Internet Time Blog

Internet Time Blog has moved!!!

2005-12-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

A new Internet Time Blog has opened up at http://www.internettime.com/wordpress/

The new RSS feed is http://www.internettime.com/wordpress/wp-rss2.php

This Blog won't disappear but all new posts will appear on the new blog.

Informal Learning

2005-12-22T08:35:00.000-08:00

Global Learning: Mr Cross, currently you are working on a book about informal learning. How do you define informal learning?

Jay Cross: Well, I had to redefine all learning in order to write the book because the world is changing so fast. The concepts we had when knowledge was fixed in place, like something you could put in a library, don’t work anymore. So I look at all learning as adaptation to the communities that matter to you, to your ecosystems, if you will. Informal learning is simply that, which is not directed by an organisation or somebody in a control position.

Labor pains for new blog

2005-12-18T22:59:00.000-08:00

I'm planning to shift Internet Time Blog to Word Press. Setting things up was easy.

I haven't had any success importing Blogger entries into the new site. And then I'll need to shift subscriptions and pointers to the new blog. This will probably be my hobby for the month of January.

Take a look if you don't mind seeting something primitive.

Confucious say ha, ha, ha, ha

2005-12-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

I cannot count the times I've heard some PowerPoint jockey explain wisely that the Chinese character for Crisis combines the ideograms for Danger and Opportunity.

Today's New York Times explodes this myth. The characters of weiji mean "a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A weiji indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one's skin and neck!"

Saying something is so doesn't make it so.

Which brings me to our president, who justifies illegally spying on citizens because we are at war with terrorists. War? What war? The U.S. has not declared war on terrorists. This is merely incendiary language to get us riled up. The War of Terrorism is like the War on Poverty; it's a metaphor. Duh.

W and his cronies conjured up the War on Terrorism because Americans are traditionally loyal to wartime presidents. I suspect the invasion of Iraq follows the same logic. Maybe W. shirked military service, but now he's Commander in Chief, so you're expected to salute (unless you're unpatriotic).

Homeland used to mean "the country where somebody was born or where somebody lives and feels that he or she belongs." Now the accent is on home. Imagine these rag-top terrorist bastards invading your house, smashing your stuff, raping the women, killing the children, and blowing the place to smithereens by detonating a truckload of plastic explosive in your driveway.

Be Vigilant... and report any suspicious person or package to local authorities or TSA personnel, warns the Transportation Safety Administration. The TSA is using money that could otherwise go to improving education and healthcare to pay more than 50,000 people to frisk passengers and search suitcases. They put thousands of federal air marshals on tens of thousands of flights each month.

In the last 30 days, I've been searched like a suspected smuggler, patted down, and asked to remove my shoes, undo my belt, and hand over my luggage for inspection. Many times. As if a terrorist is going to walk into this rather than simply blowing up an unguarded post office or university administration building. Since putting one passenger out of a hundred through this wringer would achieve the same deterrent effect as doing everybody, the TSA either does not understand statistics or is just fanning the flames to remind us we're at war.

I don't like to see the government wasting my money. I don't like being lied to. I don't like having my country look stupid on the world stage. I don't like alarmist propaganda putting people on edge. I'm mad as hell but I guess I'll have to wait for the next election to do anything about it.

Which brings me to the Bay Area Rapid Transit district (BART). These are the guys who hired an aerospace company to design a subway and ended up with non-standard gauge rails that only accommodate expensive cars manufactured in France.

BART's ace security team has mounted posters like this one just in time for the Christmas season.

A poster like this is highly unusual but I haven't figued out who to report it to.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

2005-12-17T00:06:00.000-08:00

Curt Bonk and Charlie Graham's The Handbook of Blended Learning is being released today.

If you know my thoughts on the whole blended business, you'll be surprised to find that I wrote the foreword to this tome. I'll share the unedited version:

Foreword to The Handbook of Blended Learning

By Jay Cross
Monday, 27 December 2004

When Curt Bonk asked me to contribute a chapter to this book, I flat out refused. As you might guess from the quantity of top-notch authors who appear here, Curt is persistent. He asked me again, and again I turned him down, this time with an explanation.

I told him I considered blended learning a useless concept. To my way of thinking, blending is only new to people who were foolish enough to think that delegating the entire training role to the computer was going to work. I could not imagine unblended learning. My first-grade teacher used a blend of story-telling, song, recitation, reading aloud, flash cards, puppetry, and corporal punishment.

Is it not nutty for a learning strategist to ask “Why blend?” The more appropriate question is, “Why not blend?” Imagine an episode of This Old House asking, “Why should we use power tools? Hand tools can get the job done.” For both carpenters and learning professionals, the default behaviour is using the right tools for the job.

Since I have made it to my fourth paragraph without a footnote or a passive sentence, you have probably already figured out that my perspective is corporate, not academic. My bottom line is organizational performance, not individual enlightenment. Not that I am dismissive of research. In nearly thirty years in what we used to call the training business, I have read my share of Dewey, Kolb, Bransford, Gagné, Schank, and John Seely Brown, but as a businessman, I also pay allegiance to Peter Drucker, Stan Davis, and Harvard Business Review. And I hobnob with least a dozen of the authors you are about to read.

Here are a few issues for you to consider as you ponder this fine collection of observations and advice from learning pioneers around the globe.

What’s a blend?

First of all, these are not useful blends:

· 40% online, 60% classroom
· 80% online, 20% face-to-face
· 80% workshop, 20% online reinforcement

After reading a few chapters of this book, you will see these for what they are: oversimplifications.

Four or five years ago, it was commonplace to hear, “We’ve tried eLearning. People didn’t like it. It didn’t work very well.” This is akin to saying, “I once read a book. It was difficult to understand. I’m not going to do that again.” The book in your hands describes rich variations and applications of eLearning. After reading it, you’ll find that you can no more generalize about eLearning than you can generalize about books. Consider this description of a blend from Macromedia’s Ellen Wagner.

“Evolving blended learning models provide the essential methodological scaffolding needed to effectively combine face-to-face instruction, online instruction, and arrays of content objects and assets of all form factors. For example, in such a blended learning scenario, a student may find him or herself participating in a face-to-face class discussion; he or she may then log in and complete an online mastery exercise or two, then copy some practice exercises to a PDA to take advantage of what David Metcalf calls “stolen moments for learning” – those times between classes or meetings, while on the train, or waiting for an appointment. Think about sending a text message with results of your practice sessions to someone in your virtual study group using your mobile phone - and getting a voicemail with feedback on your results when you arrive at the end of your flight.”

People don’t know what they like; they like what they know. For example, many assume that face-to-face instruction is the one best way to teach and that online learning is inherently inferior. They seek ways for online initiatives to support the high-grade face-to-face experience. As discussed in this book, Capella University turns this view on its head, asking what face-to-face support is required to supplement online learning. Having found online learning universally effective, Capella uses face-to-face only to further social goals such as building one’s support network or creating informal affinity groups. From their perspective, a blend may contain no face-to-face element at all.

Blended learning can take place while waiting in line at the grocery store or taking the bus home. Its ingredients may be courses, content chunks, IM pings, blog feedback, or many other things. Interaction is the glue that holds all these pieces together. Interaction comes in many forms, not just learner and instructor, but also learner-to-content, learner-to-learner, and learner-to-infrastructure. Interaction, especially in learning communities, can create an experience so compelling that it makes workers hungry to learn and drives otherwise sane people to pay $4 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

What goes into the blend? Great recipes are the product of generations of experimentation, tasting, and refinement. eLearning is at the same embryonic stage as American cuisine when home chefs rarely started a sauce without a can of condensed mushroom soup, and garlic was reserved for scaring away vampires.

First generation eLearning was initiated, delivered, and completed online; however, its consumers lost their appetites. Today’s tastier recipes include organizational skills assessments, books, content objects, workshops, clinics, seminars, simulations, collaboration, technical references, learning games, and links to communities of practice, both online and off..

At the University of Phoenix, I developed a classroom-based business curriculum in 1976. A dozen years later, an online program debuted. More recently, UoP introduced blended programs which combine some classroom and some online (see chapter from Brian Lindquist). Add more classroom and the result is the “local model” blend; add more online and the result is the “distance model.” Some blends are like “vibration cooking,” i.e. a pinch of this, a handful of that, and however much wine is left in the bottle. C’est bricolage.

As Nancy Lewis and Peter Orton document here, IBM’s four-tier model shows how the ingredients of the blend must be matched to the nature of the outcomes sought. Web pages work fine for performance support. Simulations are good for developing understanding. Groups learn from community interaction and live virtual programs. Higher order skills require coaching, role play, and perhaps f2f sessions. Each dish requires its own recipe.

Blends are more than a learning stew, for as the authors here amply demonstrate, blends fall along many dimensions. Some of these dimensions are listed in the chart below.

TABLE: Possible Dimensions of Blended Learnin

A Blend of Blends. The ideal blend is a blend of blends. Take the last dimension above, formal to informal learning. Study after study finds that most corporate learning is informal. It’s unscheduled. It’s learning on the job. It’s trial-and-error. It’s asking someone who knows.

If informal learning is so important, dare we leave it to chance? If we seek an optimal result, we cannot. Instead of a single blend which calls for x percent of this and y percent of that, I propose we take the blends of many of the authors here into account. We must replace one dimensional thinking with simultaneous consideration of dozens of pie charts, matrices, and comparison tables.

The many cooks of The Handbook of Blended Learning do not spoil the broth. On the contrary, their diversity of opinion and method enrich the book. Editors Curt Bonk and Charles Graham are to be congratulated for preserving the unique flavor contributed by each author.

Mike Wenger and Chuck Ferguson of Sun Microsystems make a strong argument for thinking in terms of a learning ecology instead of a blend of classroom and eLearning. “Classroom” deprives the concept of the rich, multifaceted experiences that take place there. Similarly, “eLearning” covers over the multiple possibilities born of the marriage of the learner and the Internet. There’s simply a lot more to it than that.

School’s out. Corporations seek self-reliant workers they can trust to do the right thing without supervision. Every manager wants “self-starters” on her team. Yet when it comes to learning, many workers wait for others to tell them what to do. Why don’t they take matters into their own hands? I think it is simply a vestige of schooling.

Several hundred years ago, compulsory schools were set up as a separate reality. Students were seedlings, while schools were the greenhouses to protect them from outside elements. The mission of schools was to transmit values and teach a body of knowledge. The noise of the real world might taint the righteousness and clarity of the lessons.

Schooling taught us to think of learning as something a person does in isolation and that its ideal delivery takes place in the classroom or the library, cloistered from the outside. Group work is by and large discouraged (it’s called “cheating”). Authorities choose the curriculum. Self-direction is viewed as rebellion.

Some of these same “authorities” credit me with coining the term eLearning. I would never use the word in the executive suite. Why? Because senior managers equate learning and schooling, too; they remember school as an inefficient way to learn. They are not willing to pay for it.

What is wrong with this picture? How many times have you seen a diagram of the learner-centric model that’s supposed to crowd out the instructor-centric model? It usually shows various learning modalities (e.g., content, the web, discussion groups, video conferencing, live help, etc.) arrayed around the worker.

The image is misleading. It implies that the learner is of paramount importance. In the corporation, however, the work of the group comes before the work of any individual. The learner-centric model retains vestiges of the classroom and its one-to-many oversimplification of how things really work.

There’s an even larger problem: work is typically not part of the picture at all. Imagine a situation where a worker must respond in real time. Say there’s an important customer asking about an order or something has gone haywire in the automated warehouse. Learning must be filtered through what’s happening in the work environment. Otherwise, the worker may accept the customer’s order even though there’s nothing in the warehouse to ship.

Blending workflow learning.

In the knowledge era, learning is the work. Harvey Singh’s prescient chapter proposes the most important blend of all -- the marriage of learning and work. He describes self-perpetuating systems of continuous improvement. Smart software applies its awareness of conditions and context to take a hand in concocting the ever-changing blend. Cycle times shrink to the point that all business becomes a real-time activity.

The components of Harvey’s workflow learning blend are:

· Portals and web parts
· Internet and mobility
· Granular knowledge nuggets
· Collaboration
· Workflow automation and knowledge linking
· Human and automated virtual mentoring
· Presence awareness
· Simulations
· Business process and performance monitoring
· Continuous knowledge capture and feedback
· Real-time notification, aggregation, and decision support
· Integrated learning and enterprise applications
· Interoperable, re-usable content framework

The end of blend. So, given the breadth of choices, is it worthwhile to read a book about blended learning? Yes, I think it is. As Elliott Masie says, “The magic is in the mix.”

“Blended” is a transitory term. In time it will join “Programmed Instruction” and “Transactional Analysis” in the dust-bin of has-beens. In the meantime, blended is a stepping stone on the way to the future. It reminds us to look at learning challenges from many directions. It makes computer-only training look ridiculous. It drives us to pick the right tools to get the job done.

Enjoy the book. Don’t just read it. Make it a blended learning experience. Discuss the cases with colleagues. Incorporate it into your plans. Reflect on how to apply its wisdom. Blending will help you learn.

Jay Cross
Berkeley, California
December 2004

Einstein LIght

2005-12-15T21:22:00.000-08:00

2005, the Year of Physics, is drawing to a close. There's still time for a breezy overview of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein from this entertaining site called Einstein Light. I wish this had been around when I studied physics.

The Joy of Living in Berkeley

2005-12-14T01:16:00.000-08:00

I just received an invitation to the Fifth International Conference on Neuroesthetics in Berkeley next month. This year's topic is the Flavors of Experience. "Please join us as internationally renowned scientists and artists discuss the brain’s responses to such things as gourmet food, fine wine and aromatic perfumes."

Understanding how chocolate, champagne or Channel No. 5 can elicit intense reactions and enhance long-term memories promises to guide scientists in their research of how pleasure centers and the memory system in the brain are connected. Likewise, chefs, vintners and perfumers can learn from scientists how our brains respond to their products.

At the day-long conference, speakers will range from Yale University’s Dana M. Small, an expert in how the brain processes flavor, to San Francisco Zen Center’s Ed Epse Brown, a priest, cook and author.

Last year's conference on empathy in the brain and in art was one of the more meaningful days of 2005 for me.

By the way, the conference is free.

Natural Learning Presentation

2005-12-13T06:17:00.000-08:00

This morning I delivered a half-hour presentation on Natural Learning to the Finnish eLearning RoundTable. It's a balmy 32° F in Helsinki at the moment. Thank goodness for Macromedia Breeze and Skype, for they enabled me to take part from my office in Berkeley.

I'm finding that people can buy my definition of learning as adapation.

They understand the logic of learning without boundaries.

The question I hear again and again is "How can we assess the quality of informal learning?" My response is two-fold:

How can you assess the quality of formal learning?
The measure of success is how well workers get the job done.

