Nova ScienceNOW has a 15-minute video segment on mirror neurons that builds on what we discovered at the Neuroesthetics Conference two weeks ago. Robert Krulwich, a delightfully wacko NPR reporter, makes the mirror neuron story come alive. He walks along Fifth Avenue, awkwardly balancing a stack of packages. The camera shows the faces of his fellow pedestrians reflecting his uncertainty and nervousness.

Mirror neurons fire when you do something; those same neurons also fire when you see that something done. That's why people get so wrapped up watching a football game: they feel what the players are feeling. The armchair quarterback is not just watching.

The same holds true for emotions. You show an emotion; my body picks it up and shares it. That's why we cry at movies.

Mirror neurons are the foundation for empathy. They are the way we learn to interpret emotions displayed by others. They must play a key role when we learn through observation. A baby's incentive for mimicking mom may come from sharing the experience. Instead of "monkey-see/monkey-do," it's "monkey-see, monkey-feel, monkey-do."

I simply love this illustration of the brain from the current issue of Wired. The right brain/left brain distinction breaks down under the scanner -- most of us use both sides of our brains continuously. Nonetheless, as a thoroughly left-handed, right-brained, blue-state kind of guy, I was delighted to read that left-brained jobs are being outsourced or automated while the Conceptual Age rewards us arty, empathic, big-picture types.

---

Training 2005 kicks off in New Orleans in four weeks. Cheap flights are still available. Cheap rooms are drying up, but not impossible; this evening I reserved a room at The Avenue Garden Hotel for $81/night.

If you're coming to N'awlins and have something to sell, join me in the Workflow Pavilion. For $1,850 all told, you get a kiosk on the Expo floor, a listing in the Expo directory and one full registration to the conference. The kiosk is wired and comes with sign. Essentially, you can be an exhibitor for about $700 over the price of a ticket. Email me if you'd like an application.

---

Audio recordings of Emergent Learning Forum's discussion of collaboration and learning night before last are available on the ELF site. In my book, learning and collaboration are converging so rapidly, it's hard to say where one stops and the other begins.

---

Meta-Learning -- looking at learning as a process, not an event -- may finally be ready for prime time. A documentary film crew filmed interviews with us last week. More news at the Meta-Learning Lab site.

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I'm re-reading George Leonard's Education and Ecstacy. It begins:

Teachers are overworked and underpaid. True. It is an exacting and exhausting business, this damming up the flood of human potentialities. What energy is takes to make a torrent into a trickle, to train that trickle along narrow, well-marked channels! Teachers are often tired. In the teachers' lounge, they sigh their relifef into stained cups of instant coffee and offer gratitude to whoever makes them laugh at the day's disasters.

informal learning

This email arrived last week:

Walkers and Talkers,

We're multitasking once again, exchanging ideas while expending calories up the stairways and paths of the Berkeley hills for an hour-and-a-half walk. Meet at 10 a.m. this Saturday, at Peet's, corner of Vine and Walnut Streets, in Berkeley, just around the corner from Black Oak Books. I'll provide maps but if you're anxious, feel free to bring your favorite GPS device. All pace levels welcome.

Sylvia

Vine & Walnut is where Alfred Peet taught America that there's more to coffee than Maxwell House and Folger's. The folks who founded Starbucks apprenticed here. Peet's is fifteen minutes down the hill from my house. Saturday at 10:05, Sylvia, Lucy, Kristan, Ann, Ann's sister's frisky dog Rusty, and I set off up the hillside.

Ten minutes into the walk, we paused in front of a house with painted windows. A fellow out front asked if we had any questions. I asked, "Isn't this the former home of Alexander Calder's sister?"

"Yes," he repled, "Margaret (Peggy) Calder Hayes lived here. Would you like to look inside?"

Light fixture in the living room, mobile in the kitchen

Peggy Hayes was born in Paris in 1896 and died in Berkeley in 1988. She was instrumental in the development of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and conducted art classes for children in her home for some 18 years. Nearly 30 years ago, then in her eighties, Peggy wrote
Three Alexander Calders, a reflection upon life with brother Sandy, her father, Alexander Sterling Calder and mother Nanette Lederer Calder (a talented artist in her own right) and her grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder.

Walking on up the hill, Kristan told me she counsels children having a hard time coping with school. Schools think learning happens from the outside in; true learning comes from within the learner. Eastern philosophy is more open and forgiving in this: you are who you are; you do what you do. Skip the value judgments and tests; you live with what you are given. If a child is anxious, you don't deny it. Rather, you cope or go around it. Take a teddy bear with you if you need support. Or pretend you have a magic hat which empowers you to do what you have to do.

School administrators act as if 99% of their students are mischievous and unruly -- and treat them as such. In reality, it's the other way around. Most kids are innately good. They live up (or down) to expectations. Many corporate leaders look at their employees the same way. Absent monitoring and control, the bosses fear quality would drop through the floor and competitors would eat our lunch. This is one reason why people are such innovative, productive, can-do individuals except for when they are at work. Of course, these negative attitudes provide a rationale for the jobs of school administrators and pointy-haired bosses.

A nerd walk is a play within a play. Sylvia emails people when she feels like getting a group together. Unlike hikes, talking is an integral part of a nerd walk. Professionally, Sylvia promotes authors and causes at the nexus of technology and culture (hence the nerd part). Sylvia's walks are a great way to learn about the unexpected (Calder), to bounce ideas off other people in conversation, or to share local stories.

