the company growth. Competition often saves a company from dissolving by uniting the employees.

竞争经常被用来形容两个或多个经济团体之间为争夺市场所产生的抗衡。这种抗衡能够让这些团体清楚地看到自己的短处和对手的长处， 从而能够改进自己，促进发展。一个良性的竞争能够促使一个公司不断地创新， 从而巩固自己在市场中的地位。从竞争中得到的胜利也能够成为一个公司的最大的，和最实际的发展原动力甚至是加速剂。竞争也能经常成为促进公司团结的有效筹码。

Since competition is a test of skill or ability in all societies; it is inevitable. A company that has the right attitude and strategy to face the challenges has assured right for survival. Therefore, competition is beneficial to a business and it is an necessary element in the business industry. Without competition, a company will lose it's motivation to evolve which will soon leads to a disastrous failure.

正因为竞争是一个社会间衡量能力和水平的方式，所以它是一个不可能避免的社会现象。一个公司只有能够正确面对竞争，并拿出有效的竞争方案，才能在商场上立于不败之地。所以，竞争对于商业社会是一个有利的现象。如果没有竞争，商业机构将会变得懒散和消极，从而被淘汰。

It's interesting to see the comparison image of Google US and Google China from Brian's blog. The Google China Syndrome is spreading widely across the globe in the past week. This is very much reminding me of the movie "Tomorrow Never Dies" but of course I have fate in Google that they are not going to be as "evil" as Carver's media empire. I would also like to point out the media censorship of the Chinese government also include online gambling, pornography, and racial injustices which are common censorship shared world wide.

Oh, by the way, there are many "tricks" to surf out side of the Chinese giant proxy server while you are in China. ;)

A few days after the historical merge between Adobe and Macromedia, I have been hearing various of bad rumors around the Macromedia developers' community. The news evolve from Macromedia tech support staff losing their jobs to Adobe may combine their Acrobat Reader with Flash Player into one compiler... The news really worries me, especially the second one. This speculation is based on the vivid words in the merge FAQ published by Adobe. Everyone knows Macromedia shockwave (Director) has less popularity compare to Flash due to its player is a little larger than the tiny Flash player. Adobe Acrobat reader is a 20mb compiler, if flash audiences need to download this giant player along with the Flash player, the demand will decline dramatically and the great Flash technology may eventually be replaced by others. I am hoping these rumors are caused by the uncertainty from the early stage of the product line merge. Hope the brilliant Adobe and Macromedia engineers work together and keep all the fascinating products at their best fit into today's web technology... My fingers are crossed.

Ever since Apple launched their video iPod, Video Podcast started to gain popularity. However, believe or not, the most excited group about this new technology is the Pornography industry. According to a porn web site, it's subscriber downloaded over 500,000 movie clips to their video ipod (a special format, possibly mp4) within 24 hours.

Studies show two out of every five Internet users log into pornography websites on a regular basis. 3% of the overall Internet bandwidth is taken by pornography contents. The Internet based pornography industry has reached 2.5 billion US dollars in 2004. There is a clear indication that this number will increase because the new video Podcasting technology. In the meanwhile, pornography companies have also launched specially formatted video clips for the popular hand-held game device - PSP. Matter of fact, I wonder how is the huge profit driven industry going to improve the video distribution technologies including media repository, media meta-data, wireless media delivery and mobile device media distribution technologies. According to the professionals, people love to be able to carry pornography contents using mobile devices. One thing we should be careful with is there seems to be lack of regulations on the pornographic contents being delivered to pre-mature audiences.

As a powerful response to the recent OpenOffice.Org 2.0 release, some Microsoft insiders have revealed the up-coming MS office being hosted as a server/client product. Bill Gates has mentioned about shifting the paradigm from licensed software to software access licenses over the last few years. By charging an annual renewals to the license, users can use Microsoft CRM, ERP and SharePoint products. This will obviously change the paradigm of the software delivery process. Is this a good way to "compete" with the open source products? Or it may open a can of worms which may cause a negative effects from the end users?

A high school friend came by Vancouver today after 3 years of military services overseas. We had a quite interesting talk on navy elearning over the dinner. Apparently, Canadian Navy provides the soldiers on foreign services the option of taking navy elearning programs. Even though they are called “navy eLearning programs”, but most of the courses in the program are offered by public education institutions at a standard schedule. However, the difficulty lies in most of the online learning programs aren’t really “navy elearning program” since they are not designed for “flexible” learning experiences. Sometime, the unit needs to travel to remote locations with a very short notice and the new target zone may not have appropriate internet connections. It has been really hard to carry out formal studies terms while serving the country. nevertheless my friend mentioned he has developed good skills of self study over the internet and is ready to take some normal online courses to pursue a formal degree. I wonder if rapid e-learning will somehow help out navy elearning demands in the near future...

