For some (investor) folks interested in what we do, I put together a short but sweet, Web-2.0 buzzword-filled white paper. Please be gentle.

The Cardean Learning Group’s “Living Campus”

Over the past two years, a new type of web business has swept the Internet. Going by names like MySpace, Flickr, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Dodgeball, these and other sites all share two characteristics that challenge the prevailing “command and control” hallmark of the web’s initial incarnation. These two characteristics, self-service and community-moderated, are redefining what the web is and how people relate to it.

In the “web-2.0” (the term given to these new sites), the focus is on the empowering the individual to express himself, find others like (or unlike) him, and form connections. It’s an approach that David Weinberger calls “small pieces, loosely joined” and in the aggregate, allows collective knowledge and behavior to emerge. It’s what allows the mostly anonymous members of Wikipedia to challenge the staid editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica; it’s what allows the millions of user-contributed and tagged photos on Flickr to be more in-depth and current than the highly controlled photo stock libraries of the Associated Press; and it’s what allows Craigslist members to find apartments and sell goods in a way unmatched by any local newspaper’s want-ads. Web2.0 companies have not only found a powerful viral mechanism to drive their business plans, they have tapped into a seemingly latent human-driven need. As net investor Guy Kawasaki described, “People do want to share. They want collaboration, full time. They want all that kind of stuff.”

These words ring particularly true with those of us at Cardean Learning Group. For indeed, the web-2.0’s move towards treating “customers” as “contributors” and turning control over to these “community” members parallels the approach to develop online learning environments we have practiced for the past five years. For in contrast to didactic “learn by telling” techniques that underpin “eLearning-1.0” learning management systems, Cardean Learning has always viewed the student as an active co-participant in a “learn by doing” process that is socially rooted around real world problems.

What evidence supports Cardean Learning Group claim as the industry’s first “eLearning-2.0” company? In this remainder of this paper I outline three distinct “eLearning-2.0” attributes of Cardean Learning Group’s “Living Campus,” a collection of web-based features, services, and applications that together support “life online” for the Cardean student.

Fusing Content and Community

Practically every Learning Management System (LMS) features “content,” or authoritative web pages made available to students and “community” in the shape of discussion boards to support asynchronous communication. But by relegating the discussion area as something separate and distinct from other course elements (see figure-1), eLearning-1.0 platforms treat “community” as something that is secondary to the course (content). Noted learning scientist Stephen Downes laments this separation of content and community, saying:

The design of these learning management systems also reinforces the idea that discussion is not central to the course, that it is something tacked on. One ‘leaves’ the course material (usually via the main menu) to go to the ‘discussion area’ (imagine, by analogy, if once a professor finished his lecture the entire class got up and walked across the hall to the ‘discussion room’). … If there is a single point that I would like to make …it is that the relation ought to be the other way around: that the course content (much less its organization and structure) ought to be subservient to the discussion, that the community is the primary unit of learning, and that the instruction and the learning resources are secondary, arising out of, and only because of, the community.

Figure-1: Typical Learning Management Systems segregate course content from community.

In the Living Campus (see figure-2), community is not segregated from content: every piece of course “content” is at the same time a discussion topic. Learners in the Living Campus environment do no “go to the discussion boards” to ask a question, contribute an opinion, or help a fellow student, they instead do all these things at the same page where the original need occurs. Further integrating community to the learning experience, the Living Campus interface always shows “who’s online” and “in the course” to other students. Thanks to this unique interface design, students are constantly reminded they are in a communal learning experience and can 1-click “talk” in real time with each other and the instructor using the synchronous audio-visual chat tool. The result? Community in the Living Campus eLearning-2.0 environment is more robust, more engaged, and more integral to the learning experience than that found in elearning-1.0 systems.

Figure-2: The Cardean Learning Group “Living Campus” platform seamlessly integrates course content and asynchronous and synchronous community.

This fusion of content and community illustrates how the Living Campus system was designed to support the type of reflective learning described by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in their work, The Social Life of Information:

The value of the Net doesn’t simply lie in the way it allows groups of people to talk with one another. It also comes from the way that, unlike telephones or video links, the Net can provide common objects for participants to observe, manipulate, and discuss. It’s not, then, simply a medium for conversation, nor is it just a deliver mechanism. It combines both, providing a medium for conversation and for circulating digital objects. Furthermore, it also allows participants to turn the ongoing conversation itself into another object of conversation for further reflection. Usually, educational technology tries to do one or another of these things. Ideally, it should combine all three.