The presentation has a few rough spots -- I'm trying out concepts from the book. Mercifully, you can jump around by clicking the list of slides.

Visual Thinking School

2005-12-11T22:18:00.000-08:00

Dave Gray's Visual Thinking School is simply wonderful!

Storytelling

2005-12-10T16:51:00.000-08:00

Storytelling: PowerPoint's New Best Friend
CLO Magazine, December 2005

Slide after slide of bulleted sentence fragments is an awful thing to sit through. If the speaker giving the presentation reads them to you word for word, it makes a bad spectacle even worse. Regardless of these unpleasantries, PowerPoint has become the language of business.

PowerPoint also happens to be learning’s most popular authoring tool. Many software packages enable learning and development leaders to narrate a PowerPoint presentation and upload it to the Web. The problem is that if live lectures are ineffective, prerecorded ones online are going to be even more ineffective. Unfortunately, being a subject-matter expert doesn’t necessarily make someone an expert public speaker. Sadly, many experts think the purpose of a PowerPoint presentation is to expose the audience to content and pure information—as if emotion plays no part in getting a message across.

However, it makes no more sense to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations than to blame fountain pens for forgery.

Steve Denning, the author of several books on storytelling, recalls not being able to get fully engaged into someone’s PowerPoint presentation. He recognized that PowerPoint can be too concrete, and therefore, he abandoned PowerPoint in his own presentations in favor of telling stories. No one missed it. When you hear a powerful story, you internalize it. Your imagination makes it your story, and that’s something that will stick with you.

It makes no more sense to blame PowerPoint for boring prsentations than to blame fountain pens for forgery.

Cliff Atkinson’s book “Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate and Inspire” shows how to use Hollywood’s script-writing techniques to focus your ideas, how to use storyboards to establish clarity and how to properly produce the script so that it best engages the audience.

Atkinson recently told me the story of a presentation that made a $250 million difference. Attorney Mark Lanier pled the case against Merck in the first Vioxx-related death trial, brought by the widow of a man who died of a heart attack that she believed was caused by the painkiller. Before preparing his presentation, he read “Beyond Bullet Points,” and invited Atkinson to Houston to lend a hand in putting his presentation together.

“We used the three-step approach from the book,” Atkinson said. “Then (Lanier’s) flawless delivery took the experience beyond what I imagined possible. He masterfully framed his argument with an even flow of projected images and blended it with personal stories, physical props, a flip chart, a tablet PC, a document projector and a deeply personal connection with his audience.”

Fortune magazine’s coverage of the trial describing Lanier’s presentation said, “The attorney for the plaintiff presented simple and emotional stories that strongly contrasted with Merck’s appeals to colorless reason.” Fortune reported that Lanier “gave a frighteningly powerful and skillful opening statement. Speaking…without notes and in gloriously plain English, and accompanying nearly every point with imaginative, easily understood (if often hokey) slides and overhead projections, Lanier, a part-time Baptist preacher, took on Merck and its former CEO Ray Gilmartin with merciless, spellbinding savagery.”

Lanier’s technique was persuasive and aimed to get the jurors to believe in his “simple, alluring and emotionally cathartic stories, versus Merck’s appeals to colorless, heavy-going, soporific reason. Lanier is inviting the jurors to join him on a bracing mission to catch a wrongdoer and bring him to justice.” The Texas jury awarded the widow $253.4 million.

You may be thinking, “I don’t have time to do something that elaborate.” Put that in perspective: If you spend months on a complex project, isn’t it worth a few days to wrap up the results into an effective presentation? If you’re using PowerPoint as an authoring system, remember this: A presentation and self-directed learning are two totally different experiences, and the fact that they both may be in PowerPoint doesn’t change that. For compelling presentations, follow the advice in “Beyond Bullet Points.” And for training that works, follow the tenets of sound instructional design.

Oh Canada

2005-12-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

Clarity

2005-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:00

How the Brain Works is a beautifully simple interactive depiction of brain functions.

via elearnspace

VisualComplexity

via elearningpost

Fever dreams

2005-12-08T13:34:00.000-08:00

Ten days ago in Berlin, I came down with the flu or a bad sinus infection or more likely both. Come evening, I began to shiver. I was running a fever. I spent the night in a semi-conscious stupor. The hotel radiator was not as hot as it might have been. I put on a sweatshirt and returned to bed. Dazed.

I've read that the never-never land between sleep and wakefulness can realease creative ideas. It's as if the curtain between the conscious and unconscious mind becomes porous. Famously, chemist Friedrich Kekule dozed off on a London bus and awoke having figured out the atomic structure of benzene.

I'd been writing most of the day, so thoughts of informal learning were darting in and out of my head. Around 1:00 am, I began to have an ah-ha. An image of the streamlined, universal, informal learning portal began to form in my mind's eye. An hour later, the image was still fuzzy but I hadn't lost it. Fever dreams! At least lying in the dark shivering wasn't time going to waste. 3:00 am, 4:00 am, and 5:00 am passed by. Occasionally I'd take a swig of mineralwasser, but most of the time I just shivered and smiled to myself that this new software was being pieced together in my mind.

Around 7:00 am, I could wait no longer. I cut on the computer and began sketching my vision.

That's it.

This reminds me of stories in the Sixties where some guy is high on speed or LSD. He writes for three days straight, finally turning in when he runs out of ink, convinced that he has just written the Great American Novel. Upon awakening, he finds three hundred pages filled with the word mu over and over again.

I think I'll have to wait for my Nobel prize.

Learning Styles, ha, ha, ha

2005-12-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

Normally, I would not expect to get many chuckles from a 186-page report entitled Learning styles and pedagogy post-16 learning A systematic and critical review, 2004, by Frank Coffield, Institute of Education, University of London; David Moseley, University of Newcastle; Elaine Hall, University of Newcastle; Kathryn Ecclestone, University of Exeter. This is an exception.

This marvelously tongue-in-cheek report looks at 800 studies of learning styles and concludes that there are better uses for educational funding. “Learning style awareness is only a ‘cog in the wheel of the learning process’ and ‘it is not very likely that the self-concept of a student, once he or she has reached a certain age, will drastically develop by learning about his or her personal style’.”

The authors at the Learning and Skills Research Centre doubtless had a rollicking good time coming up with conclusions like “Research into learning styles can, in the main, be characterised as small-scale, non-cumulative, uncritical and inward-looking. It has been carried out largely by cognitive and educational psychologists, and by researchers in business schools and has not benefited from much interdisciplinary research.”

And how about this? "The sheer number of dichotomies in the literature conveys something of the current conceptual confusion. We have, in this review, for instance, referred to:

convergers versus divergers
verbalisers versus imagers
holists versus serialists
deep versus surface learning
activists versus reflectors
pragmatists versus theorists
adaptors versus innovators
assimilators versus explorers
field dependent versus field independent
globalists versus analysts
assimilators versus accommodators
imaginative versus analytic learners
non-committers versus plungers
common-sense versus dynamic learners
concrete versus abstract learners
random versus sequential learners
initiators versus reasoners
intuitionists versus analysts
extroverts versus introverts
sensing versus intuition
thinking versus feeling
judging versus perceiving
left brainers versus right brainers
meaning-directed versus undirected
theorists versus humanitarians
activists versus theorists
pragmatists versus reflectors
organisers versus innovators
lefts/analytics/inductives/successive processors
versus rights/globals/deductives/
simultaneous processors
executive, hierarchic, conservative versus legislative,
anarchic, liberal.

"The sheer number of dichotomies betokens a serious failure of accumulated theoretical coherence and an absence of well-grounded findings, tested through replication. Or to put the point differently: there is some overlap among the concepts used, but no direct or easy comparability between approaches; there is no agreed ‘core’ technical vocabulary. The outcome – the constant generation of new approaches, each with its own language – is both bewildering and off-putting to practitioners and to other academics who do not specialise in this field."

The question at the end of the 186-page report asks whether government doesn’t have better things to do with its money, “Finally, we want to ask: why should politicians, policy-makers, senior managers and practitioners in post-16 learning concern themselves with learning styles, when the really big issues concern the large percentages of students within the sector who either drop out or end up without any qualifications?”

Let it be

2005-12-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

Soft morning light from the bedrooom window nudged me awake this morning. I lay still, enjoying a fuzzy state between sleep and consciousness. The window framed an abstract painting, a high-contrast pastiche of thick black lines and fractal branches against a glowing gray background.

Contemplating my living painting (it rustles in the breeze), a thought from Dwight Eisenhower flowed into my head: "Farming looks mighty easy if a piece of paper is your field and your plow is a pencil."

This morning I want to wrap up a chapter on cultivating the learnscape. The chapter will be advice for composing a productive ecosystem for work and learning. A month ago, I'd have called this Design. Now I cannot.

As a verb, design means:

design something for a specific role or purpose or effect
conceive or fashion in the mind; invent
make a design of; plan out in systematic, often graphic form
create the design for; create or execute in an artistic or highly skilled manner
make or work out a plan for; devise

Learning, working, and living simply aren't designer goods. Rather, they evolve as relationships come together and break away as one chunk of reality tumbles into another. No one painted the picture I saw from my bedroom this morning. No designers had a hand in its creation.

After two cups of good, strong coffee, I find the painting morphing into the redwoods in the backyard, with a Japanese maple in the foreground, backlit by the fog over San Francisco Bay.

Perhaps I could have designed the painting, but I could no more design those redwoods than I could plow a field with a pencil.

Ever see a redwood cone? They are tiny. About the size of a marble. Each cone contains sixty to a hundred tiny seeds; 125,000 seeds weigh about a pound. Sixty years ago, one of those seeds took up residence in my back yard. Several of my trees have grown more than a hundred feet tall. They weigh more than a million pounds. How the hell did this happen? The seed contained a blueprint but the seedling's relationships with its surroundings created the tree.

New workers are seeds in the business ecosystem.

Assessing the Value of Learning

2005-12-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

Last week at Online Educa in Berlin, Brenda Sugrue, Tony O'Driscoll, and I led a session on Establishing the Value of Learning in the Workplace.

I contend the three major factors of value -- investment, return, and time -- don't hold still long enough to be useful metrics.

Google is worth $3 billion on the books. Investors value it at $125 billion. ROI ceases to have meaning when the "I" is funny-money.
Inflation used to skew the value of a unit of money over time. Now the units of time are no longer constant. The 21st century will contain the equivalent of 20,000 current years!
Return is tough to measure in a world where intangibles are worth more than tangibles. Everything's relative.

My solution is to pose decisions to a wise, skeptical avatar. If you can convince Andrew Carnegie a project is viable. go for it.

Brenda is senior director of research for ASTD. She presented the 2005 State of the Industry, a just-released review of trends in workplace learning & performance. Learning is broadening in scope and garnering more investment.

Tony has spent the last year with IBM's Almaden Research Lab researching the value of learning. He described the findings of a study of C-level officer perceptions of corporate learning. The CxOs are strategic but most CLOs are still working in the trenches.

Jay's slides - Brenda's slides - Tony's slides

Back in the USA

2005-12-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

This afternoon I arrived back in Berkeley, coughing and sneezing, after four weeks on the road. San Francisco - Taipei - Bangkok - Dubai - Abu Dhabi - Kuwait - Frankfurt - Berlin - Frankfurt - San Francisco. Around the world but mainly at night.

My book is in much better shape than it was before the journey. There's a new version at the review site for those who are so inclined.

Berlin

2005-11-29T07:03:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Berlin yesterday morning, checked in at the misnamed but reasonably-priced Hotel Berlin Plaza, plugged in my laptop, and tapped away most of the day as I watched the snow drift by. The Plaza does not have internet connections; in fact, they charge 2,5 Euros an hour to use Microsoft Office on the one public PC in the "Business Center."

Berlin is in Christmas dress. The trees of the Ku'damm are a sea of white lights. Fanning out from the ruins of the Friedrich-Wilhelms Gedank Kirche run are scores of festive booths serving hot mulled wine, fancy candles, meter-long bratwurst, ornamenets, and more.

I shared lunch today with Gary Woodill, a font of wisdom about learning origins and esoterica. He told us about the distributed intelligence of slime mold. One of these guys doesn't know jack but put a bunch of them together, and they can navigate a maze. Separate and re-group the maze takers; they'll go through the maze faster than a new group! Then there's the explanation of why codfish have failed to return to the banks of Newfoundland after years of overfishing. The fishermen had taken all the adults, obliterating the collective wisdom of where to go for food.

Gary is finishing up an ebook for Brandon Hall, and I've been doing my author thing, so conversation turned to books. The slime and cod stories could make interesting alternatives to the One-Minute Cheese Manager books. Someone needs to write The Stupidity of Crowds, a history of English football louts. The opportunities are endless.

Educa is becoming one of the world's meeting-points for thought leaders. Within ten minutes of walking in the front door, I'd become involved in half a dozen conversations that started on my blog or in Abu Dhabi or in email. Werner Trotter, who heads press relations for Educa, and I talked about the power of the Educa imprimateur to bring the right people together and the excitement of web/learning/life 2.0.

I am really looking forward to the next few days.

Wake-up call

2005-11-26T10:29:00.000-08:00

My noggin is filling up with learning fluff from the net, the street, books, conversations, and subscriptions. think I know how Johnny Mnemonic must have felt. He's the William Gibson character with a hard drive implant in his head. If he doesn't download after a while, well, let's not go there. It's not a pretty picture.

We live in surreal times. I have no doubt but that we just passed the knee of the exponential curve of everything, the ride up the hockey-stick handle is getting faster, and soon the nose-cone of our vehicle will begin to glow from the heat. I told a professor today that our culture train is whizzing along at about 600 KPH, way past the speed where the wheels were predicted to fall off. Sorry for the mixed metaphor. It's late. And the acceleration just slammed me back in my seat.

Abu Dhabi can be truly beautiful.

We stopped by the city fish market to buy shrimp for dinner. Unlike New Orleans, here it's okay to eat Gulf shrimp.

These two guys cleaned out my pockets very smoothly, and I have lots of trinkets to prove it. In fact, I'm way out of luggage allowance and will probably send FedEx some business tomorrow. Tomorrow night I am off to Berlin. The mercury there has fallen to 32F.

For a wealthy country, Abu Dhabi has its bargains. I took a $1.25 taxi ride across the isthmus in front of my hotel, visited the Heritage Village ($1.25 admission), and later bought a nice-sized package of safran for, you guessed it, $1.25. The UAE is also an amazing national rag-to-riches story.

The photo of Abu Dhabi at left was taken about the time I was a college student. Almost all the buildings were huts made of thatched palm fronds. The sheikh's fort, in the lower right foreground, had a couple of stucco houses inside the walls. Now Abu Dhabi looks like lower Manhattan (if it had all been put up in the last 25 years. And maintained.)