Sim 2 University Expansion Pack will be out on Mar. 1st, and some sneak previews on this expansion really make me want to try out the popular computer game. I know it's gonna be addictive and time consuming but the idea of living through the college life one more time is just exciting, only this time I am aimed to have more fun.

Campus life involves studying, partying, and going to class. The Sim character will actually "study hard" to make the grade. According to the previews I have read, the character in the game will just "disappear" from the screen while "attending classes", but a real time clock is running to keep a track of the hours being spent in the classes. I am just wondering what if Maxis incorporates some real University course wares into the game? Name it "SIM Real College Expansion - Art History (or choose your own major)". Players can actually jump into real knowledge learning environment from the game and hop back into the game after 30 mins of class time. The score is no long based on a simple computational calculation of how many hours of class time the character "disappeared for class", but some actual marks from the knowledge tests in the game.

This may sounds really crazy, and Maxis will never get into this simply because the amount of extra costs to make the game and lack of interest from the games... Anyway, just some crazy thoughts to end the day...

What is Rapid e-Learning?

A new term was derived by the e-Learning industry in the year 2004: Rapid e-Learning. To make it simple, Rapid e-Learning contain 3 unique characteristics: 1) Content authoring should be simple and web based. 2) In order to minimize the time from content authoring to content publishing, the subject matter experts (SME) must take the primary role instead of the instructional designers. 3) Each learning/training organization must have a content sharing platform/database.

Here are some common factors of Rapid e-Learning:
- Common web authoring software like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and Flash are not being used. Instead, SME use web based authoring tools/platforms to generate digital contents. These contents will then be delivered to the learners as html, flash and other media formats via the web.
- SME needs minimum trainings from using these authoring tools/platforms.
- The learning contents are in smaller “chunks” usually, say, less than 30 minutes of studying time for each “chunk”. Then the course creator will “assemble” these “chunks” into a self contained courseware. These chunks can be viewed as learning objects.
- The learning materials can be delivered in synchronous, asynchronous and mixed mode learning environments.
- The contents must be learner centric instead of the “instructor feeding” style.
- Each content module must have a clear theme which allows the module to be presented as a stand alone learning object thus the production time for each of these objects can be “pumped out” on a efficient time basis.

Why Rapid e-Learning?

In the new millennium, production cycles in most of the industries are shortened. Enterprise and institutions are constantly facing changes in the surrounding environment such as new product demands (e.g. Oracle acquires PeopleSoft ), new government polices (War against Terror), new market competitions (China joins WTO), new diseases (SARS) new technologies (Blog) etc. The entire chain of learning is reacting to these changes in a faster and faster pace. e-Learning in general is playing an more and more important role in our society. In order to deliver the most accurate, the most up-to-date, the most high quality knowledge to the learners, us educators must restructure the traditional ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) model, and come up with a new solution. Thus Rapid e-Learning was born. Where do we go from here depends on how our learners respond to the change of the world.

4). Content sharing initiatives face new challenges
Ever since learning object was defined, content sharing became to be the number one research topic in many public institutions across the world. Canada alone has performed over 20 well known researches projects that varies from Learning Object Repository Developments (CAREO, BELLE, POOL, etc.) to EduSource distributed LOR initiatives. Many standards have been implemented (AICC, LRN, IEEE, ADL/SCORM, etc.). I personally believe these researches and developments will further advance in the year 2005. Growing with the rapid e-Learning demands everywhere, content sharing environments will be expanded in a great deal.

5). Rich media is zooming
Rich media is being used in the e-Learning practices at an increasing rate last year. Macromedia continuously produces amazingly popular rich media authoring tools such as Flash 2004, Breeze Alive, Flex and RoboDemo. I think macromedia is doing everything right in supporting the e-Learning industry. They have always played a role as the inspirer and supporter instead of the direct solution provider. However, they have made a clear move into the e-Learning and web based training market by acquiring e-Help. There are many other tools work just as RoboDemo, like Camtasia, Firefly and Epiance. However, RoboDemo certainly will take the advantage of the wide adoption of Flash and other Macromedia technologies. This year, we should be able to see more learning contents online using rich media.

6). A war is starting between the content publishing vendors
There are three main course content providers in the e-Learning industry: Skillsoft、Thomson NETg and ElementK. However, I vision there will be more traditional publishers soon join this market simply because there is still a large room in the digital content market.

I guess this is enough for the vision in 2005. There may be many ground-breaking innovations surface in the new year that will change our view of e-Learning. In the meanwhile, let’s all keep being creative and push the available technologies to their highest potential to benefit our learners.