This evening I joined 80 other people on the Berkeley campus for a free talk by George Leonard and Michael Murphy.

George & Mike were introduced to one another at a party 40 years ago next week, talked until 2:30 am, and have worked with one another ever since.

George was an award-winning reporter for Look magazine; Michael's family owned the land in Big Sur that is now the Esalen Institute. Esalen seeks to provide "ways to explore life." They described some of the visitors over the years, from Fritz Perls to the Beatles.


"Tell us about the hot tubs," asked a student behind me. George replied, "Everybody already knows about the hot tubs. How many of you have been to Esalen?" More than half the hands went up, mine among them. Years ago, I soaked naked with a bunch of strangers in steaming hot water in an open-air pool clinging to the side of a cliff overlooking the Pacific. It is serene. Native Americans did the same thing in the same place for hundreds of years. It is not Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice; it is bliss.

In 1968, George wrote Education and Ecstasy, two words you usually don't find in the same place. I just reread the first ten pages. It is eloquent. It brings tears to the eyes. The title of the second chapter became the label applied to the sixties' cults, believers, weirdos, and saints: Human Potential. George felt...and still feels...that most of us use at most 1 or 2% of our potential. He and Mike have spent the last four decades helping people realize more of their potential through integral programs that seek to build one's life, body, mind, and soul.

When George's Mastery came out, I read it in one sitting. The message was that mastery takes a lot of time -- much practice. You can't be impatient. Sometimes you'll hit a plateau; you feel stuck; nothing is changing. On the path to mastery, you recognize that this is part of the package. Eventually, you'll find yourself on a higher plateau. And so the cycle repeats itself. "Any significant long-term change requires long-term practice, whether that change has to do with learning to play the violin or learning to be a more open, loving person."

In '95, George and Mike came out with The Life We Are Given, a program for turning your life around.

"We believe that by the very nature of things, each of us carries a spark of divinity in every cell and that we have the potential to manifest powers of body, mind, heart, and soul beyond our present ability to imagine. We believe that a society could find no better primary intention, no more appropriate compass course for its programs and policies, than the realization of every citizen's positive potential. We mean the potential inherent in every aspect of our lives, from the most commonplace to the most extraordinary, the hidden capabilities that wait to be summoned forth, not just in the mind but also in the body, heart, and soul. Such a compass course might create clarity where there is now confusion and bring the human psyche into harmony with nature and the cosmos. At best, it could open the way to the ultimate adventure, during which much of what has been metanormal would become normal, and some who read these pages would be privileged to share the next stage in the world's unfolding splendor."

Someone suggested George let us experience some integral transformation. Everyone on your feet! Breathe through a spot just below your navel. Slowly move your arms in this fashion. Close your eyes. Shift your weight from one foot to the other. Open your eyes but don't look at anything. You get the idea. Part Aikido, part hatha yoga, some visualization -- the transformation process is eclectic in its sources.

Running Esalen, Mike says he sometimes feels like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, holding back cult members who are about to plummet over the edge. Other times, the synergy of practices is wonderful. Run on a treadmill; find your maximum capacity. Then say a mantra while running; the word "One" over and over will do. Your capacity increases measurably.

It's wonderful how people, even famous people, are open and friendly if you simply treat them as respected colleagues. I'm gathering material for my book on informal learning. George gave me his phone number and email address, suggesting I get in touch.

Why do these guys do this? They said they simply want to do what ever they can to make this a better world. Their next program seeks to understand and unravel religious fundamentalism.

"We broke the cardinal rule:
Underpromise and overdeliver."

What a gutsy thing for a company to say. This was a line in an apologetic email whose sincerity won me over. They're taking a little longer than expected to send out a free beta.

Dear Jay,

My name is Joe ____ and I'm the CEO/co-founder of _____. I wanted to personally reach out and apologize for the amount of time you've been waiting for a beta account. We broke the cardinal rule: Underpromise and overdeliver. Our team has been working hard to make improvements and upgrade infrastructure, but it's taken longer than we anticipated.

I also wanted to say "thank you" for your interest in _______. My goal is for you to love our service and I want to hear from you (what you like, what you don't like, etc). ____________ is heading up our beta program and I encourage you to be in communication with him as well.

Your beta account will be provisioned no later than Monday, January 24.

Thanks again for your interest in ______.

Sincerely, Joe

Obviously, Joe read the Cluetrain Manifesto. Probably several times.

How time flies. Cluetrain came out more than five years ago. Look hard and you'll find me among the early signatories. Online, entirely free, and one of the most powerful books of the late 20th century. My summary: No more corporate BS. Here are Chris Locke's opening words:

Premature Burial

We die.

You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it.

"Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.

Life is too short because we die. Alone with ourselves, we sometimes stop to wonder what's important, really. Our kids, our friends, our lovers, our losses? Things change and change is often painful. People get "downsized," move away, the old neighborhood isn't what it used to be. Children get sick, get better, get bored, get on our nerves. They grow up hearing news of a world more frightening than anything in ancient fairy tales. The wicked witch won't really push you into the oven, honey, but watch out for AK-47s at recess.

Amazingly, we learn to live with it. Human beings are incredibly resilient. We know it's all temporary, that we can't freeze the good times or hold back the bad. We roll with the punches, regroup, rebuild, pick up the pieces, take another shot. We come to understand that life is just like that. And this seemingly simple understanding is the seed of a profound wisdom.

If you missed reading The Cluetrain Manifesto the first time, do it now. Maybe some day you'll write letters as compelling as Joe's.