These are an antique pearl scale and size-checker. Until the 1930s, the locals dove for pearls. Then the global depression and the Japanese invention of cultured pearls wiped that business out.

The Heritage Village is a mini-Williamsburg or Mystic Seaport. This fellow lowers a goatskin bag on a pully down into the well. He throws a line over the ox's hump. The ox swurls around 180 degrees and lumbers along for 15 or 2o feet. Water gushes out into irrigation ditches that water several small plots. I had just finished Verna Allee's The Future of Knowledge before I saw this. She explains how little has changed in human commerce over the years.

We could not have picked a better place for a World Cafe. The Emirati have lots of practice. I have learned the intensity of meetings in a "third place," neither work nor home, but rather a place to gather for honest conversation.

It was beginning to heat up. When it's too hot for camels to stand, it's way over my limit.

When the old, historic souk (market) burned down a while back, it was not rebuilt. I imagine a gleaming bank tower stands there now. I wandered around this six or seven stall replica. Then I walked along the road (nice Gulf breeze making it comfortable), past a few pricey-looking boats, and into the Marina Mall, the home of IKEA, Carrefour, and a nine-screen multiplex cinema. It's like walking a thousand years in 15 minutes.

This morning a woman dressed head-to-toe in black, full head scarf -- looking through the one-way gauze -- walked by me at the mall; she was jabbering into a cell phone. A more daring young woman was in black, but her skirt had a slit almost up to her waste so when she walked, you saw a flash of her scarlet pants underneath.

Things that look old-fashioned to the inexperienced eye must appear like science fiction to locals my age. Were I an Emirati, I wouldn't have gone to a local high school because when I was a teenager, the country didn't have any high schools. Growing up without running water or electricity, eaking out a living from arid, scrubby soil, and not being knowledgeable about the larger world, and twenty-five years later to be buzzing around in an air-conditioned Mercedes, inhabiting a high-rise luxury condo, parenting kids who have cell phones and computers... Can you imagine what that must feel like?

I suspect the Emirati will be better prepared for what's up ahead than the Americans. When I talk with people about the acceleration of time, they think it's some theoretical deal, like Einstein or Heisenberg. No, this is the real deal.

Five years from now, you're going to feel like an Emirati my age, shaking your head but not about to turn it down. And today, when I'm thinking about effervescent knowledge and nanotech, you have a question about how to grade informal learners? Or whether WebCT is a keeper? Or how to be sure workers are competent? Or the definition of education?

As I said, this island is really big on coffee. My advice if the accelerating pace of change does not concern you: forget that stuff. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Notes from the scribbler

2005-11-25T01:38:00.000-08:00

A printed manuscript of my book on Informal Learning just arrived. Four hundred pages of characters and runes. It's intimidating. Maybe that's why none of the people I sent it to for comment are responding. A Dutch writer who saw the manuscript wrote back less than a day later. "That's a BIG book you have put out there. This informal learning thing is interesting. And just like last year, I find your writing inspiring, not very practical, but inspiring and that is often more important, at least, it is more important to me than practicalities of daily problems."

I'm trying to finish up a section on ecological systems approaches, comparing living organizations to other biosystems. Did you know that were it not for the lowly dung beetle, Africans would be waste-deep in dung in a month? Or that if the bees and butterflies diappeared, so would your food. Take away the worms, the soil will turn acidic, and plants would not grow. Watch out for corporate DDT!

The FlickR Blockade here is now in its fifth day, so this is the only place you're going to see these photos!

To cut down on accidents, the Interior Minister of Kuwait has announced that ex-patriates in Kuwait will not be allowed to drive unless they have a college degree and an income of more than $1,200 a month.

Paul took this picture of his wife Cathy and our group at Finz Restaurant last night. Next door, an ersatz Cuban band was blasting Buena Vista music to the delight of a thousand writhing Latinos and friends.

The open kitchen at Finz. I took this from my seat.

Toni Luskin's nails. A computer graphic of her Gucci scarf was sprayed on her digits.

Not cheesecake. Or beefcake. I wanted to show you a feature all bathrooms should mimic. The mirrored wall is all steamed up, save this portion over the sink. I assume a rear-projection heater lies behind the mirror.

If it published in the Middle East, the Friday New York Times would be the fat one. It's our one-day weekend.

Observations

2005-11-24T05:40:00.000-08:00

Pictures from the FlickR free zone. This feels so strange. I resized these in MS Paint and uploaded them via Blogger.

The Emerging Elearning signs along the Corniche Road have come down. Party's over.

The Hilton's beach is on the Gulf but behind a breakwater.

German women delude themselves that their skin is impermeable to cancer.

Infidels at the pool.

Life’s been good to me so far

2005-11-24T04:52:00.000-08:00

The old Joe Walsh song is thumping in my forebrain.

I have a mansion
Forget the price
Ain't never been there
They tell me it's nice

I live in hotels
Tear out the walls
I have accountants
Pay for it all

They say I'm crazy but I have a good time
I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime
Life's been good to me so far

I’ve been a little under the weather, so I’m eating light. Last night’s supper was a small shellfish salad. This morning I ordered the Japanese breakfast from room service. I've drunk three litres of San Pellegrino in the last 24 hours. And no alcohol.

Around one o’clock this afternoon, I figured I needed some sunlight, so I walked across the street to the Vasco’s, the Hilton’s beachside restaurant, thinking maybe I’d order a light salad.

The maitre d’ suggested I sit inside, as a large banquet had taken over the entire patio. I grabbed a seat in a little nook by a window. Soon a familiar fellow in a dishdasha was by my side. “Did I want to join the banquet?” I didn’t think so. He said he remembered me from the conference. I asked if he'd attended the conference. Only when Sheikh Nahayan was there. The banquet was another lunch hosted by His Excellency. Now I could see him sitting at the head of the table. They were just finishing up, but His Excellency wanted to treat me to lunch.

The Sheikh and I talked briefly as he departed. Tayeb was surprised to see me but greeted me warmly. Mustafa, the Syrian fellow I'd had lunch with at the Sheikh's came along. They were off, and food began to arrive.

My Maserati
Does one eighty-five
I lost my license
Now I don't drive

I have a limo
Ride in the back
I lock the doors
In case I'm attacked

I'm making records
My fans they can't wait
They write me letters
Tell me I'm great

So I got me an office
Gold records on the wall
ust leave a message
Maybe I'll call

Lucky I'm sane after all I've been through
(Everybody sing) I'm cool (He's cool)
I can't complain but sometimes I still do
Life's been good to me so far

A salad of radicchio, butter lettuce, arugula, prawns, and lobster chunks appeared, soon accompanied by a spicy lentil broth drizzled with crème fraishe. The main course consisted of a lamb chop, spicy chunks of hamoor (a Gulf fish), some savory camel, a great langoustine tail, and I forget what else. Desert was tiramisu with chopped nuts, its chocolate container surrounded by swirls of pistachio cream and apricot coulis. Good, strong coffee.

Now I’m going to take a nap.

I go to parties
Sometimes until four
It's hard to leave
When you can't find the door

It's tough to handle
This fortune and fame
Everybody's so different
I haven't changed

They say I'm lazy but it takes all my time
(Everybody sing) Oh yeah (Oh yeah)
I keep on going guess I'll never know why
Life's been good to me so far.
Yeah, yeah, year.

Great new tools keep appearing in my toolbox

2005-11-24T00:25:00.000-08:00

Werner Trotter pointed me to RollYO, a service for running your own selctive search engines. His Edutrain RollYO searches, for example

* grayharriman.com
* mcgeesmusings.net
* ottergroup.com
* downes.ca
* elearnspace.org
* elearning-reviews.org
* clomedia.com
* educause.edu
* elearnmag.org
* researchblog.ecornell.com
* elearnopedia.com
* elearningguild.com
* cetis.ac.uk
* distance-educator.com
* elliottmasie.com
* masie.com
* internettime.com
* elearningpost.com
* parkinslot.blogspot.com
* eduforge.org
* e-learningcentre.co.uk
* flosse.dicole.org
* darcynorman.net
* elearningeuropa.info
* learningcircuits.org

Many of these are sites I track on my SuprGlu aggregator, Jay's Eclectic Tastes. I've put Werner's RollYO link in the right column there.

Notes from the underground

2005-11-23T21:24:00.000-08:00

Work is moving right along here in my writer's cottage hidden away in the Abu Dhabi Hilton. My book now tops four hundred pages and that's before adding the graphics.

Michelangelo said the statue was inside the stone. All he needed to do was chip away the superfluous marble to let the statue emerge. I've stuck together a sufficiently massive stone so as of today I'm taking out the chisel, praying that the statue that emerges won't be too avant guard.

At Emerging Elearning, several of us addressed the importance of FlickR as exemplifying not only a nifty way to share photographs, but also as a social networking device, a learning tool, and good entertainment. For the past two days, going to FlickR gets this response:

I notice that this embargo started soon after FlickR posted one of their humorous downtime notices that "FlickR is taking a massage." When the kiddy-porn blockers sees hundreds of thousands of people flocking to a site about massage, the system probably goes on red alert. I wrote to complain and have had no reply, but I imagine my email went directly to the electronic shredder without intervention.

On the other hand, yesterday's local paper covered the news that Bush told Blair he wanted to bomb Al Jarezza, the only television station telling the Arab side of the news in a professional manner. Last night I watched Al Jarezza for a while; it was a lot more interesting than watching The Sopranos with Arabic subtitles. Even joking about obliterating (W's explanation for a leaked memo on this plot) shows our president to be seriously stupid. How would we feel if Osama had blown CNN and a chunk of downtown Atlanta off the map because he felt their news coverage was biased and incendiary?

I believe that humankind is basically good and that the flat world will be a better place to be. It will also highlight our indivdual brands of ignorance. Locking arms in unity will not be a day at the beach.

Emerging Elearning Day 3

2005-11-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

This has been a wonderful day. We completed the circle of our World Cafe by sharing people's contributions with the Minister of Education Sheikh Nahayan.

Me explaining that we had appropriated the cafe concept from Bedouin hospitality.

His Excellency, Paul Mace, moi

These are starter photos. Wherever the sheikh appears, a bevy of professional photographers is grabbing shots. Sitting next to him, I felt like a celebrity at the Oscars. Click, click, click, click. Anyway, I should have enough photos to fill several albums in a day or two.

I'll be in Abu Dhabi another week, focused on writing the Informal Learning book. The last few days in the UAE have been a terrific learning experience for participants, my friends who joined me here, and me. This afternoon I decided that this experience will become a chapter entitled "Conversations."

Everyone I spoke with deemed Emerging Elearning 2005 a success. Videos of major presentations are already up on the conference site. Tomorrow we plan to set up a mail list to keep the flame alive by continuing the conversation we have started.

Blogging live from Emerging Elearning

2005-11-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

Jery Michalski is chair of today's sessions on Lifelong Learning. Jerry asks the audience what they think Lifelong Learning means. A woman with a wonderful Irish lilt to her voice brings up making time for reflection. the head of the woman's college says you don't learn well without knowing your style. The head of the Dubai Women's College thinks LLL depends on curiosity.

Bernie Luskin is our first keynoter this morning. Senge says planning is learning. Bernie's going to fill in the cracks between the previous days' presentations. He'll focus on 10 advances in learning. What's new?

He will use some avant guard language. We're in the communications century. Bernie thinks of the 80s as the era of spreadsheets, the 90s were the decade of the gadget (blinking tie clips, talking earrings); now we're in the communications age, the beginning of the age of communications and programming.

We are digital. Two vital questions: What needs to change? What needs to stay the same?

The "e" is strangling progress with over-reliance on technology. It should stand for exciting, emerging, energetic, exceptional, ephemeral, engaging, elastic, evangelistic.

Curiously for a guy with Ph D in psychology, Bernie says the amygdala is located in the forebrain.

Interrupt! The Australian ambassador takes the stage. He says you couldn't have found a worse speaker to talk about what's coming up. Or anything else for that matter. However, he hopes that we will take everything he says as gospel. Australia has numerous ties with higher education. The University of Western Australia and HCT are announcing a new masters degree program in petroleum technology.

Jerry is taking the stage. He will tell us

some stories of Fiona, Peter, and Joi
Then, three Ps: persistence, power tools, play
Finally 21st century skills

He will focus on informal learning. How do you get along? Emergent phenomena: the use and recombination of things that are there for other purposes.

Nothing beats face to face. Being here trumps any technology. Learning is social. Why do we know so little about it?

Fiona is Jerry's '62 Sunbeam Alpine. Alpine owners mailing list. Detailed instructions answer people's questions about maintenance.

Peter Kaminski: Maven. Low-key guy. He's on a number of the mail lists Jerry subscribes to. When a question pops up, give Peter a few hours and he will find the answer and share it. Mavens (who know a lot and are willing to share), Connectors (who put people together) and Salespeople (who sell ideas) populate Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Jerry''s The Tipping Point, The Social Life of Information, Communities of Practice (how do I find and use them), Bowling Alone (unaffiliation), The Wisdom of Crowds, Achieving Success Through Social Capital, Linked.

Joichi Ito, who lives his live sort of inside out. He leverages technology to do wonderful things. Flickr not only shows your photos. Tags. All sorts. Cats in Sinks. Transparent screen. Bookmarks on del.icio.us. Keep up with a feed on any topic. If you could look over the shoulder of a dozen people....

Joi has a 24-hour tesxt chat. 108 users...late at night. People are there 24/7, even when Joi is not there. You can talk or (privately) whisper. Joi blogs: a lot. Member of ICANN.. Remarkable transparency. Doc: all I'm doing is my email on the web.

Joi in warcraft. Guilds. Playing with social engineering. Joi now
Second life.

Joi knows Peter. These are linked social networks. If you don't put out informatoin on what you're doing, you won't connect. Virtuous circle.

PersistenceUnder the net, it was impossible for an individual to leave something of yourself for others to see. Any person can find a free website and leave behind words, interactions, or code.

Power Tools. Mailing lists. Chat. IM. VoIP. Scfreen sharing . Social networking. Media Sharing. Bookmarks. Video sharing. Podcasts. Screencasts. (tour possibilities). Machinima... (makes the equv of a movie) Blog Search. Weblogs. Feeds. Tagging. Wikis. (which imply trust), Context and Memory Tools, Visualization, Group Productivity. Each of these things come from diffferent worlds. We need to rethink them arounde human preferences, very plastic, task forucsed, Free them from their history.

Play. Hard to bak in fun. Kids want a challenge, not to have everything easy. Just for Fun. Heavy metal umlaut.

Service mashups. Google+Craigs's list. Not done by a realtor. You Tube. Short videos.

21st Century Jobs. Gardeners, facilitators, process experts, graphic facilitators, coarches, guides, researchers, tool trainers, synthesizers, mem extractors. Dan Pink. Right-brain skills are the jobs of the future.