Cardean Learning’s Living Campus environment is the first eLearning-2.0 offering to do “all three.”

Being Real, Online

Web-2.0 companies like MySpace have dramatically demonstrated the power of living life online. The typical MySpace homestead contains photos, video, music, “favorites” lists, and blogs. MySpace does such a stellar job enabling its members to express their true selves online, connect and interact with others, that many of its 65 million members have fundamentally changed their offline habits to support their online life.

MySpace and other web-2.0 companies illustrate the power of what’s known as social presence theory: the idea that a medium’s social effects are principally caused by the degree of awareness and immediacy that the medium affords to its users. Unlike their web-1.0 counterparts, web-2.0 sites provide multiple and diverse ways for community members to project themselves socially. And as an eLearning-2.0 site, the Cardean Living Campus platform provides these same affordances to its community members. The learner profile shown in figure-3 illustrates a typical Cardean “spotlight” and how it is much more rich than the typical “online profile” found in eLearning-1.0 management systems. For example, just like a MySpace homestead, the Cardean spotlight supports photos, music, “favorites” lists, and blogs. But along with Cardean-specific community elements (location, degree program, completed courses, etc.), Cardean spotlights also contain facets of life found on external sites, such as a MySpace profile or a Flickr photoblog. In this way, Cardean Spotlights let members present to others their “complete” life online.

While the majority of interactions take place among Cardean community members, individuals have the option to “publish” (with appropriate security flags) their Spotlights to the external web using a web technology called RSS (for Really Simple Syndication). This ability to “punch holes” in what are typically closed, walled garden communities opens the Cardean learning community to the greater world, further leveraging its value to community members. Taken together, these Spotlight profile techniques create a higher level of social presence and cultivate deeper levels of engagement between community members, a defining characteristic of a web-2.0 service.

Figure-3. A Cardean Living Campus member Spotlight.

The Living Campus

How do web-2.0 companies manage to support millions of active community members with small, often times shoestring-level centralized staff? The secret lies in the self-service, community-moderated approach these sites take to maintain the environment. So-called “user-generated content” is the manna on which web-2.0 sites survive. Rather than rely on a centralized group to write, edit, review, and publish all the content that keeps community members coming back for more, sites like Wikipedia rely on their community members to perform these tasks. The result? In Wikipedia’s case, over 1-million articles have been authored by over 1.1-million registered contributors, with each article receiving on average just over 12 edits. For a community site with less than 900 administrators, or 0.07% of its total subscriber base, the Wikipedia clearly illustrates the power of self-service and community-moderation.

These same tenets underlie Cardean’s Living Campus. While many eLearning-1.0 companies give lip service to supporting a learning community (typically done via a set of group bulletin boards available to community members), the Living Campus at Cardean is a true community of practice, regulated and owned by community members. In fact, Cardean’s Living Campus uses the same web-2.0 content engine that powers the Wikiepedia (a wiki, or web application that allows users to edit webpage content through a simple browser).

An illustrative “campus group” created and managed by students is shown in figure-4. Here, a student-owned “finance club” displays all of the elements that come “for free” when a student or students create a group: a wiki-based web page authoring tool, a membership and subscription list, discussion boards, and chat room. As with the Spotlight profiles, Cardean visitors can also view these groups (unless they are made private), and a group’s content can be published to the outside world via RSS feeds.

Figure-4. An illustrative Cardean Living Campus “group,” part of the site’s student-run campus.

While student groups are a logical application of the Living Campus’ community-engine, there are many additional examples: the Faculty Lounge (accessible only to Cardean adjunct faculty), Course Reviews (no-holds barred reviews and opinions on Cardean courses), and other professional and personal value-added networking services such as the Working Mothers Support Group, local meet-ups, and alum groups.

In characterizing the difference between the web-1.0 and web-2.0, a recent Newsweek article summed things up in the following manner:

Less than a decade ago, when we were first getting used to the idea of an Internet, people described the act of going online as venturing into some foreign realm called cyberspace. But that metaphor no longer applies. MySpace, Flickr and all the other newcomers aren’t places to go, but things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons. Cyberspace was somewhere else. The Web is where we live.

By remaining true to its principles of learning as a socially-rooted and actively applied process, Cardean Learning’s Living Campus plans to lead the eLearning-2.0 revolution and be the place not just where we live, but where we live and learn.

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