After an eight-month hiatus, John Hagel is blogging again. Hagel founded McKinsey's e-commerce practice and just finished a book with John Seely Brown. Hagel & JSB write the most compelling descriptions of the power of loose coupling and services-oriented architecture I've read anywhere.

Their new book, The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, due out in June, will break new ground.

Those alluring mass markets of China and India? Their new middle classes will be very demanding. To keep up with internal demands, China and India will become hotbeds of innovation -- generating what Hagel and Brown call "innovation blowback." Companies from developed countries who penetrate these emerging markets will often find themselves competing with radically improved products/ services/ processes back in their home markets. Developed countries don't have a patent on innovation. Hagel promises to elaborate in an article in the Feburary Harvard Business Review. (I have an online account; the article is not up yet.)

A few teasers:

"The real opportunity will be to combine product and process innovations in ways that play off and reinforce each other."

"Don't get overly consumed by breakthrough innovations depending on new generations of technology - a lot of the opportunity comes from rapid iterations of enhancements to products and processes that individually may not make a big difference but cumulatively enable breakthroughs in price/performance levels."

"It is dangerous to think of innovation as a one time event. It is much more productive to view innovation as a process playing out over time. This is the key to the bootstrapping that is occurring in a broad array of product and service categories, ranging from digital still cameras to motorcycles to health care services."

I keep bumping up against the same meme, as if ripples from some inspiring event keeping rolling into my consciousness. It goes like this:

1. At first, competition hinges on being able to deliver the goods or, better still, having them in plain view on the shelf
   
   
2. When several providers join the fray, products that are "better, faster, cheaper" gain the upper hand.
   
   
3. Innovation kicks in, improvements roll out more often, and intergenerational feuding begins. As among Western peoples, a youth culture springs up. The lithe newcomer with the latest features is venerated. Join the product of the month club.
   
   
4. Financial markets reward companies that concentrate on core and hand off everything else. This used to mean getting really good at what you did. Now it means being agile enough to swap into a new core.

I realize this is abstract. I'll come back to add graphics and try to make things more intelligible.

This topic is also more about business than traditional training, but I contend that if corporate training isn't supporting the business, it doesn't deserve to exist. And business is changing. Big time.

I finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about ten minutes ago. In a post titled Thin Slices, I described the first couple of chapters; now I'll give you my take on the rest of the book. Related blog entries here are First Impression and Automatic Decision-Making.

Gladwell tells the story of Warren G. Harding, a guy who looked presidential but was a total doofus. No one could get beyond their first impression. The Implicit Association Test analyzes your subconscious biases -- so well that you can't fake it. You can take it online. I found I was biased against fat people even though I could stand to drop 25 pounds myself. Bottom line: you don't know what you're thinking.



Then we visit a commando vet who outfoxed the top U,S, military in an elaborate war game which sounds like a dry run for invading Iraq. The vet made room for spontaneity; the establishment used systems. More was less. Too many options fuzz up your thinking. The bad guys started by demolishing the U.S. fleet with cruise missiles (having zeroed in on their position with stealth fishing boats.) Hive mind trumps information overload.

A researcher sets up a tasting table at Draeger's in Menlo Park (a great grocery store, if you're ever in the neighborhood). One day the researcher offers tastes of six jams. Another day, there's a choice of 24 jams. More people buy jam when presented with fewer choices. No one can deal with 24 choices; they fear making the wrong decision.

We're introduced to Kenna, a singer the record producers love but the market researchers pan. It's like the Pepsi Challenge and New Coke. A first taste is different from drinking or listening to the whole thing. Furthermore, experts grow repertoire and they're the only people who can tell you why they react they do. Conversation with a couple of amazingly analytical food tasters leads Gladwell to conclude:

Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret -- and decode -- what lies behind our snap judgments and first imporessions. It's a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconsicous with the help of a trained therapist until they being to get a sense of how their mind works.

Gladwell overworks the shooting of Amadou Diallo: 41 bullets fired at an unarmed man. In short form: the cops misread the situation. The shooters got so worked up, they were suffering from momentary autism. Faulty assumptions and shared hysteria had them watching their own movies rather than judging what was really going on.

A few pages into the Diallo story, I hit one of these small-world anomalies that seem to be the hallmark of my existence. There are page after page of stories about Paul Ekman, the facial recognition expert. Paul was the last act at the Neuroesthetics Conference I attended in Berkeley one week ago today.

That's not the coincidence.

Ekman's mentor, Silvan Tomkins, more or less invented reading human emotions. Gladwell lauds Tomkins as a mind reader, perhaps the greatest of them all. Following in Tomkins' footsteps, Ekman found that changing one's expression changes the autonomic nervous system. I have read Volume III of Tomkins' monumental Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. In fact, I've heard Tomkins tell the joke form of Ekman's finding. Two psychologists meet on the street. "You're fine. How am I?" Tomkins was my psychology prof at Princeton. If I'd only realized he was such hot stuff.

Gladwell wraps things up with a cautionary tale. A woman auditions to play first trombone for the Munich Philharmonic. Candidates for the position play behind a screen, to eliminate favoritism since one of the players is known to the orchestra. Surprise, surprise, the woman plays so well they send everyone else home early. Then they try to oust her by any means possible. Lawsuits ensue. It's a great story and her husband wrote it up for his website; see You Sound Like a Ladies Orchestra. Gladwell ends on this story, saying:

When the screen created a pur Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

---

Blink will make Malcolm Gladwell the guru speaker of the year. He seems like a very nice fellow, and I wish him well. He is a compelling storyteller. The telling and retelling of his parables will awaken many people, particularly hard-assed business types, to the legitimacy of intuition as a mode of thinking.