Learning is social, less is more, bias for openness, appropriation is key (reffs on services,k folksonomies) business models lie above the new platform.

Edward Guiliano, President of New York Institute fo Technology

eLearning is so last century. Computers are applicances: ho hum. "I gotta use words when I talk to you," T.S. Eliot.

Tech that create, enable, and empower learning

Great video. Woman hits "carriage return"" and knocks monitor off her desk.

Cultural revolution in Whom we teach, How, Why, What, How we learn.

Emerging eLearning. Live.

2005-11-19T23:37:00.000-08:00

Ellen Wagner is on the stage talking about designing experiences that are useful, usable, and desirable. She told a story of giving a presentation, retrieving a phone message telling her a blogger in the audience disagreed with her data, and telling the audience she knew someone questioned her data. She seemed prescient when noting that someone was disagreeing.

Imagine students fact-checking in real time in the classroom. It levels the playing field between student and teacher. Intellectual parity is on the way.

Note on Jerry Michalski's blog...

I'm in Abu Dhabi at the Higher Colleges of Technology, participating in the eMerging eLearning conference, courtesy of my friend and neighbor Jay Cross.

Next to me is XPlane's Dave Gray, who just blogged about Jay's post about Macromedia's Ellen Wagner, who just told a story about being blogged during a corporate presentation.

Recursive enough for you?

Mobile learning is not elearning on a handheld nor all smart-phones nor games nor always on nor interactive. iPods aren't connected.

People want mobile because we are mobile. There’s too much going on to survive without exchanging information on communications.

From Command & Control to Communicate & Collaborate

Change in pedagogy we've been looking for is being forced by learning imperatives biult on connectedness, communication, creative expression, collaboration, cultural awareness, and competitiveness.

Flash... to improve the world.

Clark Quinn is presenting his pitch on Using Technology to Make Us Wise. Clark's a cognitive designer. "Wise people look out not just for themselves, but for all toward whom they have any responsiblity."

Beyond smart: sensible decisions. Long-term. Commpassionate. Empathetic.

What would a wisdom curriculum look like? We're drowning in information and increasing change. It's tough to copy. "The proper study of mankind is the science of design."

Day One of this conference had a number of highs for me. To begin with, I had the honor of welcoming people to the conference and introducing the leader of the educational revolution, His Excellency the Minister of Education, the Chancelor of the Colleges, the Patron of this Event, Sheikh Nahayan Mabarek al Nahayan from the conference room of the most expensive hotel in the world, broadcast on national television.

The next high was the World Cafe. Relecting the tradition of Bedouin hospitality, where any visitor is welcomed into the tent, served coffee, and welcomed into conversation, our World Cafe, actually tables covered with flipchart pads in the middle of the school library, welcomed academics, Emirati, teachers, administrators, and speakers. Here's Jerry, starting the first cafe.

Participants tell me we unearthed some important themes.

Here's Clark Quinn helping people at the cafe articulate the outcomes.

xPlane is creating a visual to explain and continue the conversation.

Today we used the outcomes of yesterday's World Cafe conversations as input into further dialog.

Here's a peek at the Gala Dinner last night. I may even post some video of yours truly dancing the camel dance. Ellen called a friend in the States who heard the Arab band playing. Cacophony. Her friend said, "That sounds like the Arabian Nights." Ellen said, yes, of course it was.

Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Interactive, demonstrates why device convergence would be handy.

Abu Dhabi Today

2005-11-18T06:31:00.000-08:00

Chez Sheikh

His Excellency Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan

Greetings in the majlis

A sumptuous meal beyond description
Great camel!

The Marina Mall

You want luxury? We got luxury. Rolex to Radio Shack.

Carrefour. You never know when you'll
need a bottle of Evian in the desert.

The video in back was showing wipe-outs in these things.

Taking basic black to a new level.

Educating Ourselves at Emerging Elearning 2005

2005-11-16T12:24:00.000-08:00

Learning in the Real World
By Jay Cross, CEO, Internet Time Group and
Chair, International Steering Committee of Emerging Elearning 2005

“Education is the key to a country's social, technological, political and economic development. It shapes young minds and inspires the entrepreneurial spirit in society. As such, the students of today are the future leaders and we must ensure that they get every possibility of success from our education and training systems.” Dr. Tayeb A. Kamali, Vice Chancellor of HCT

It is easy to confuse learning with school. All too often, we forget that most learning takes place in life, not in the classroom. People learn from doing, and improved performance is the measure of their success.

Focusing too closely on schools leads us to absurdities like America’s “No Child Left Behind” program, which equates learning with passing a test. I hope the UAE adopts more pragmatic goals, for example “Make the Emirates the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.”

Elearning

Seven years ago I made up the term “elearning.” I wanted people to consider the benefit of adding the power of the internet to traditional learning. (Only five years ago, many people thought the internet would never amount to anything!) Some people immediately misinterpreted my concept, thinking I meant training by computer alone. This is nonsense. Elearning provides great support of workshops, discovery, books, mentors, guided practice, and other traditional forms of learning. Relying on the computer alone for education is like building a house using only a hammer as a tool.

At Emerging Elearning, our distinguished speakers will be sharing ideas on what makes for successful education, technological or not. The concept of elearning should expand opportunities, not limit them. We plan to use all the tools available.

Emerging

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. The UAE was in the forefront in naming its conference Emerging Elearning three years ago. Simple, old elearning has combined with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and today’s environment to morph into emergent learning.

Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. Emergence refocuses our thinking on the future. Emergent learning encourages experiment and innovation; elearning fosters incrementalism and complacency.

Emergent learning enables us to push beyond the confines of elearning to explore combinations with informal learning, storytelling, social network analysis, appreciative inquiry, workflow learning, conversation, contextual collaboration, organic KM, simulation, dynamic portals, expert location and blogs.

I am in the midst of writing a book on Informal Learning for Pfeifer press. I am finding Abu Dhabi a tranquil and inspiring place to write. I cannot help but bring models of informal learning to this conference, for example, our world café.

Emerging Elearning World Café

The World Café is not Starbucks. It is a process for fostering conversations that matter. Instead of one-way presentations, a World Café event encourages people to work together. At Emerging Elearning, we aim to draw out the best thinking of both UAE officials and the thought leaders from outside the UAE

We begin with questions.

K-12 Educational Revolution. How does a country design and implement a world-class, standards-based K-12 educational system? What advice can we offer, especially around issues of technology? What new technologies might enable the UAE to leapfrog current systems? Where do we start?

Normally, people spend most of their time at work or at home. Work is a demanding, pressure-packed, rats-in-the-maze race with the clock to get the job done. Home is a comfortable, private space for sharing time with family and individual interests. Neither work nor home, a World Café is a neutral spot where people come together to offer hospitality, enjoy comradeship, welcome diverse perspectives, and have meaningful conversations.

Emirati know this process well. One has only to look at the back of a dirham to see the prominence of the coffee pot in local culture. The tradition of hospitality with coffee dates back to the mists of time. Coffee conversations in the desert have played a significant role in bringing people together for centuries. It is in this spirit that we are convening a World Café in the library of the HCT.

You may wonder if this California concept will work for our purposes in the UAE. The World Café technique is best suited for sharing knowledge and stimulating innovative thinking around real-life issues and questions; the UAE situation fills that bill. The Café is good for conducting an in-depth exploration of key challenges and opportunities; yes, that’s what we want to do. The Café engages people meeting for the first time in authentic conversation; we have not only people meeting for the first time, but they are also Emirati, Italians, Americans, Saudis, Austrians, Brits, Chinese, and Norwegians, among them government officials, professors, vendors, consultants, and school teachers. We have diversity.

We often fail to see the riches in our own back yards. Imagine that conversation is the core process for accessing collective intelligence and co-evolving the future. You would be in good company:

• Gary Hamel writes that “Strategizing depends on creating a rich and complex web of conversations that cuts across previously isolated knowledge interests and creates new and unexpected combinations of insight.”

• Alan Webber writes in HBR that “Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization. In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work…so much so that the conversation is the organization.”

• David Bohm suggested that “there is the possibility for a transformation of the nature of consciousness, both individually and collectively, and that whether this can be solved culturally and socially depends on dialogue.”

• David Cooperrider writes that, “Talk is key to the executive’s work…the use of language to shape new possibilities, reframe old perspectives, and excite new commitments…the active process of dialogue.”

• Tom Atlee says, “Dialogue is the central aspect of co-intelligence.”

• The Dalai Lama has said, “The reality today is that we are all interdependent and have to coexist on this small planet. Therefore, the only sensible and intelligent way of resolving differences and clashes of interests, whether between individuals or nations, is through dialogue.”

These quotations come from a wonderful new book entitled The World Café. In it, Juanita Brown writes, “The World Café reintroduces us to a world we have forgotten. This is a world where people naturally congregate because we want to be together. A world where we enjoy the age-old process of good conversation, where we’re not afraid to talk about things that matter most to us. A world where we’re not separated, classified, or stereotyped. A world of simply greeting, free from technology and artificiality. A world that constantly surprises us with the wisdom that exists not in any one of us but in all of us. And a world where we learn that the wisdom we need to solve our problems is available when we talk together.”

I’m looking forward to engaging in some conversations that matter. Our collective intelligence is greater than our individual intelligence. We have the opportunity to do good work together and enjoy ourselves at the same time. How about a cup of coffee?

Downtown Abu Dhabi from the Corniche

Gulf News

2005-11-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

A change in location can change one's thinking. Life in the Abu Dhabi Hilton is modern, almost Western, in look and amenities, but with enough variations to catch my attention.

The Emirates Palace Hotel down the street is hosting a "Leadership Summit" today with John Edwards, Benazir Bhutto, Richard Branson, Sheikh Nahayan Al Nahayan, and Bill Clinton.

For a mere $3,000, you can attend a two-day event in Dubai later this month with Bill (via satellite this time), Gorby, Madeleine Albright, Arie De Geus, Kenichi Ohmae, and Daniel Pink.

Gulf Business quotes the CEO of new airline Jazeera as saying, "We do not consider ourselves in the airline business; we are in the business of empowering travelers."

Business is good. The Abu Dhabi stock market has risen 75% this year; the Dubai market is up 150%.

Michael Jackson popped up in Dubai yesterday. An online poll by Gulf News found that 47% of the populace did not want him to move here. (34% were in favor.) The News reports rumors that "Wacko Jacko" was spotted at a shopping mall, wearing traditional Emirati woman's clothing as a disguise.

The private sector in the UAE will cooperate closely in facilitating the integratioon of UAE nationals into the job market. A government committee is drawing up a list of corporations that will volunteer their support. The private sector has said that Emirati youngsters lacked experience, were disorganised, asked for high salaries and were not adequately trained.

It's 90 out. Time to get back to writing.

My temporary home in Abu Dhabi

2005-11-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

This is my writer's cottage in the UAE, the Abu Hilton.

Planning the World Cafe event for the upcoming Emerging Elearning conference and a class at the Higher College of Technology.

Good morning Taipei!

2005-11-14T04:30:00.000-08:00

Peter Drucker

2005-11-13T22:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I saw Peter Drucker's photo on the front page of a Chinese newspaper I could not read. I feared the worst. When I reached Bangkok, I confirmed the bad news on the net. Management's greatest spokesperson and teacher has departed for the big boardroom in the sky.

Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilites, Practices hit the shelves a few months before I got my MBA. What awful timing. Unlike the snarky MBA-in-a-box products, this book really delivered. I can't imagine a better foundation for the study of management.

At his core, Drucker believed that people are good. Management's job is to set a direction, make clear to workers what must be done, and free them to do it. Workers are a resource, not a cost. Treating them right releases their energy to achieve breakthrough performance. Long before they became popular, Drucker emphasized customer-focus, worker empowerment, and innovation. Knowledge workers? He made up the term.

I'm in the midst of writing my book on informal learning. Peter Drucker is easily the most profound influence on my thinking.

Summing up yesterday

2005-11-12T06:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's marathon workshop on the future of eLearning was fun. We set up a follow-up wiki with links to other material.

Talking about Web/Learning/World 2.0, we watched the EPIC GoogleZon flick. I managed to squeeze in my visual learning image extravaganza and a ride in the Internet Time Machine. And the Ferris Buhler clip that everyone has seen in the States but was new here.

During the day we played by "California rules," e.g. you must participate. Topics included time inflation, the nature of process, The World is Flat, how networks evolve, the learner life-cycle, a new definition of learning, web 2.0, connecting eLearning to senior management's vision, positioning and marketing eLearning for success, web services & the future direction of IT, examples of bad design, the advantage of conscious evolution over design, visual learning, emotion & learning, and meta-learning. Whew. It was a full day.

Afterward, a reporter from IT home, Taiwan's equivalent to CIO magazine, asked me how eLearning has changed over the years. (eLearning is very big here since it is on the short list of vital initiatives backed by the government). I was curious what would pop out of my tired brain. Changes:

Learning is becoming wedded to the internet.
Today's eLearning is more practical than the original variety (some of which we'd seen in the workshop).
eLearning often comes in chunks. Courses are dead. Pop-ups are more practical.
eLearning is becoming truly personal in that you choose the chunks you want.
eLearning is becoming participatory. You learn with others. They teach you; you teach them.
Intentional communities of practice are being established. Canada's CGI has a technical thought leadership program that looks something like the internet except it's behind the firewall. It relies on RSS to distribute information and an inhouse SourceForge to store intellectual property.

And what's the role of blogs in this? I mentioned Plogs (project blogs) as a way for teams to keep up with complex projects, for example an ERP implementation. A big area, just now coming onstream, is blogs for customer education. Look at Bob Scoble's work at Microsoft. Before blogs, Microsoft was "the evil empire," surrounded by virtually impenetrable walls. Now developers talk with partner developers all the time. Trust is building. It's a night and day difference.

Everything's tied to the collapse of hierarchies into peer networks. The World is Flat, and its organizations become flatter every day.

Tomorrow I'm off to the United Arab Emirates.

A final souvenir:

Class in Taiwan

2005-11-10T01:27:00.000-08:00

Whew! I'm accustomed to one-hour talks. Three hours today seemed to go on forever. Tomorrow's twice as long.

Training tip: Don't try to entertain a Chinese audience with a comedy skit featuring an American telling jokes in a thick Italian accent.

Training tip #2: Don't insert six slides on the news article you read at breakfast the day of the presentation no matter how compelling.

Training tip #3: Remember that outside of Silicon Valley, every audience contains people who have no experience in the blogosphere.

Training tip #4: Cookie cutter solutions don't travel well. Motivation is not a problem here.

Taipei

2005-11-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Taipei this morning: my first trip to Asia. Snapshots. Among the inscrutable photos... more scooters here than in Rome... Chinese breakfast... tallent building in the world.

And day two...

