Who the hell is Brian Lamb? transcript
Brian Lamb speaking at WCET CatalystCAMP, October 23, 2009
A couple of biographical stories about my background and maybe in the course of that do a couple of refs and out-takes from my talk tomorrow.
I got into this field as a teacher in Mexico. It was actually this really high-end school for the ultra rich – it was like I was teaching the next generation of Latin-American oligarchs. But the students were incredibly well educated. Most of them had taught abroad. Their level of English was incredible and every student had a laptop. The idea was all the learning materials had to be online. So the idea was that you certainly never gave any didactic teaching in the classroom at all. The classroom space was to be for project time, Q&A, figuring some creative way of working through the material, the contents of which was a very strict ipsative introduction so it was actually a very progressive place. And they paid for my training at places like UVC. Through various concatenations I ended up there. 
Now, how many of you, how many people have been in this field for a while? Remember this thing called learning objectives? I actually overheard someone use the word out in the thing. I just about froze in my tracks. It’s kinda like hearing your name. You think you’ve got a new identity, you’ve moved to a new town and no one knows who you are, no one knows anything about your criminal past, and then someone says that name. You freeze in your tracks and it's kind of a terrifying moment.
My first job title at the University of British Columbia, and this would have been in 2001, was Learning Object Project Coordinator. So back then what we were hearing was that learning objects were going to solve all our problems.
And what did they mean by learning objects? Well, no one can tell you really. To some people it meant a very distinct set of ways of arranging a learning online lesson with certain attributes and a piece of assessment at the end. And it would follow the technical specification set by these various global consortia with competing specifications. They are still around – IMS, SCORM. I’m throwing these around but I don’t feel any clearer about these concepts now than I did then. But the idea was, and it was a very sound idea, and it’s still really at the core of what I’m interested in, was given that one of the things that’s unique about digital media is that it’s a non-rivalous resource. I have a file on my computer, assuming I’m not breaking copyright and all that to do, there’s nothing stopping you from having that same copy. It doesn’t detract from my copy, it is no more expensive really to share it. And given that, especially back in 2001, it’s really expensive to develop good online learning resources, it’s insane for you [points to a member of the audience] to be developing a first year chemistry tutorial on a certain type of transformation, and you [points to another member of the audience] developing a job outlet on the same transformation and not even knowing what each other were doing, and recreating those wheels. And just in terms of practice it makes no sense.
And there was a real sense back then that if you went to conferences, it would be like, the big issue was, depending on how you author, you wouldn’t even be able to run each other’s stuff. So the idea of ‘interauthorability’ was a big buzz word. We just kinda had this nightmare scenario emerging where we were all going to spend a ton of money and have all this ‘stuff’. And we had no way of preserving it, no way of sharing it, no way of building on each other’s work, and that was more or less what we were going ahead and building.
So, besides learning objects being the way ahead, how are we going to solve that? Well, how do we solve the problem of sharing resources in the physical world? We build archives. We get a big building, get professional, get a really rigorous cataloguing system, make people follow the rules, pay people to catalogue these items, put them into little slots and people come to the archive and take them out, and at the end there’s some kind of organised catalogue. And the idea was that we were going to do that. You can still see these repositories by the way – go to Merlot, Merlot.org. It has not changed at all since 2005. You can go to the internet, way back, that machine, and they haven’t really changed at all. I’m not putting them down, but if you want to see what I’m talking about you’ll see that approach.
We ran into a few problems. First of all, has anyone here actually worked on a SCORM specification or an IMS specification? OK, so every time an instructor creates an online resource they will submit it to a repository to make sure that it’s correctly meta-tagged. One thing that’s worth remembering was that at this point Google was just starting to emerge as a viable search technology. So back then you could search for a New York Times in Alta Vista and you might not actually get to the New York Times website until the tenth page of results. It’s hard to forget just how incredible it was when you typed into Google ‘New York Times’ and the first result was the New York Times. We take that for granted now. So that was partly it, we had to figure out systems that would allow those kinds of things to develop out of the way we would catalogue it, like we did the books. So some faculty member would create a chemistry tutorial and they would submit it, and we would ask them to fill out like seventy-five forms. It would literally take longer to fill out the forms than to create the resource. And it would ask questions like, ‘What is the axiomatic density of this resource? What is its SCORM compliance level?’
I never quite figured what these terms meant, and I'm supposed to go to faculty. You think it’s hard enough to get them to use Googledocs and that’s a technology that works well too, so it was really clumsy back then. But we were told by the great authorities in the online learning world, from major vendors and from all kinds of deep thinkers, that this was the only possible way we could avoid outright chaos. I was hired to do it, it was my job. I came from Mexico and now I had a job at a university in Canada. Ok, it’s my job, I’ve got to convince people this is what to do. I was getting nowhere, obviously. Nobody did get anywhere at first. So I would go to conferences, like this one, where a bunch of us from different places had our own repositories with a piddly number of objects in it and absolutely nobody using them. And we would complain to each other and share what little best practices we were able to cobble out of it. 
And then this thing called blogging was coming out so, you know, it’s a quick way of starting up a website. When I got a new way of making my repository a little more user friendly I blogged about it. When an instructor asked me a question I didn’t understand, I blogged about it and I’d get comments from other people. And if I did a good presentation or a good hack on it to make the interface better, I posted it on my blog. And my friends, my friend in Calgary and my friend in Arizona, when they wanted to share something they would just see it on my blog, and they’d take it and then they’d use it on their blog. 
I think at some point we went, ‘OK, what is it we are trying to do with this learning object repository? We’re trying to be able to share each other’s work. Huh. What else do we want to do? Well, we want to be able to foster communities of practice too – right? And what else do we want to do? We want to foster real collaboration and rapport.’ 
So we realised, basically here we are in our jobs pushing expensive, complicated technology that nobody likes, and in our spare time we’re using these piddly, funny, goofy little technologies that are doing the exact same stuff. And it’s cheap, or free, it works really well, it’s free, we’re sharing the stuff across and we’re developing communities of practices from it. But, you know, it took like two years before we could even get blogs or wiki technologies onto the programme of a conference like this one.
I don’t want to take a shot at this conference; maybe this conference was all over, but like, I remember the Merlot Conference. I did a session with Alan Levine, who back then ran a repository in Arizona, and Darcy Norman, who ran a repository in Calgary. And we met each other through our blogs, and we collaborated through our blogs. And the very first time we met was as we gave our joint presentation, which they put at the very end of the conference, the graveyard slot we called it, which interestingly enough is where I am speaking tomorrow.