The downside is that Gladwell abandons us after telling the stories. There's no conclusion. There's no theory. There's no advice on how to take advantage of thin-slicing, no suggestions on how to attain wisdom. In fact, "thin slicing" is destined to become a buzz word but it is nearly meaningless.

I find Richard Sapolsky's descriptions of focus and stress more illuminating than Glawell's. Michael Gazzaniga's The Mind's Past gave me a framework for thinking about the subconscious.

The Mind's Past talks about the internal conversation always going on in our heads. Listen for a minute. Yeah, that's it. The book also describes a mediator between the brain and the mind called "the interpreter."

Let's call the subconscious, autonomic brain simply "the brain;" it's attached directly to the senses. The conscious, aware portion of our gray matter, we'll call "mind."

The brain gets sensations first. It rejects most of this sensory input and makes basic decisions about what to do next. Later, "the interpreter" creates a story to provide a rational explanation. The interpreter weaves together a plausible story to bullshit the mind into believing it's rational and in control. In fact, most decisions are made before they enter consciousness.

Got that? Your don't make up your mind; your brain makes up your mind. Its interpreter spins yarns the way you do when recounting a dream. A lot more of the brain comes with mechanics "factory-installed" than we like to think. As Bernard Malamud has observed, "All biography is ultimately fiction." Gazzaniga says, "Autobiography is hopelessly inventive."

Changing one's mind consists of convincing the interpreter that the facts of the matter or memories of the past or one's self-image or the rules of the game haved shifted. The changed interpreter puts a different spin on the stories it tells, for those stories must seem internally consistent. The stories must also maintain the fiction that the mind is calling the shots, not the brain.

What might be the nature of this interpreter? Clearly, it needs an image of who its owner is and what the owner is capable of. I'll call this the secret resume, for like a printed resume, it's a very selective and self-serving sense of one's past. The interpreter also needs a worldview or meme library, the rules by which things operate. And the interpreter must retrieve memories, for this is the content of thinking. Changing either the secret resume, the worldview, or the memories changes the interpreter's stories. This is learning.

Every Christmas, my brother and I exchange mystery gifts. This year I received this:

An aspargus steamer? No, aspargus spears should be horizontal, not standing up. I don't know. I turned to the clue on the back of his Christmas card: "Might come in handy at a hillbilly barbecue."

Hmmm. Maybe you stick a squirrel in it for roasting? No, I don't think so. I am stumped. If you know what this is, please leave a comment below.

Next month I'll be traveling 50% of the time. In the next thirty days I'll visit Washington, New Orleans, Vegas, Amsterdam, and the Middle East. Lots of airports, little time, and a desire to check in with the net to keep grounded. Urgent emails? News from home? Meltdown where I'm headed? You may know the drill.


These gizmos cost $20 - $50 and alert you to wifi hotspots.

I wanted a quick way to find WiFi connections, but I know next to nothing about this stuff. I ended up on a site called Handtops that had this review of remote connection finders. Ten minutes ago I ordered a Kensington WiFi Finder Plus for $30.

The convenient, one-button WiFi Finder Plus quickly indicates signal strength for all 802.11b, 802.11b/g and active Bluetooth® enabled networks within range. Compact device attaches easily to laptop carrying case or key chain. Silver case with 6 LEDs and built-in flashlight. 1-year warranty and free technical support.

---

My WiFi key fob is for the airport or the coffee shop. Once in place, I will probably go online with AOL (I maintain a $6/month account just to be able to grab a cheap connection from nearly anywhere in the world) and then I plan to tap into:

WiFi Hotspot Locator or WiFi Maps.

In New York City a few months ago, when I lost my in-house net connection, I tapped into some guy's set-up across the street.

What's your experience with Wi-Fi locators? Any horror stories?

Shai Agassi keynoted the Accelerating Change conference at Stanford on November 6, 2004. A recording of his presentation has just become available at IT Conversations.

Download this mp3 and listen to it. Agassi provides the most compelling description of the future of business and enterprise software I've heard in a long time. This is not just for SAP people. Rather, it's the way our new world is going to work.

Agassi is a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. He is responsible for SAP's overall technology strategy and execution. In this leadership position he oversees the development of the integration and application platform SAP NetWeaver, SAP xApps, packaged composite applications mySAP SRM, and Business One. His IQ has to be off the charts.

Listen to the recording on your new iPod. Then put it on your expense account.



Cross-posted at

Two years ago, Lance Dublin and I wrote a book entitled Implementing eLearning. It's on Amazon. As they say,

"Price: $33.11 & This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping."

The buzz is dying out. Lance and I are no longer accosted by people clutching the book, asking for autographs. Today I dropped by Amazon to see how the book is doing. You can learn a lot on Amazon.