Announcing a new aggregator site

2005-11-06T21:16:00.000-08:00

Jay's Eclectic Interests

Be among the first to see it! (This site is less than an hour old.) Woo-woo XML.

Web 2.0+ SuprGlu

2005-11-06T20:42:00.001-08:00

SuprGlu. You like Stephen Downes's Edu_RSS? It's been my favorite site for years, even though Stephen's code doesn't update Internet Time Blog. SuprGlu, a web 2.0 app if there ever were one, enables you to create your own feed aggregators. I started this about 20 minutes ago, and I love it.

The pitch:

Do you already use services like del.icio.us, flickr, blogger, typepad, etc? SuprGlu is a new way to gather all your content from those sites. In a nutshell, SuprGlu:

gathers your content from popular webservices and publishes them in one convenient place.
presents your content with simple, great looking templates which you can customize.
is FREE to use!

Love that web 2.0

2005-11-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

Where you're coming from.

Being there

2005-11-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had lunch with an amazing man, John Sperling. I worked for John nearly thirty years ago, developing the business program for what morphed into the University of Phoenix. To my delight, I found John to be the same energetic, spunky crusader as before, his energy and interests undiminished by age. We talked about what made the UoP such a runaway success, things like group process, small class size, clear objectives, and faculty as mentor, not instructor. John's vision has shaped the way I see the world more than I'd realized.

I've been writing about technology-assisted learning for eight or nine years now, but talking with John at a table at Il Fornaio in Levi Plaza yesterday reinforced my current belief that there's no substitute for meeting face-to-face. I used to think that super-high-resolution screens and 180º immersive environments would one day make mediated conversation as good as being there. It's certainly hasn't even come close thus far. I'm adding this to my list of informal learning technologies: Being there.

I asked John to what he attributed his journey from a cabin in the Ozarks to revolutionizing higher education. "I was stupid until the age of 19," he told me. When he went to sea, there was no background noise. He overcame his learning disability. In spades. After receiving a doctorate in economic history from Cambridge, he became a professor at San Jose State. Friends thought he was nuts when, in his fifties, he resigned his tenured position to follow his heart and found the University of Phoenix. (Don't think of Phoenix, Arizona. Instead, think of mid-career adults getting a second chance.) Ever since, John has been "doing well by doing good."

(Smokey the wonderdog is sold on this "being there" concept. When I returned from Learning 2005 this week, he camped out in my open suitcase in hopes that would keep me at home.)

Tonight I begin my round-the-world odyssey so I'm somewhat distracted by contemplating what to pack. Nonetheless, I'm thinking about how I learn things. Writing here in the blog is part of it.

After an encounter, like chatting with John, ideas float through my head. I try not to judge them too early. I put them aside for a while. I reflect on them as I sleep. (Might this be the cause of my sleep apnea?) I awake with the new thoughts forming connections to pre-existing mental patterns. At this point, I may craft a blog entry.

All learning is co-creation. When I express myself in the blog, I necessarily have to think about how you see things. Don't get me wrong. I don't mind pissing you off. But I recognize that you wouldn't get much were I just spouting gibberish, so I try to write coherent sentences. Most of the time. This helps me crystalize my thinking, and that sets off another round of pattern formation in my head.

Which is all to say that while being there is vitally important, it doesn't negate the power of technology to leverage individual learning.

Geez. I almost forget the point of this entry. I'm organizing my book on informal learning, and I just realized I'd left out a thread: my story. My story doesn't hold a candle to John's, but it is illustrative. And different. So later today, I'm going to try weaving a thread of my journey through UoP, SmartForce, and the blogosphere into the fabric of the book.

When I downloaded John's and Smokey's photos from my camera, this morning I discovered a batch of photos from Learning 2005 that I'd totally forgotten. Here, for you visual types, are pics of Beth Thomas, Bjorn Brillhart, and the LearningLand community boards:

Parking Enforcement Center

2005-11-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

Kafka lives.

This afternoon's mail included a letter from the "Parking Enforcement Center" in San Ramon that requests I appear in person at the Santa Clara Police Department for an Administrative Hearing on a parking ticket I have been protesting for half a year. The date of my hearing is November 10, and I won't be there because I'm leading a workshop in Taipei that day.

Here's what happened. In May I was visiting a faculty member at the University of Santa Clara. I parked in the University's garage. When I returned to my car after the meeting, I was surprised to find a parking ticket. I went to the booth where I'd gotten parking instructions; they told me to go to the campus police. The campus police said they couldn't do anything; I'd have to deal with the people in San Ramon. I filled out paperwork explaining the circumstances of the ticket, and sent this letter to San Ramon:

May 20, 2005

Parking Enforcement Center
P.O. Box 5010
San Ramon, CA 94583

On May 11, 2005, I picked up a Visitor Permit at the gate of Santa Clara University. The guard told me to park along the ramp or on the first floor.

The ramp was full, so I returned to the first floor and parked in what I presumed to be an okay spot. There was no sign on the wall. See attached photo.

I met with a professor for a couple of hours and was surprised to find a citation on my car. I presumed I had parked legally. On close examination, I found a faded “B” painted on the concrete floor, so I realized I’d made an error.

I certainly did nothing wrong intentionally. I thought I was following your guard’s instructions. I request that you dismiss this citation.

Some time later, I received a form letter that my appeal was turned down. I was not informed why. I followed the procedure challenging the ticket. I sent a second letter.

June 29, 2005

Parking Enforcement Center
P.O. Box 5010
San Ramon, CA 94583

Request for Level 2 Hearing.

On May 11, 2005, I picked up a Visitor Permit at the gate of Santa Clara University. The guard told me to park along the ramp or on the first floor. My Visitor Permit is enclosed.

The ramp was full, so I returned to the first floor and parked in what I presumed to be an okay spot. There was no sign on the wall. I presume you still have the photo I included with my first request for a review.

I met with a professor for a couple of hours and was surprised to find a citation on my car upon my return. I presumed I had parked legally. On close examination, I found a faded “B” painted on the concrete floor, so I realized I’d made an error. The citation is enclosed.

I certainly did nothing wrong intentionally. I thought I was following your guard’s instructions. I request that you dismiss this citation.

Note: Your administrative review did not include the reason for denial that is part of the process described on Santa Clara University’s website. Reference: http://www.scu.edu/cs/Parking%20Citation%20Review.pdf. Note your Correspondence to me dated June 24, 2005.

I enclose a check payable to Santa Clara University in the amount of $40 but do so under protest. Again, I request that you dismiss this citation.

Here's the letter I received today.

The letter says I must call at least five days in advance of my hearing and "If you are unable to appear and do not call your citation will be upheld." Well, I did call. The woman who answers the first phone number listed in the letter told me she doesn't handle that. I should call the 800 number. I did. After listening to voice mail instructions on how to pay by credit card, I was informed the office was closed. I called the last number on the letter, a campus security office of some sort and left a message; I haven't heard back.

Google tells me the "Parking Enforcement Center" processes tickets for Monterey, Orinda, East Bay Regional Parks, CSUC, Carmel, Roseville, Walnut Creek, Sacramento, and other locales.

I feel like I'm being coerced. No one has paid attention to my side of this. Driving to the Santa Clara police station would blow half a day and cost me more than the fine, but rather than pay the $40, I want to register a protest. Are the universities and towns that have handed off parking collections really aware of what's going on? I'm sure it's less taxing for them to tell people who feel they have been treated unfairly "You'll have to take that up with San Ramon" rather than listen to their stories.

While Googling the Parking Enforcement Center, I came upon this item from The San Mateo Times.

For example, there's a parking ticket my wife got when she was at UC Santa Cruz. The parking signs on the lots were very confusing. First we tried to protest the tickets through the mail, but they were only accountable to themselves. So then we went on the Internet and sent them an e-mail, and we copied the chancellor of the university and the state Attorney General's Office, and we got the ticket reversed. That was a simple case of standing up for your rights.

The Parking Enforcement Center doesn't list an email address, but I'll be sure to copy the Attorney General and the president of the University of Santa Clara about this if it goes any further.

Another Google item:

U.S. Audiotex files for IPO

U.S. Audiotex Corp. of San Ramon filed for an initial public offering. The company provides electronic payment options to government entities, enabling consumers to use their credit cards to pay, by telephone or through the Internet, federal and state income taxes, sales and use taxes, property taxes and fines for traffic violations and parking citations.

It seems that U.S. Audiotex became Official Payments, and in 2002, Official Payments became a wholy owned subsidiary of Tier Technologies. Tier trades on NASDAQ. Firms like Tier file quarterly statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A few statements from recent filings:

We target industry sectors where we believe demand for our services is less discretionary and is likely to provide us with recurring revenue streams through long-term contracts. The forces driving the need for our services tend to involve federal- or state-mandated services, such as child support payment, collection and disbursement, as well as a fundamental shift in consumer transaction preferences, such as the increased substitution of electronic payment methods for cash or paper checks.

Some revenues are derived from "fees charged as a percentage of dollars processed." Hmmm. How would you feel going to traffic court if you knew the judge got a cut of the amount he fined you? Other items of note:

In October 2004, Tier was awarded a five-year $85 million contract by the State of Michigan Child Support State Disbursement Unit.

During the three and nine months ended June 30, 2005, net revenues increased $8.9 million and $19.7 million, respectively, over the same periods last year.

I see that one of Tier's directors went to the same B-School as I. I'll drop him a note before going full bore on this issue.

In the meanwhile, has anyone else suffered an injustice at the hands of these guys? Leave a comment or drop me a note.

Around the world in 27 days

2005-11-04T15:26:00.000-08:00

Five minutes after midnight this Sunday, I board a plane that will take me around the world in the next 27 days. Don't bother to call (except Skype and GoogleTalk) until early December.

I hope to come home with a nearly complete manuscript of my book. It's still changing shape almost daily but the structure is beginning to make its appearance. Here's today's cut:

Informal, connected, learning 2.0

2005-11-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

Today Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and I had an hour-long dialog about the future of learning. You can hear it via Breeze.

George Siemens

2005-11-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

George and I talked about Connectivism, informal learning, and whatever popped up on EdTech Talk this afternoon. (mp3 file).

Web Two Point Oh!

2005-11-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Web Two Point Oh!

Create your own Web 2.0 Company

Find a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!

Samples:

cellphone-based television on the desktop
web-based dating via email invite *only*
greasemonkey extension for podcasts via instant messaging
rss-based micropayments via XML
tag-based maps via shockwave
geotag-based textbooks on the desktop
web-based podcasts via Ruby on Rails
geotag-based search engine via bittorrent

Learning 2005 #6

2005-11-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I flew home from Elliott Masie's unconference, Learning 2005, and my body's still on East Coast time. It's 6:30 in the morning here in Berkeley. The world around me is still. Smokey the wonderdog and I are the only ones up, and he's just wandered over to lie on the central heating grate.

My mind is on fire with ideas. Snippets and flashes of Orlando are still in turmoil in my head, seeking connections with life's stored patterns. The mind's post-processing is one reason that evaluation sheets completed immediately upon the close of a session are meaningless. You don't know what will last until patterns have sunk it and connected to your worldview, and experience has determined which ones are keepers.

I can already tell that I learned a whale of a lot at Learning 2005, more from the participants than from the on-stage talent. For the last month, I've been stewing about whether one can take advantage of informal learning one step at a time or whether the transition requires a sea change in our thinking. I've been of two minds on this.

On the one hand, organizations can profit immediately from applying the techniques described in Informal Learning. Building a great informal learnscape increases revenue and innovation while diminishing cost and bureaucracy.

On the other hand, a piecemeal approach will never spark organizational transformation. Getting the most out of a broader definition of learning requires unlearning the vestiges of the way we're accustomed to interpreting the world.

Throughout Learning 2005, I saw people struggling to force-fit new ideas into old frameworks. How can I add some informal learning to our formal learning? How can I measure informal learning with my LMS? How can I insure that they learn what they need to? Can't our competency management system run things? “Incrementalism is the enemy of innovation,” said Nicholas Negroponte. You can't retrofit all the new innovations to last year's model.

Events are to learning as snapshots are to world travel. People have left the hotel Coronado but ideas and relationships that began there continue on. The memes of the event are propagating. Participants are trying new concepts on for size back home. An on-line scrapbook of photos and presentation highlights perpetuates memories and continues to spark new ideas. Learning 2005 is a process, the time in Orlando was the middle, and traces of it will always remain.

Learning 2005 is part of a larger whole. You can't remove the Coronado or the greasy food at the Pepper Market or Elliott or you, the participant, or the mental baggage you brought with you and have the same deal. It's all one bucket of stew. In spite of forewarning, some people thought they had signed up for just another conference. Their three-day experience bore little resemblance to mine. Many were uncomfortable with the flexibility, the alternatives, and the margin for confusion, compared to their expectations. Some griped about anything unconventional but I sense the poor folks always drink from a half-empty glass.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as are effectiveness, value, enthusiasm, brilliance, opportunity, and the softness of the pillows. I became a different person at Learning 2005, and I hope to wake up a new person every day. This morning I am a revolutionary. To learn is to be. Change requires a new way of being in the world.

Learning 2006. Extreme makeover. Join the instructional designer witness protection program. Be all that you can be. Do your part to make the universe all that it can be, too.

A hour later.

We revolutionaries get no respect. While my chats on informal learning have generally drawn rave reviews, I just got a note from ASTD that they don't want to hear it.

November 2, 2005

Dear Jay Cross:

Thank you for submitting a proposal to present at the 2006 ASTD International Conference & Exposition scheduled for May 7-10, 2006, in Dallas, Texas, USA. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept the following proposal:

Proposal Title: Informal Learning for Free-Range Learners and Frustrated Training Executives

Track: Performance Improvement

Format: Concurrent Session

If you submitted more than one proposal, you will receive an individual email notification for each proposal.

As you can imagine, we receive many more proposals than we can accommodate. The competition is stiff and it is difficult to choose from so many outstanding entries. The Program Advisory Committee is composed of individuals from the field who carefully review each proposal. ASTD Education staff also review each proposal to ensure that we accomplish ASTD’s primary goal to create a conference program that meets the needs of our audience and provides a balance and diversity of topics, speaker credentials, and issues.

You may have received an email on September 30 advising you that ASTD was considering one of your proposals pending confirmation of speaker availability and session space at the Dallas Convention Center. Unfortunately, due to space constraints we were not able to accommodate all proposals under consideration. If there are session cancellations, we will look first at proposals already submitted to find an appropriate substitute and we may be in contact with you to fill such a vacancy.

We certainly appreciate your time and interest in submitting this proposal and hope that you will join us at the Conference. The learning and growth that occur at an ASTD Conference go well beyond the educational sessions, and we invite you to contribute to the informal peer exchange and learning that take place outside of the structured presentations.