The first chapter of Implementing eLearning is online. Free. Better still, you can search for a word and get a list of citations that include it. For example, I put in "position," and got back a list that starts with:

1.	on Page 11:
	"... understand your customers, walk a mile in their shoes. Here's how: Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, preferences, gripes, habits, intelligence, and personalities. When you're planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to ..."
2.	on Page 23:
	"... they craft a marketing strategy, analyzing how they intend to serve different segments of the market and where they will position their product vis-à-vis the alternatives. They plan their tactics. Campaigns kick off, plans are translated into action. Results are monitored ..."
3.	on Page 35:
	"... be seen and heard by anyone in your organization. By this definition, leadership is not reserved exclusively for persons "in positions of authority." Rather, leadership can be exercised by anyone, at any time, under circumstances requiring them to behave in leader-like ..."
4.	on Page 45:
	"... draw on your research as you morph into a marketing designer. You'll assess the payback of various segmentation schemes. You'll position your product vis-à-vis its competition. You'll paint the big picture. You'll then think like a marketing executive as you put ..."
5.	on Page 57:
	"... own. Each of the 249,000 associates can log into the central system to review what training is required for their position and what they have completed to date; important training assignments rise to the top of the list. Today, training at ..."
6.	on Page 60:
	"... Costs, Boost Efficiency D Slash travel budget 0 Reduce time away from the job 0 Automate instruction D Reduce training positions D Accelerate training D Keep up with demand for knowledge Meet Business Objectives D Become competent sooner 0 Improve customer ..."
7.	on Page 62:
	"... Chapter 6 market segmentation that optimizes results by leveraging the most appropriate groups of customers a position that places your product in the "sweet spot" in the customer's mind. Figure C-1 offers an example of an e-learning ..."
8.	on Page 63:
	"... mind-mapping exercise. Scheduled to on-demand Informal as well as courses Generic to custom for core In-house development for our expertise Position Brand BMW in our market có Scottish Ale-not for everyone Swiss Arm -versatile hand y , y >ý Sincere fast ..."
9.	on Page 74:
	"... example, people perceive BMW automobiles as sporty. Volvos are considered safe. Cadillacs represent the epitome of luxury to many people. Position is all about place. In fact, that's what the dictionary says position means. Positioning involves putting your product in a ..."
10.	on Page 76:
	"... Chapter 6 Figure 6-4. Mental mapping: becoming a solution provider. Human A INSTRUCTION Machine i Current iý position 00 i i i 00 i i .0 00 wor Future position Theoretical E FOCUS im. Pragmatic INTERPRETATION: Sales training ..."

Not a bad Cliff's notes for assessing a book.


No one has offered a review as yet. People have written me that the book inspired them. (If you're an inspiree, write a review. I've heard it really boosts book sales.)

Amazon lists popularity rankings. Only 223,183 books to beat until we join the bestseller list!

Our book was part of a series on eLearning. In fact, we were the capstone of the series.

Evaluating eLearning #67,984
Project-Managing eLearning #150,866
Leading eLearning #202,096
Designing eLearning #209,774
Implementing eLearning #223,193<--
Selling eLearning #240,860
Using eLearning #246,133

This got me to wondering. How do other eLearning books fare in the marketplace?

eLearning and the Science of Instruction (Clark) #10,039
Telling Ain't Training (Stolovich) #15,022
First Things First (Rossett) #15,938
Designing Web-based Training (Horton) #16,983
Michael Allen's Guide to eLearning (Michael Allen) #17,150
Designing World-Class eLearning (Schank) #31,164
eLearning Tools & Technologies (Horton) #32,686
ASTD Learning Handbook (Rossett) #38,661
Simulations and the Future of Learning (Aldrich) #40,709
Web-based Training (Driscoll) #150,749
eLearning (Rosenberg) #191,505
Implementing eLearning #223,193
All Learning is Self-Directed (Tobin) #236,547
Beyond Free Coffee & Donuts (Oberstein and Alleman) #271,250
Virtual Learning (Schank) #534,459
ABCs of eLearning (Broadbent) #595,293 <\ul>

I've read all but three of these books. I've spoken with all the authors except the Donuts people. And I know there's something hokey about these numbers. Marc Rosenberg's book sells outside of the Amazon and ASTD channels (It's on the shelf at Border's), but nonetheless, it has to be way above #191,505.

Lance and I will both be attending TechKnowledge in Vegas week after next. Either of us will be happy to talk with you about your issues.


If the topic of implementation interests you, check out our supplementary material on the web, especially the "Director's Cut" (unexpurgated) version of some of the chapters from the book.

Just over a thousand people have downloaded our free eLearning Action Plan Template from the final chapter of the book. Got yours?

Next week I'll be in Las Vegas for a couple of days at ASTD's TechLearn. It's at the Riviera on the Strip. If you go to the official website and click housing and travel, you get an 800 number to call and an online reservation link. Either way, you receive the conference hotel rate of $89/night.

If you go to the Riviera's website, you can get that room for $59/night.

Alternatively, you could go to QuikBook. Their rate for the Riviera is $36/night. (You can get a deluxe room at the Sahara for $31.)

What's up with that? It's an anachronism.

In years past, hotels gave kick-backs to conference organizers who steered participants to their hotels. Back when you were at the mercy of a travel agent on commission or a conference organizer, this cozy set-up was the norm. Now most people make their own reservations through QuikBook or hotels.com. Conference financing is tough. Every dollar bilked from members helps keep the organization afloat.

You might look at it this way: suckers who overpay for their lodgings are subsidizing lower ticket prices for the rest of us. Unfortunately, the hotel is taking a nice cut of their largess, too.

I'm not singling out ASTD. All conferences work this scam.

---

When you hear about corporate transparency, this is it. If we squawk, the practice will stop.

Here are my discount travel links. Please add your favorites in a comment below.

The year is 2025. I'm sitting in the porch swing of my retirement bunglow regaling my great grandchildren with stories about the bad old days. "Kids, gramps remembers when email was reliable." They don't believe me.

"Before 2004, no one had Spam bots, white lists, cryptomail, pre-approves, reputation agents, or email chargebacks. My email address was on the public web with no encryption or aliasing for ten years!" They are incredulous. "One night some hooligan posted 400 Paris Hilton comment Spams on my blogs." I told them it took hours to delete the work of the vandals. "No, gramps, tell us it isn't true," they shrieked.

Yesterday (in 2005), I emailed this invitation to a couple of thousand members of Emergent Learning Forum:

Emergent Learning Forum will meet 5-8 pm January 27th in San Francisco. Our topic is The Nexus of Collaboration and Learning. This month we're teaming up with FutureCatalyst to explore how Emergent Learning Forum should explore
this historic convergence throughout 2005.

Joining us to bring the topic to life are David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies and Jerry Michalski of Sociate.com.

Attendance is limited to 20 people. It's first come/first served. Advance registration is required. The $10 admission charge covers the cost of wine and snacks.

For more information and to register for the event, visit our website:
http://www.emergentlearningforum.com

Live participation is not available but we hope to post an mp3 file of the sesssion.

We have room for five more people, so if you're interested in joining us, sign up now.

Since the invitation, I've been inundated with "Out of Office" replies, requests to prove I'm human, and various mail blocks.

Emergent Learning Forum has used Your Mailing List Provider for several years; it's a good service. But the world has changed. We're going to switch over to Constant Contact. This will tip us off as to how many members actually receive our email, how many open it, and how many click back to our site.

I recently sent an announcement to another group I'm affiliated with via Constant Contact. The list is 6 months old; everyone had opted-in, i.e. requested to be on it.

• 5% bounced because their address had disappeared.
• Just under 1% unsubscribed.
• One person reported my notice as Spam.
• 57% opened the email. (And a quarter of them clicked an internal link in the email.)
• The remaining 37% received but never opened the mail.

When you send mail to people who've requested periodic updates, count yourself among the lucky if half your messages are actually opened by the addressee.

You may have noticed that I'm a true believer in the effectiveness of visual learning. Graphics add impact to blog posts as well. I didn't appreciate how much easier this has recently become until I was describing the process to the new webmaster for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association over a glass of tart vernaccia di San Gimignano at Cafe Rouge in Berkeley this afternoon.

Let me show you. Before heading to the Cafe Rouge, I prepared lunch at home. Click the photo at right for a larger image.Then mouse over the photo to identify what I ate. This all comes built in with Flickr. I could also use Flickr to network and share photos with others, but I'm not into the social ins and outs yet.

By the way, that's the stand-up desk at the Internet Time Group command center, and that's a redwood right outside the window.








After a hike in the Berkeley hills and a trip to the book recycling center, I stopped by the Asian supermarket to shop for fish. Flickr created this thumbnail. Again, click for the fullsize image. Grocery stores are wonderful subjects for photographs. I should know. I've been reprimanded in France, Germany, and the U.K. for snapping photos of (to me) exotic foods. Today I was in stealth mode. No flash. Look the other way while shooting.


The fish are phenomenal at Ranch 99 Market. In addition to several dozen varieties on ice like these "true snappers," there's a case of filets and crustaceans, six big tanks of live fish, a sashimi counter, and self-serve heaps of clams, cockles, oysters, geoducks, squid, octopus, mussels, and catfish heads.








Look closely enough and you'll see not just carp but some prehistoric-looking fish above and the outline of yours truly taking the picture. Obviously, I crop my photos. Sometimes I've also tweaked the brightness and sharpness It's so easy, almost intuitive, to make adjustments like these with Picasa2, the free photo editing and management package from Google. Picasa is limited, compared to my usual graphics program, Paint Shop, but for simple photo editing, I can double or triple my speed by using Picassa.

The Chinese call these top-shell; to me, they're giant whelks. In the shell, they look marvellous, don't they? At home I steamed them in white wine. Yuck. Wrong way to do it. When I plucked them out of their shells, along came their intestines and the product of their intestines and noxious odors. These guys apparently have to be cleaned at some point in the cooking process.








I'll conclude with an artsy shot. Uta gave me the chopsticks decorated with Hosukai's Great Wave for my birthday. Their shadows are found art, objets trouvées. At Cafe Rouge, my companion told me of living in Soho on 9/11 and experiencing the surreal, looking at the twin towers from the window of his apartment and then the same scene on television. I see the towers in the shadows from my chopsticks. By the way, rather than cut-and-paste or write HTML, I simply dragged this photo from Flickr to Blogger.



Blogs have been celebrated as the printing press for the rest of us. Free services like Flickr, Picasa, and Blogger give us the tools to speak in pictures as well as words.

Media Tec, the publisher of Chief Learning Officer and Certification, is bringing out a new magazine in April. This seems apodictic, but the pitch is that "The success of the enterprise depends upon many factors. Chief among them is the ability of the workforce to achieve corporate goals."

Workforce performance management begins with the recruiting and hiring process and weaves through the fabric of business, including elements such as talent management, corporate communications, coaching, mentoring, leadership development and succession planning. The end result is a more vital organization with a more engaged and more productive workforce.

Right on! The enterprise meets systems thinking. Five years ago I was calling this the People Value Chain. It's a wonderful point of leverage for the corporation: holistic management.

CLO Business Intelligence research indicates 89% of enterprise organizations link learning & performance. Of these:

17% target senior leadership.

29% target key employees like sales and customer service.

65% target the entire enterprise.

4% target the extended enterprise, including partners & suppliers.