We also hope that you will consider submitting again for the 2007 Conference. The “Call for Presentations” for 2007 will be posted on the ASTD Website, www.astd.org, in April 2006.

Thank you, again, for considering our Conference and we look forward to seeing you in Dallas.

Best regards,

Victoria Jones
Chair, Program Advisory Committee

Linda David
Manager, Conference Programming

Of course, maybe they'd seen Will Thalheimer's remark that "Although sometimes I find Jay's ideas completely nuts, I like his work because it pushes against our old boundaries and forces us to rethink what we're doing. Jay is a collector of ideas and inspirations. In fact, his talk got me thinking about informal learning and how to make sense of what it is and what it can do for us." If it takes acting nutty to help people open themselves to new ideas, I'll throw a fit for them.

Learning2005 #5

2005-11-01T16:01:00.000-08:00

On the walk home

Monday

Vice Admiral Moran is describing the competency management system of the U.S. Navy. I heard this pitch at the eLearning conference sponsored by George Mason University and Defense Acquisition University last year.

The former CNO, who set this project in motion, must have told his people to use MBA-speak to describe what they are doing. The talk is peppered with words like “connection to the top line”, “merger,” “human capital,” and “our business.” The “five-vector model” creates a “resumé” for every sailor. The admiral could benefit from reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. This strikes me a show time, okay for initial shock value but boring after a short while.

I’m beginning to filter what I’m experiencing here as old-school or new-school. Last night Elliott talked about the excitement of the new school approach, but then talked at us for two hours. Granted, there were interviews interspersed, but audience involvement was little. At one point, Elliott said, “I’ve lost control,” missing the point that the future entails getting control by giving control. Old ways die hard. This morning’s session is more interviews, less Elliott: an improvement, but still the sage(s) on the stage.

Tuesday
Oh what a beautiful morning. (It's pouring outside at the moment. I decided to pass on MGM Land.

This was the third or fourth time I’ve heard Malcolm Gladwell, and he’s getting better every time. People think they are autonomous. However, a lot of behavior is determined by context, by environment.

Blink – a police officer behaves differently when alone and when in a group. Many of the mistakes are made in groups. Keep him alone to bring out the best. Change the context, change the behavior.

If they could change anything about schools, they should eliminate the teacher’s room: where they vent and gripe. Better to put them in the cafeteria where they talk one to one.

How am I different in terms of how I respond to the environment I am part of?

Next: what subtle differences between us will impact the way we structure the future?

Statue at the Getty. The kairos. Takes two ways of thinking to evaluate. Analysis didn’t spot a fake in 14 months of effort; artists recognized the forgery for what it was immediately. Best decisions come from both ends of the spectrum.

Thin slicing. Rapid judgments. We all do it all the time. Tigerrun. Experts are thin-slicers. With experience, the decision-making process moves inexorably from conscious decision-making to unconscious “intuition.”

Driving. Why don’t we have accidents all the time? Why do teenagers have a 100x accident rate? They can’t thin slice. Teenage brain is crawling. Make the car safe? No. Train the driver to be safe.

Day in the life of Malcolm. Fairly haphazard, by design. Constantly trying ideas on for size. Have several continuing interests. Just kind of walk around. Take notes. Wander around the stacks in the library.

Messy desk is a judgment from someone who doesn’t understand your learning style. If it’s your desk, you know where everything is.

Same hiring process doesn’t work for all jobs. If first impression is most important, make decisions on basis of first impression. If candidates never meet the public, you may not want to meet them at all. Screening future professors puts them in a high-risk, high-pressure situation (the mock lecture), yet this is just what they are seeking to avoid by becoming professors. In selection, one size does not fit all.

Information glut. Take, for example, a doctor. Specialize ad infinitum? Eventually people start to max out. The loss of the generalist means no one sees the big picture. It’s hard for anyone to have a unified strategy. There’s a threshold where additional information leads to dysfunctional behavior. Give someone more choices on their 401K, and they shy away from the whole deal (which is not in their best interest.)

One of humankind’s biggest problems in decision-making is that assigning the wrong weights to the variables. Anything that can help us assign better weights is worth doing. If I have an ethical system, I have a way of assigning those weights. It clarifies how we make our decisions.

When should we trust our intuition? Is there a method to assess how confident we should be about what we intuit? On the road, we intuit well because we have lots of experience. A mother’s intuition is acquired. At first she relies on books; by child number three, she just knows.

Elliott is selling off the inflatable furniture from LearningLand. $20 gets a sofa; $10 a chair.

Steve Johnson, John Abele, Malcolm Gladwell all on stage.

SJ: On the web, zooming out. You look at a restaurant page. Then you zoom out to see what other people are saying. Technorati, Del.icio.us, make it possible to look at things you couldn’t find before.

SJ: Games know how proficient you are.

SJ: Attention-space of users in user interface design.

Geez, Steve is in high-bandwidth mode.

JA: Democratization of knowledge. Institutions can no longer hoard knowledge.

MG: Medicine is so invested in the closed system that once worked fine. When medicine ceased to deliver, this became problematic. We’re going to have to choose another way. If they’re not willing to keep up and to learn, we have to junk them.

SJ: Stacks in the library? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

MG: The interesting person doesn’t know what’s interesting about her. I have to have a conversation….

EM: Who’s the teacher? What’s a tipping point? (Table discussions.)

JA: The ability to lose control.

SJ: EPCOT. Felt closer to the 19th century than the 21st. This would be insane to a 10 year old. The media these days knows something about you and reacts that way.

EM: U.S. is becoming less the center of the universe.

MG: Fundamentally redefining the social contract between people and their employers. It used to be about “benefits.” They’re not going to take care of us any more.

MG changes into Marshal Goldsmith.

Marshal… Coach helps successful leaders do what they do better. Malcolm’s a Buddhist. I don’t deal with the past at all. I am focused 100% on the future.

Every night I get a call. I do it to keep it in my head. How happy was I today? I know how hard it is to change.

Your dream. “I’m incredibly busy right now. I feel as busy as I ever have. Sometime my life is a little out of control. The worst will be over in four or five years. I’ll begin my healthy lifestyle and everything will be okay.”

Learn as much as I can. Help as much as I can.

No feedback about the past. Only ideas for the future.
No judgment about the future.

Mark Oehlert and I talked about the structure of this event. It’s open, as in open source. Everyone is providing feedback. The Masie Center will be able to craft a better Learning2006 as a result. They will not only leapfrog into top position, they will also have what it takes to remain there.

Linda English learns that if you schmooze with Wayne, you gotta be fast.

Breakout Sessions.

I jumped from one session to another.

What do learning managers really manage?
“Informal” means breaking into small groups to these folks.

Asking questions of participants before session starts.
• Better define your own role
• Stare experiences, broaden understanding
• Scope of what we manage
• Beyond management to leadership

Approach is to post five questions, e.g.
• Organization throws things at her that they “shouldn’t.” What should be managed that is not?
• How do we coach others to become LMs?
• What is your job description?
• What does it mean to be a learning manager?
• Does internal/external hiring matter?

Other Sessions
Vendors almost universally presented PowerPoint (a no-no) sales presentations (another no-no) to people lined up in rows (doesn’t promote informality). If the vendor community doesn’t change with the times, the times will break them.

Question: What would you do differently about Learning 2005?
1. Peanuts and beer in the LearnLand.
2. More clarity around role of facilitator.
3. Segment sessions into beginner and veteran.
4. More give and take in the main-stage events.

What's wrong with this picture. (The layout discourages interaction.)

Informal session…
Dick Sethi, Organic Leadership
Larry Israelite, director of strategic learning, Pitney Bowes

This is a discussion… the wisdom of the crowd.

We will break into small groups to discuss. Get back together to report. (This is the new formal informal.) However, we never got into groups, preferring a whole-group discussion.

Dick: How to combine formal and informal for optimal results? Dose of each.

Larry: Here as resident crank. We spend too much time with things we know nothing about. Learn by doing = haphazard learning. Trade-off of serendipity vs. danger of propagating mal-memes.

Lots of Q&A. Lack of structure? How to balance? Sometimes the payoff is in hindsight. The LMS should track whether you use it after the fact, whether or not you apply it and grow from it.

Don’t call it learning.

People are people, not objects under the control of HR.

Self awareness, EQ, reflection.

Intentional. This session never came back to the questions we started with. Informal need not mean inattentive.

HR/training people seem to feel they’re in control of people’s lives. We have lives outside of work and learning.

Proton Media Session
The e-Sociology of Learning.

Opposites are not contradictory but complementary. Niels Bohr.

Elliott avatar wandering around Protosphere →

Use the media they know—Warcraft, Sims, TurboTax, etc. (I’d been thinking of this as an advantage of my “Internet Inside” concept. We shouldn’t be forcing people who know how to use a browser entirely new interfaces.)

[Just for you: Two molecules are walking down the street. One says “Oops I think I lost an electron.” The other: “Are you positive?”]

Ron Burns: Not all games the same at all. Learning is a primal response for survival. We are a tribe. (Don Clark pointed out that “learning may be natural,” but it’s not normal for boys to learn algebra.)

Gaming puts you in a world. “All we do is make games that sell.” We’re competing for attention.

Protosphere is a game-like multi-learner platform. A first-person portal that sits above the LMS.

Our awsome participant pick-up rock band. Video to come shortly.

Back to the main tent

Learning2006 November 5-8 Orlando

Gerry, a sophmore at RIT and but 19 years old, has become our folk hero.

Consortium: $5000 membership per company. Comes with two tickets to LearningLand. 191 companies are members.

UPS: how do you know people are ready?

Nano-learning. How do you offer a 90-second module? How do design for this? Take a look at a 30-second commercial. (The event photographer and I talked about learning to take photos. Feedback from digital pics is immediate.)

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Bobby’s eldest daughter.

Wayne
Just right is in the eye of beholder. It doesn’t mean perfect. Wayne has become our philosopher and oracle, the answerer of hairy questions.

Content is powerless on its own.

Elliott
Told textbook publishers to give away the books. Sell the yellow highlights.

Tomorrow morning I'm out of here, so this will be my last post from Orlando. Elliott intends to keep the conference site & wiki open all year, including hundreds of photos, so you won't lack for sources if you want to track this event.

Learning 2005 #4

2005-10-31T12:54:00.000-08:00

My session this afternoon on informal learning was packed with enthusiastic people. It was fun. For once, I followed my own advice, thinking about what the audience wanted rather than what I wanted to present. This was my first presentation in longer than I can remember that used no PowerPoint. It improved the flow. Things felt more spontaneous -- because they were.

Learning2005 #3

2005-10-31T07:33:00.000-08:00

Photos from last night. I'm to busy to tell you what's up. Add your own captions.

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Learning 2005 #2

2005-10-30T18:42:00.000-08:00

Learning 2005 opening night

A country/zydeco band is belting out tunes in the big ballroom. There are about 1200 people (wild ass guess) here with me. I snared a seat at the only table up front without a Reserved sign. It’s me, Judy Brown, some ADL guys, and Deepak Sethi, a SHRM SVP who shares my interest in informal learning.

Elliott gets into it. Learning 2005 is a little bit different. We’re going to have lots of conversations, discussions, arguments, a variety of folks, citizen journalism, voting, liquid learning. We’re going to mix it up. The folks backstage don’t have a sequence to follow. We’re going to make Malcolm Gladwell blink; we’re going to tip him over.

Everything here is about extreme learning. That’s one standard deviation away from your comfort zone. Small group chat: Do you allow yourself to fail? Some will succeed; some will fail. I mention that complexity theory gives me solace: it ain’t my fault. It’s those damned complex adaptive systems at work.

We cut on our LearnBeam response devices. What’s your opinion? One third strongly agree, one third strongly disagree, and the remainder are neutral.

Avery Lerner, an avatar, comes on screen and spars with Elliott. He instructs Avery to call out whenever anyone uses jargon.

Extreme Learning. Times are way faster, more challenging and more confusing. Extreme Learning deals with higher velocity; we can’t afford to take 18 weeks to develop a program. We’ll talk about personalization. Google is responsive, PowerPoint not. We want scalability. We’ve been training the competent and available; the incompetents never make it to the session. We’re going through different generations of learners.

We’re going to look out of the box. Find two people you do not know. Talk about what we have to do to deal with the next generation of learners. John Abele and I talked about changes in the world. He said that if people understood more about risk, they would act more sensibly about their health. I replied that I thought the world was changing: the industrial age is over. The power comes as people learn to learn. Elliott asks people to sit down; they don’t. John and I conclude that Elliott’s just experienced a learning moment.

19 year old Masie employee: I enjoy learning stuff by doing it. IM is real time; email is not.

Awards. Elliott pointedly says he doesn’t charge an entry fee. (Take that, Brandon.) He simply looks for exemplary apps and good causes. CNN, eLearning for Kids, Tiger Woods Learning Foundation.

John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific, takes the stage. (Tulane Medical Center slipped a couple of Boston Scientific stents into my arteries after my heart attack in New Orleans last March.) Introducing non-invasive surgery required creating new infrastructure, learning, political support, etc.

Want to try a medical case study. How would you want your surgeon to be trained? I liked having a doctor who had not only done this operation but had also trained others. And done research.

A few pics from the Learning Consortium meeting

Back of the head of the CIA's CLO

"Extreme" Mark Oehlert and the LearnLand environment set up in Second Life.

The avatar enters.

The Learning Marketplace

A discussion within LearnLand on business processes.

You need to do this to grok it.

Learning 2005

2005-10-29T21:17:00.000-07:00

Coming to you live from the Coronado Hotel in DisneyWorld. I'm tapping the keys at one of a hundred PCs in the middle of "Learning Land," the hub of this year's Learning 2005 conference. Elliott and Stan are whipping around on Segway scooters. There are maybe sixty of us in Learning Land at the moment but the room's so big it feels empty.

Learning Land. Certainly a grounded metaphor for our networked world. Land is so passé. Given that TomorrowLand, FantasyLand, AdventureLand, and the like have an established tradition here, I guess it's okay.

Surrounding the PCs in this immense room are "pods," chairs grouped around giant flipchart boards. Each pod is intended to seed a community or special interest group. Eileen Clegg has drawn starter graphics to get people thinking. (I've already added my scribbles to a few of these.) Chairs and tables are spread about to foster conversation. It will be fun to watch the communities grow when the crowd shows up later today.

Beth Thomas welcomed me at the door to Learning Land. It's all about networking, she said. How true. You can look at what's going on here online as never before possible, but the real action is face-to-face.

Check Mark Oelert's blog for his take on things -- and links to the blog, wiki, schedule, and so on.

Previous years at the Coronado on this blog:

Nostalgia. 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004

Less glamorous, but also 1998 & 1999

Time warp: the 2000 program

Games

2005-10-29T19:59:00.000-07:00

There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
The finite game is played for the purpose of winning,

an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play,
...and bringing as many persons as possible into the play.