One has to wonder what title appears on the door of the head of a big company's workplace performance. Workforce Performance Solutions is "directed to top-level management, senior human resources, workforce and organizational development executives whose task is to optimize the abilites of their human assets to drive and improve the execution of enterprise strategy."

Is Media Tec travelling the road of the recent grad who said he wouldn't have majored in philosophy had he realized that none of the big philosophy companies would be hiring? Are they launching a magazine with no potential audience? No, I don't think so. Media Tec is repeating the formula that worked for them before.

When Media Tec was preparing to launch CLO, I told Norm Kamikow it was a dumb name. Despite the buzz, you could count the number of CLOs in American companies on your fingers and toes. Nonetheless, CLO went from six to twelve issues a year in the same timeframe as Online Learning and eLearning magazines were going down the tubes. CLO was named "Best New Magazine" by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. It's a good thing they don't take my advice.

Workplace Performance Solutions should be great for telling the workflow learning story. Free subscriptions here.

Best of luck, Norm and John.

Informal learning is one of my major research themes for 2005.



I'm looking for pointers to stimulating people, interesting viewpoints, or success stories.

Contact Jay.

This spam showed up in my email this morning. No text, just the graphic. Not a link to click.



It's an animated gif; the text changes to give dates of the conference and a URL.



What were they thinking? It's rare to find such an inappropriate use of graphics. The image adds nothing, is demonstrably impossible to spell-check, and wastes bandwidth.

Of course, they had to send more than one copy.

Sometimes a picture is worth less than 50 words.

Gratuitous project management tip: Use the right tool for the job.

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Ooops

Maybe gmail stripped the text out of the email above. I just received Dave Winer's Scripting News, and this was all I got...

Blogs are often a better way to keep up to date with new developments than books or magazines. Blogs are fresh. They're concise. And usually they're free. For example, when it comes to knowledge management, save your Amazon budget for another topic, and read The Future of Knowledge by Dave Pollard. It packs a whole lot of sense about managing KM into 1800 words.

In the eLearning field (broadly defined), I recommend (and not necessarily in this order):

Maish Nichani
Stephen Downes
George Siemens
Harold Jarche
Lilia Efimova
Eva Kaplan-Leiserson
Tom King
Mark Oehlert
Alan Levine
Jane Knight
elearnopedia
David Weinberger
Robin Good
Seb Paquet
Will Richardson

Dave Lee and I are refurbishing Learning Circuits Blog over the next month. If you have suggestions or want to contribute, drop us a line. Or course, modesty keeps me from mentioning Internet Time Blog.

To stay on top of this torrent of news, get yourself a feed-reader. Here is my Bloglines account. It uses syndication to let me read headlines (which I can drill down from) I haven't seen before. There are lots of options. I may convert to Firefox's Live Bookmarks.

The easiest way to keep up with things is through a syndication source that someone else has assembled for your use. No special software is required. Just go to Edu_RSS, hosted by Stephen Downes.

Blogging is hardly perfect, but at this moment in time, it's a great way to deliver and devour information and ideas.

Empathy in the Brain and in Art

The 4th International Conference on Neuroesthetics
UC Berkeley Art Museum, 15 January 2005-01-15

This morning I joined three hundred neuroscientists and students in the theatre at the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum for an all-day symposium on empathy and art.

Intro
Ulterior motive: bringing art and science together
Interest in Neuroesthetics heating up (a dozen hits on Google last year; now 2,000)
Today our focus will be empathy, a fundamental aspect of human communication

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Intentional Attunement: From mirror neurons to Empathy

Vittorio Gallese, from the Dept of Neuroscience at the University of Parma, got things off to a great start.

Whenever we observe, predict, or hear the consequences of an action, "mirror neurons" energize our brains the same as if we were actually doing something. Looking at the face of a disgusted person activates the disgust area of the observer’s brain. Same deal looking at a picture of someone being touched. To some extent, this even works when presented with a merely symbolic representation of an action. We do not just “see” the actions, emotions and sensations of others. We and they share an intelligible interpersonal space, a “we space.”

"Nature is on the inside," said Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth awaken an echo in our brains. "It is the artist who is truthful, the photo mendacious," said Rodin.

It becomes impossible to distinguish between who is seeing and what is being seen. (You've heard this meme here before.)

When Bill Clinton says "I feel your pain," maybe he does.

More information on this here.

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The Art of Face - a Mask, a Body, a Movement

Leonard Pitt, Writer and Movement Artist

Empathy is about listening (and Leonards’s teacher taught Marcel Marceau). He's into mime. Interesting how people mediate their experience. What we say about face holds true for body. He’s watched feet from Paris cafés. For days. The great whoosh of experience. You take it in, not analyze in it.

Masks. Masks just like people. Picks up tragedy mark, dons beret. Takes labored breathe. Looks around. Something grabs attention. Mime time. Recognition. Pained breath. Sad contemplation. Uncertainty. Head bent down. Frozen mask but shows: pride, anger, etc. All this from a sad mask. He’s moving in space forward, back.

Mr. Happy. Smug. Mischief. Trickster. He dons the mask. His eyes open wide. Laughter. There’s always laughter. It’s recognition that the eyes match the mask, and that’s enjoyable. Yawn. Backache.

The feet are the proletariat of the body: they are always carrying the weight. People often forget to express the lower part of their body. “I’m just showing people what they already know but they just don’t know it.”

When people are new to masks, they think they’ve got to move all over. Finally they realize that slower is better. “The best dancers don’t move.”