Finite players play within boundaries;
infinite players play with boundaries.

Jame Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Attack of the blogs!

2005-10-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

The cover story of Forbes begins "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective."

Forgetting that perhaps there's an upside to a blogosphere that's growing at the rate of one blog a second, Forbes describes faux-blogs that companies use to trash competitors and sneaky investors use to drive down stock prices.

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory.

Some companies now use blogs as a weapon, unleashing swarms of critics on their rivals. "I'd say 50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors," says Bruce Fischman, a lawyer in Miami for targets of online abuse. He says he represents a high-tech firm thrashed by blogs that were secretly funded by a rival; the parties are in talks to settle out of court.

Forbes points to a real problem: libel from anonymous sources. However, their reporter tells a goofy tale, for he generalizes as if all bloggers were cut from the same cloth. This is like trashing people who use pen and paper because some use them to write ransom notes.

Gearing up for the Mouse

2005-10-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

Saturday I fly to Orlando to attend Elliott Masie's new gig at DisneyWorld. Advance notice includes a map of how other attendees match your interests, jobs, etc.

Geek get-together in Berkeley

2005-10-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

From Dave Winer's blog:

Berkeley geek dinner, Monday October 24

We're having a geek dinner in Berkeley on Monday evening, to honor our guest from up north, Robert Scoble. Where/when: Fellini's, 1401 University, Berkeley, CA. Limit of 25 people, it's possible more may squeeze in. These digerati showed up en masse. I remember chatting with
Scott Beale, Tom Conrad, Michael Arrington, Sylvia Paull, Matt, Scoble, Scott Rosenberg, Alex Bard, Raines Cohen, Dave Winer, Steve Gillmor, Enric, Kevin Burton, Marc Canter, and Lance Knobel.

For a while I was sandwiched between Dave and Scoble, with Marc booming away on the other side of Scoble. Scoble is a delightful character, always energetic, smiling, and apolitical. I asked if he still tried to keep up with 1200 blogs. No longer -- he reads RSS feeds via Memeorandum.

Michael Arrington's TechCrunch, which I began reading after meeting Mike at BAR Camp, says Memeorandum is changing the way people look at the web. Imagine a realtime combination of Google's link ranking, Del.ic.ious's tag reporting, and Technorati's popularity contest. TechCrunch says Memeorandum is changing the web.

Memeorandum finds blog posts, newspaper articles and press releases that are being heavily linked to in near real time and puts them up on the site. The position and size of the headline is indicative of its importance (determined by number of links and other factors, such as how much people are writing about the linked content). The higher up and bigger the headline, the more important it is. And linking sites, the conversation, are clustered underneath the headline.This means you can find out in near real time what is important in technology (or politics), how important it is, and who’s talking about it. If you then post on the subject, you will be linked into the discussion as well.

Alex Bard described Goowy to a few of us standing at the bar. Accounts are free. I tried Goowy later in the evening. It's as if Microsoft Outlook were webified and simplified. Also, Goowy runs on the desktop or on the web, so you can always keep it with you. This could be ideal for my upcoming travels. I plan to play with it.

I was chatting with Steve Gilmor and Scott Rosenburg when Dave came by. Steve asked about Dave's current Archos multimedia PDA. Dave pulled this gizmo out of his pocket and said, "I've got an idea. Let's do a podcast." Then he put his arm between me and Steve & Scott, saying "Just you two." Scott and I hung out for a little bit; his book is due a month before mine and we talked about the importance of quiet time. Paul Montgomery blogged excerpts of the podcast. Documentation takes care of itself when you're having fun.

Steve Gillmor: John Perry Barlow said Cheney was one of the two smartest people he ever met.
Dave: What does that say about John Perry Barlow?

Dave: I read Nicholas Carr's thing, and for once I agreed with Tim O'Reilly. It's like: "Fuck you Nicholas Carr, who the fuck are you?" I even posted as much in his comments. I thought bloggers, we were going to at least try not to turn into the whores of the mainstream media. Present company excluded, of course.
Someone: We're in the grey zone.
Dave (laughing): I say that with all due respect.
Someone: And love!

Julia (a waitress): Anybody need sugar?
Dave: We need to get you to sign a release, because we're doing a podcast right now. Would you like to say hello to anybody, because it's actually recording?
Julia: OMG!
Dave: What's your name?
Julia: I'm Julia.
Dave: Would you like to say hi to your mother?

The assorted digerati then proceed to grill Julia (who is mostly off-mic) on her knowledge of Web 2.0 technologies.

This is a very friendly, convivial group. Face-to-face networking is intense. Information exchange is intense. A session like this is open to anyone who shows up, but in the main it's the blogging/web 2.0 hot shots who participate. Many faces were familiar from Gnomedex 5 and BAR Camp. With a few exceptions, everyone joins in sessions like this on an even footing.

Tom Conrad and I talked about a rare quality of openness and sharing that pops up at events like this. No more secrets. We can talk without signing non-disclosure agreements. None of the old cut-throat attitudes toward competition. I said it reminded me of the idealism of the sixties, when a whole generation felt like brothers-in-arms. We're all in this together, man. In hindsight, I recognize that geek dinners convene a community of practice. Software designers, entrepreneurs, publicists, and inventors come together, converse, joke, swap stories, describe what they're doing, and then amplify their conclusions on the tom-toms of the internet.

Scott Beale took photos of the evening. His shots are a lot better than mine, so that's what you see above.

The messages of the Cluetrain are played out in these gatherings. Authenticity. Openness. This variant yells out, "Communities of practice are conversations." F2F roolz.

Movie Reviews

2005-10-23T22:24:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, the family went to see Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-rabbit. Hilarious and superb. A review in the NY Times had credited Gromit with the most expressive face in film. They were right, quite a feat for a blob of clay with marbles for eyes.

Good Night and Good Luck , shot in black & white and cigarette smoke, is a powerful reminder of McCarthy and the Commie hunts, the fifties equivalent of Karl Rove. Where is this decade's Edward R. Murrow?

I'll admit it: I'm a David Cronenburg fan. In Existenz, people port a virtual reality game directly into their central nervous systems and can't separate reality from the game. Crash was a weird little number where people get off on intentional car wrecks. And I'll never forget the scene in The Fly where Jeff Goldblum calls on his fly-strength when arm wrestling and breaks the other guy's hand off at the wrist. Cronenburg's latest, A History of Violence is pointless. The few action scenes are so fast you almost miss them. I don't know why they bothered to make this one.

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George Siemens & Connectivism

2005-10-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here's where some of my blog's current visitors are from. (Thanks to Harold Jarche for turning me on to Blogflux.) It's a small world after all.

George Siemens has posted a great presentation of his concept of connectivism. Couple this with Stephen Downes' article on eLearning 2.0 and my take on informal learning. The three of us come at the topic from different directions but end up in nearly the same place. We're trying to schedule an on-line conversation to explore our intersections.

I listened to George's presentation this morning. We share a concern that old notions of learning and knowledge try to put boundaries around learning. George points to the use of frameworks; I despair of limiting potential through closed design. George opens the boundaries by redefining learning as creating connections. I define learning as adaptation to change. We both say "the knowledge is out there," not just in a learner's head.

Stephen calls for eLearning 2.0 that parallels Web 2.0. By all means. A minor quibble: if internet no longer starts with a capital i, it's time to forget the e of eLearning.

Borrowing from both Tom Friedman and Tom Malone, I think the world of learning is becoming flat. Networks evolve from top-down to peer-to-peer. Government evolves from kingdoms to democracies. Corporations go from command and control to commercial ecosystems. The teacher-student model morphs into colleagues with shared interests. Individuals are becoming their own instructional designers and knowledge navigators.

Yesterday Microsoft's Bob Mosher and I took turns addressing the informal learning part of this equation at eLearning Forum. My main ah-ha came from small group discussions after the fact. One individual talked about how her company had dismantled its training department. (Business units could contract for their own compliance training and so forth.) Others discussed how to add informal learning to the overall mix of training activities. Nick Negroponte's observation showed up on my internal billboard: "Incrementalism is the worst enemy of innovation." I think wholesale change is in order and fear that grafting pieces of informal learning into the existing structure is like putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound.

Donald, the woods, $*%&! Cingular

2005-10-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

Donald, where were you when I needed you? My MBA took two years and bushels of hard work. Damn. Attending Trump University, I could have earned 400 MBAs over the course of two years.

In yesterday's email:

"A great education is an essential advantage in business."-- Donald J. Trump

Dear Jay,

Do you want to get an edge in business? Are you interested in making money and saving time?

Then Trump University's brand new live course, "MBA in a Day," is for you.

Update: 10/23/05
Today's New York Times reports that the Donald has been near bankruptcy on a couple of occasions, saved only by borrowing from close relatives (and pledging his share of his inheritance as collateral.)

Sunday I drove the Skyline Drive above the Shenandoah Valley. Wonderful views of the Blue Ridge. (It's really blue.) A great environment enriches my thinking.

Stupid cellphone.

Today I received the third voice-mail spam from Cingular Wireless about how they are going to "improve my service" by making me listen to instructions for changing my inbox settings, re-record my greetings, and lose my previous messages. Actually, the voice online said I could listen to my previous messages by pressing "7," but since Cingular apparently decided to "improve" lots of accounts at once, pressing "7" goes to the message "All circuits are busy now. Please try your call later."

Blackboard + WebCT = new Blackboard

2005-10-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

Paging the Department of Justice...

BlackCT? WebBoard?

Blackboard and WebCT will become one. The new company will be called Blackboard. Blackboard's CEO will lead the new company. WebCT's CEO will become a consultant.

Here's the letter that went out a earlier today to cognoscenti, movers, & shakers:

We are writing you today to directly communicate some momentous news. Earlier today, WebCT and Blackboard signed a formal agreement expressing our intent to merge our companies.

This decision is one that has been made based on careful consideration by both entities. We believe that this union will have a positive impact on the global e-Learning community and on the individual clients of both companies. We want to communicate the rationale behind the merger and to provide some of the early details on what this news means for you.

By leveraging the best of Blackboard and WebCT, we believe we can improve the online learning experience for educators and students worldwide. As a single company, we will bring together some of the brightest, most experienced talent in the e-Learning industry, and we will be uniquely positioned to share and deliver proven best practices to the combined client base. Most importantly, the combined Blackboard and WebCT community of practice will represent the largest and most comprehensive network of e-Learning practitioners in the world. We will work diligently to bring this community together to broaden access to shared expertise, reusable technologies, faculty and developer networks, and to promote exemplary course programs.

The combined company will continue to develop, innovate, upgrade, improve and support both Blackboard's and WebCT's products, WebCT Vista and WebCT Campus Edition, and Blackboard Academic Suite and Blackboard Commerce Suite. Following the merger, the combined company will be actively engaged in industry standards efforts. We will develop common, standards-based APIs, based on Building Blocks and PowerLinks, that will allow the existing product lines to interoperate with one another as well as provide a means for clients of both Blackboard and WebCT to share their applications, innovations and experiences with the global client community. Over time, the combined company will incorporate the best features and usability characteristics from the two product lines into a new, standards- based product set.

While we are eager to realize the benefits of combining our clients' collective expertise and designing future solutions, we remain overwhelmingly focused on your success today. We will continue to maintain the same level of commitment to support and service level agreements, and there will be no interruption in the service you receive today. As we build this new community, we will maintain and enhance each company's current commitment to advisory boards as well as user groups and mailing lists.

We expect the merger of Blackboard and WebCT to be finalized later this year or early next year, subject to regulatory and other approvals. The combined company will be named Blackboard and will be led by Blackboard's current President and CEO, Michael Chasen. We are pleased that several members of WebCT's executive team will remain with the combined company and join Blackboard's existing executive management team, including Chris Vento as Sr. VP of Technology and Product Development, Peter Segall as Sr. VP of Education Strategy, and Barbara Ross as Sr. VP of Integration Strategy. Karen Gage will be joining the Marketing group as a VP. Carol Vallone, WebCT's CEO, will continue with the combined company as a consultant focused on client relations and strategy. Until the merger is complete, however, each company will continue to operate independently.

In closing, we would like to thank you for your institution's business to date and request your input as we embark on this next phase of e-Learning. Additional information will also be available at www.Blackboard.com/WebCT. In the mean time, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact your current account manager.

...

We look forward to our continued partnership, hearing your thoughts and answering any questions you might have.

Sincerely,
Carol Vallone
Chairman, President & CEO WebCT

Michael L. Chasen
President & CEO
Blackboard Inc.

Comments from a couple of pals:

Could it be that the motivation for LMS consolidation is more a belief that $1 + $1 > $2 , instead of anything directly relating to product attributes, customer opinions, complimentary products/markets or competitive forces (open source, etc)?

Seems really odd Jay. The places I go and the people I meet definitely prefer WebCT to Blackboard. Most believe that Blackboard's technology is inferior. And after getting to know the WebCT management people a little bit during the past year after giving talks at their conferences and having them write a chapter in my book and having met some of the Blackboard people (who have a habit of saying no to any good idea or to say "why don't you put that in our building blocks" even if it hits them smack in the head), I can attest that WebCT people are a much more fun and better managed group of people. And WebCT has become profitable during past couple of years. So this seems odd. Why is Blackboard in charge? The industry is in real trouble now.

Could opensource tools like Sakai and Moodle be forcing such a decision?

Wissenskapital

2005-10-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

Wissenspool - Intellectual Asset Management (IAM)

Measuring Intellectual Capital

von Jay Cross (Internet Time Group)

Wie lässt sich der Wert dessen messen, was sich in den Köpfen der einzelnen Mitarbeiter befindet? Die Einschätzung und Bewertung von intellektuellem und sozialem Kapital sollte eigentlich ein vorrangiges Interesse von Unternehmen sein. Diese wichtigen Aspekte werden allerdings von vielen Managern stark unterbewertet. Führende internationale Bildungsexperten wie Jay Cross von Internettime Group, USA haben sich der Frage verschrieben, wie wir lernen und wie Lernprozesse gemessen und ausgewertet werden können. Er vertritt die These, dass ROI (return on investment) seine Bedeutung verloren hat. In Kooperation mit IBM und ASTD (American Society for Development and Training) wird er auf der ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN 2005 fünf Untersuchungen vorstellen, die eine Antwort darauf geben sollen, was ROI im Bereich (Aus-) Bildungsmanagement ersetzen wird. Der nachfolgende Artikel ist in Englisch - der Verkehrssprache der ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN.

Dear asdf:

2005-10-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

As long-time readers here know, I make 95% of my work available on-line at no cost. Karma makes a better world.

Several thousand people have downloaded the eLearning Action Plan Template from Lance Dublin's and my book, Implementating eLearning.