He talks about about the persona of a character behind the mask. He’s Dropo, the retired French clown of Italian parentage. He puts on a clown hat...and looks exactly the same. He puts on his nez…mon nez... Je l’appelle Claude. Claude Monet.

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Cultural Teachings from the Apes

Frans B.M. de Waal, Professor, Department of Psychology, Emory University

Culture was once reserved for humans: “Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customer and many other capabilities and habits acquired by man”. Culture, like the soul, was not for animals. Then Shigery Watanabe (1995) found that pigeons could discriminate between Matisse and Picasso. The bower bird does art. Kinji Imanishi (1952) on Koshima island found cultural transmission among monkeys. One monkey began washing her potatoes. Within a decade all individuals (except the mature males) washed their potatoes. They wasn't any teaching. This was imitation. They aped one another.

Cats don’t paint. Congo, the premiere painting monkey, does. Knows when a painting is complete & won’t continue. There’s no figurative art and no interest in the end product.



If you didn't think animals have culture, wake up and smell the coffee.

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Recognizing the Subtleties in Facial Expressions

Paul Ekman. University of California, San Francisco

You've read about this guy. He identified the emotions that occur in every culture. (Or at least the 23 he has looked into.) These include seven negative emotions...

Anger
Fear
Sadness
Disgust
Happiness
Surprise
Contempt

...and these enjoyable emotions

5 sensory pleasures
Amusement
Excitement
Relief
Wonder
Ecstasy
Fiero – I get it!
Naches – from parenting
Schadenfreude

Dr. Ekman has developed a CD-based course that teaches people to spot emotions in others they would previously have missed in 20 minutes. After his brief demo, I was able to spot where Kato Kalin showed he was lying on the stand in the O.J. trial.

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My raw notes contain more detail and describe a few other speakers.

Two days later, Monday: This event was sufficiently out of my traditional boundaries that I can almost feel my brain making connections as it incorporates what I heard into what I already knew. On yesterday's walk, I listened to Barry Schwartz on my mp3 player. Speaking at PopTech, he was railing against our being confronted with too many choices. Clueless undergraduates entering college are presented hundreds of classes to choose from. This is bewildering. Worse, they're so divided that they can't learn from dialog with other students. It's early and my thoughts are wandering. I'm all for freedom but know that we each have to get out of our comfort zones, to push the envelope; until this form of daring becomes a habit. For example, speakers of English will be better learners if they are force-fed some Milton, Yeats, Pound, Frost, and Jeffers, and forced to watch Citizen Kane, A Man and a Woman, and Ken Burns' The Civil War.

In the mid-sixties I met the woman in the apartment next to mine when I went over to complain about her boys, ages 10 & 12, who were bouncing a basketball off the wall of their bedroom, on the other side of which was my hallway. She invited me in. Hanging in the boys' room was this painting:



"Look Mickey" now hangs in The National Gallery of Art. It's the first painting in which former college art professor Roy Lichtenstein used comic book characters. He'd painted it for his sons' amusement. He had just received a divorce from my neighbor, Isabel.

Is and I became fast friends, and she introduced me to Pop Art. At the time, only the avant garde took Roy, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and their pals seriously. I had no appreciation for art of any sort at the time. For example, I didn't notice anything phallic about this image.



Is and I roamed around Princeton in her Renault Caravelle. We painted together a few times, drove around the countryside, and sang duets to her guitar. Roy was starting to hit the big time: he came to visit in a classic Morgan sports car. The only problem was that he couldn't figure out how to put the top up. Three months later I moved to Europe, never to see either of them again. Roy was in his cartoon phase:



An article in Life magazine asked, "Is this the worst artist in America?" At first glance, people didn't realize that the images in the paintings were becoming less and less like cartoons. To achieve the machine-printed look, Roy made his dots disproportionately large and exagerrated the outlines around people and objects. He had to do things by hand to achieve an automated look. He also started weaving ironic meaning into every canvas. Take this, Life magazine:



Through his images, Roy commented on the work of other artists. Years later I was delighted to be seated underneath prints of these takeoffs on Monet's Rouen Cathedral series at The Brasserie, across the street from The Seagram Building in New York. Monet painted the same scene at different times of day; throwing aside subtlety, Lichtenstein simply changed his single color. (I call him by last name from now on because, people had recognized his stature as an artist. I wouldn't call Matisse "Henri" either.)



Your don't have to be an art critic to recognize these:



Where do you go after knocking off several periods of Picasso? What statement can the artist make? Since it's all about art, how about a painting of paint itself? Lichtenstein wasn't happy with this one because he felt the paint could be confused for bacon.



In time, he created his own iconic vocabulary. A quarter century after Mickey, Lichtenstein's style was far from its comic roots. Consider this painting of a living room in which he wryly comments on his own work:



I love the risible contradictions that became Lichtenstein's signature. Is it real or is it Memorex? What makes classic beauty classic? Does this painting have the Buddha nature? Is this art or is it a question about art? (People who pay millions for a Lichtenstein must think they know the answer.)



Yesterday I attended an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art entitled Roy Lichtenstein: About Art. Most of the paintings above are on display. The show closes February 22. If you go, you must read the explanatory posters on the wall so you can chuckle at Lichtenstein's wit.

Isabel died in an institution twenty years ago. The boys must be in their early fifties. Roy passed away in 1997 from complications of pneumonia. He is survived by his second wife Dorothy.

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The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Arts.Telegraph on Roy's ascent from bored professor to Pop Art icon in three years
Roy Lichtenstein Gallery