The original version is a pdf file; soon we're going to make it available as a Word document. Also, my eyes have been opened to the power of informal learning, and this requires a new and different framework for planning.

I'll notify everyone who requested the original eLearning Action Plan when the new material becomes available.

...everyone except the people who tell me their name is asdf, their expectation is asdf, they work for asdf, and so forth. This is akin for paying for something with counterfeit money. The cheats will get what they deserve. Nothing. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

[Note: a-s-d-f are the first four letters on the second letter-row of the keyboard. It's a quick way of putting gibberish in the fields where data is called for. Mr. asdf made two more requests the day I posted this.]

Finland

2005-10-12T12:04:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning I went online at 5:30 am to address an eLearning conference in Helsinki, the Kontakti.Net eLearning Corporate Competence.

Juha-Matti Arola blogged the presentation. There's a Centra (Sentra? Caba?) recording here.

JM's blog itself is a testament to informal learning.

During the event, JM helped me stay in touch with the audience by training a webcam on them so I could see what was going on.

Natural learning

2005-10-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

Late yesterday afternoon I returned home from a two-day executive symposium at the Marconi Center on the shore of Tomales Bay. The topic was right: the future of talent. The process worked: scenario learning meets graphic journalism. The people were great: enthusiastic, open, and ready to embrace change. Instead of the routine three bullet-point fare that oversimplifies our messy world, our discussions were ensued with memes of connections, interrelatedness, and complexity. We were inspired.

Being close to nature added magic to our event. Marconi Conference Center, one-time hub of Marconi's Pacific wireless network, hugs the shore of Tomales Bay. The Bay sits atop the San Andreas fault. We were on the western-most edge of the North American plate. The other side is the Pacific plate, which has been sliding rambunctiously up the California coast on its trip to Alaska for eons. Sir Francis Drake dropped by in 1570 (because the Pacific plate portion, Point Reyes, juts out from the mainland).

Walking from the rooms where we slept to our meeting room just up the hill, we passed quail, hare, and wild turkeys. People's repilian brains house Neanderthal-era fight-or-flight responses, so it's easy to imagine other primeval ties to the nature. Our brains connect to the complexity of nature below the surface of our consciousness. Feeling one with nature frees our thinking.

Nature Deficit, by Richard Louv, presents compelling research that shows that kids taken into the woods to play suffer fewer ADD symptoms than those on playgrounds. In a 2004 study published in the American Journal of Public Health, the laboratory found that children as young as five showed a significant reduction in ADHD symptoms when they engaged with nature.

Making the case

2005-10-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from a new IBM white paper entitled Learning: A vital ingredient for successful business transformation

Making the case for learning

Imagine a cereal maker telling workers to fill every box only halfway to the top because it needs to cut costs. The situation is absurd because it would come back to haunt the company in short order.

Now, imagine a senior executive telling her transformation team to chop back on training because she’s got to cut costs. That’s clearly viewing learning as an expense rather than an essential business component to help ensure the success of the transformation. Yet it happens all too frequently. Why?

Training is easy to overlook or short-change if it’s viewed as just a number. But the consequences of cutting it become apparent when you think about what you’re proposing to eliminate.

Which of the three areas that we’ve illustrated would you be prepared
to do without?

People who believe (“heart”) in your company’s transformation and embrace the change; project managers who automatically do the right thing because they have internalized the new business vision
Workers who understand (“head”) the project and know what to do
People who can operate (“hands”) the new system to support your business with ease

Chances are, you can’t afford to give up any of these key elements. Learning is a vital ingredient to optimizing the success of your transformation. Learning will support the initial transformation and long-term, sustained innovation from your efforts. Learning will help ensure that people have the right skills, tools and mindset to propel your transformation forward. Furthermore, effective learning accelerates the adoption of new technology and processes—getting your employees up to speed faster, and speeding ROI. And learning helps foster the culture change required for successful transformation, and it is an integral component of effective human capital management.

The Intelligent Design of learning

2005-10-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Maybe this is a thought crime, but the meme that's propagating in my head this morning is that instructional design will once again mimic software design. (Where do you think those human performance flowcharts came from anyway?) Read this article about lightweight software development and the surge toward Web 2.0.

Now, let me indulge in some cut-and-paste thinking. Modify the article by substituting instructional or instruction for software, and Cross for Fried. Here's what you get.

Traditional instructional development is expensive, resource-intensive, and born of a Cold War mentality, Cross said. His advice is to "think about one-downing, instead of one-upping, and underdoing-competitors" –beating them with less.

According to Cross, in the era of lightweight apps and simple products you need less money, people, time, abstractions and instruction.

Cross believes that money mostly buys salaries and you only need three people–a designer, programmer and utility player, which he calls a "sweeper." The feature set should be scaled for the headcount. Having less time is also an advantage. "You spend time in unproductive meetings and overanalyzing the product. Less time forces you to spend less time on better things," Cross said.

He suggested 30 hours per week per person, which "forces you into building better products and being creative with your time." And, if you have less time, you have less time to think about abstractions, such as functional specification documents, which Cross characterized as a waste of time. "Instead, build the product and start from the user interface customer experience first; then wrap with the technology," Cross said. "The interface screens are the functional specification."

Finally, building less instruction means fewer features, less documentation, minimal support and less confusion in selling the product. "Less instruction is key to building very specific tools. There are a million simple problems to solve with less. Competitors solving complicated ones are most likely to fail," Cross said. "For Web-based instruction there are plenty of simple problems to pick from and you can nail."

The more I dig into how people learn, the more convinced I become that we've been trying to do things the hard way. We used to think our job was designing instructional systems. I'm beginning to think we're nurturing the evolution of learning experiences.

Instructional design tries to fix things that are broken. It begins with assessing what's wrong, "gaps," and leads to developing grandiose, cure-all solutions. Learning evolution begins with what you've got and nurtures incremental improvement.

We see the same sort of issue on the front page of our newspapers. One the one hand, some people believe a master designer released Earth 1.0 about six thousand years ago. Others folks believe Earth beta has been evolving for billions of years; it's a web without a weaver.

Do you believe in the intelligent design of instruction or the evolution of species of learning?

Next up: Instead of "the network is the computer," think "the network is the brain."

Learning 2.0 || Web 2.0

iPod, iLearn, iSell

2005-10-06T17:54:00.000-07:00

CLO October

Podcasting: Broadcast Your Organization’s Knowledge
Jay Cross

Recent advances in information technology, such as podcasting, will profoundly impact knowledge management, corporate training, and in-house communication. Just as blogging gave us all a personal printing press, podcasting gives us an inexpensive, personal broadcasting studio. Subscribers can download short radio shows to their iPods or MP3 players. Microsoft recently threw its weight behind the open-source software that makes all this happen. We’ll soon reach the tipping point.

Before long, an executive or expert will be able to record or telephone in an announcement that will be delivered via the Internet—to two subscribers, or 2 million. People can listen live, or at any time they choose.

The larger the organization—and the more rapid its rate of change—the more challenging it is to keep people informed. Consider Cisco Systems. On average, the company brings out a new product every week. Its thousands of systems engineers must stay up to speed to keep their customers informed.

Mike Mitchell oversees the Cisco Media Network, a $7 million network-quality video studio and distribution system that is part Hollywood, part “Revenge of the Nerds.” The day I visited, CEO John Chambers was making his annual report to employees from the Santa Clara Convention Center. This was broadcast live throughout Cisco offices, and also will be added Cisco’s online content library. Just about anyone at Cisco can upload content that will be published for viewing worldwide.

Over the past five years, Cisco has formed global virtual teams of systems engineers in a dozen strategically important technical specializations. Being selected for a team confers status: Team members become the local go-to experts. Twice a year, each team of systems engineers meets face-to-face for up to five days. Their agenda may feature product presentations, Q&A with the field, competition, customer interviews and other business-critical messages the teams deem important.

Most systems engineers attend global virtual team meetings after the fact, at a time of their own choosing. Altus Learning Systems video-records the meetings and converts them into video on demand (VoD) for subsequent viewing. In addition to video, a VoD includes a synchronized PowerPoint presentation, MP3 audio and a word-for-word transcript. A team meeting typically generates 30 hours of streaming VoD content.

“We’ve Google-ized our IP,” said Juan Gamez, manager of technical programs for Cisco. As fast and easy as it is to search Google, Cisco systems engineers can pinpoint just what they’re looking for. Instead of searching the Internet, they query thousands of VoDs. Instead of receiving URLs to entire sites, the system takes them to the exact sentences they requested. They can stream this information from any Cisco office worldwide in a manner of seconds. Cisco people will initiate more than 30,000 searches for VoDs this year, and will view more than 20,000 of them.

Gamez recently noticed an anomaly in his usage statistics: Systems engineers accessed 243 percent more VoDs last year than the year before, but MP3 downloads were up a staggering 376 percent. Upon investigation, he found that they were downloading VoD content onto their iPods. (As natural-born techies, many systems engineers had purchased iPods early on.) Sensing another means of getting information out to the workforce, Gamez investigated what would be involved in podcasting product information.

Podcasting would enable systems engineers to subscribe to topics of their choice, which would automatically load into their iPods. They would gain the equivalent of their own portable, on-demand radio show.

Altus Learning Systems helps clients like Cisco disseminate product knowledge. Founder Ted Cocheu said that podcasting addresses two critical issues in today’s learning-on-the-run environment. The first is timely self-service access to the knowledge people really need. The second is mobility—accessing knowledge whenever, wherever. Podcasting fits the bill on both counts.

Informal eLearning Forum, October 21

2005-10-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

Leveraging Informal Learning for Better Business Results

Mark your calendar for our
October 21 event on Informal Learning

A U.S. Department of Labor Department Study estimated that fully 70% of all adult learning is informal. Others commonly estimate the split is 80% informal to 20% formal for workplace learning, and estimates go as high as 95% informal for knowledge workers in highly creative roles. Since the vast majority of workplace learning occurs informally, can we really afford to leave it to chance? This meeting brings together Bob Mosher (Director of Learning and Strategic Evangelism for Microsoft) and Jay Cross (CEO Internet Time Group) to engage participants in a highly interactive discussion of strategies for leveraging infomal learning for better business results.

October 21 8:30 through lunch
Microsoft Mountain View Campus
more information

The session will be webcast live via MacroMedia Breeze 5

Talk at Black Oak Books

2005-10-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

Ned Davis and I spoke at Black Oak Books yesterday evening. Actually, Ned did most of the speaking and I added color commentary. Our audience were few in number and not ready to man the barricades.

The message of Ned's new book Lessons for Tomorrow is that America's schools are obsolete. Kids learn by roaming around and doing stuff with other kids. School stifles kids' instinct for discovery by demanding obedience, docility, and conformity. In a world that is flat, America is losing its competitive edge and we will be flattened.

A woman in the audience told us education is never going to change anything. Things just happen and that's the way it is. One fellow advocated home schooling for all. A woman who joined the group near the end of the discussion told me how she home-schooled her daughter for education but sent her to high school as a junior for socialization.

Even in Berkeley, people are not ready to riot for better schools. Ned said that he'd interviewed many teachers who knew in their hearts many of the things that are wrong with our school system. Parents seem to be the most clueless group. The parents' vibe is that while most schools are garbage, the school their kids attend is okay. Few parents see more than one school, and you can't generalize from a sample of one. Assessing a school is not like choosing a car, where the choices are many, the dealers are hungry for your business, and you can always fall back on Consumer Reports for an objective assessment. (Reminds me of the finding that 90% of male drivers think that they are among the top 10% of all drivers on the road.)

So what are we supposed to do if we are mad as hell and don't want to take it any more? Ned suggests we need a major commitment, like that of John F. Kennedy when he called for putting a man on the moon. That's what we need: another JFK.

Can a leopard change its spots?

2005-10-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Awwww...

These are from the website of Sun Microsystems. Are we witnessing the beginning of an open, friendly Sun? "Let's be pals" instead of "Take no prisoners." No more driving down the stock price by badmouthing Bill?

Guess not.

Google-Sun

2005-10-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

The agreement between Google and Sun this morning is very important. Mobile, ubiquitous computing sounds the death-knell of desktop bloatware. Desktop? We don't need no stinking desktops.

Putting Google's software team to work on Java can work wonders. This is all about Web 2.0, the web as platform, the writable web. I've been using OpenOffice, blogs, wikis, and text editors since reformatting my hard drive a couple of months ago. Except for Word (I'm writing a book, after all), I've found that I can live without Microsoft Office.

Google is great at slip-streaming new features into their environment. This works so much better than Redmond's versioning strategy, which is disruptive, requires significant learning, and often adds features that are just different, not better. And I have to pay for it!

Google has a cuddly image. Most of us trust the brand. Contrast this is Microsoft. Even governments are sufficiently suspicious of the Evil Empire that they legislate against M'soft products. Sure, it's a joke when a Microsoft exec shows the Death Star when describing the Microsoft Campus. Or when Microsofties show up at a conference dressed as storm troopers. But the jokes are grounded in reality. The concept of a Google stormtrooper is absurd.

Market Capitalization, $ millions

Sun Microsystems $14,322
Google $86,844

Microsoft, $267,603

This shark smells blood in the water.

I'll get back to how this will reshape adult learning....

Natural Learning

2005-10-05T00:03:00.000-07:00

A major component of informal learning is natural learning, the notion of treating people as organisms in nature. They are free-range learners. Our role is to protect their environment, shelter the newborn, provide nutrients for growth, and let nature take its course. Shouting at roses will not turn them into rhubarb nor artists into engineers. You can’t motivate a person to become something they are not.

Putting natural learning to work is more like landscape design and gardening than traditional instructional system design. All of life is interconnected. Organisms cannot live independent of their ecosystems. Self-service learners are connected to one another, to ongoing flows of information and work, to their teams and organizations, to their customers and markets, not to mention their families, friends, and friendship groups. We can improve their connections and nurture their growth but we cannot control them or force them to live.

Great gardens express a unity of design. Each garden is a whole, not a bunch of independent pieces. All great landscapes have unity. Designers of learning experiences must create harmony among the layers of our learnscapes.

A landscape designer’s goal is to conceptualize a harmonious, unified, pleasing garden that makes the most of the site at hand. A learnscape designer’s goal is to create a learning environment that increases the organization’s longevity and health, and the individual’s happiness and well-being.

Gardeners don’t control plants; managers don’t control people. The most that either can do is nurture growth by tilling the soil, supplying nutrients, and pulling weeds. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.

The designer must work to satisfy aspirations and values, not precise outcomes. Man plans; God laughs. No learnscape survives when the levee breaks.

The late Peter Henschel, former head of the Institute for Research on Learning, said that “The manager’s core work in this new economy is to create and support a work environment that nurtures continuous learning. Doing this well moves us closer to having an advantage in the never-ending search for talent.” How else could it be? Neither nature nor the workplace will cooperate by going into suspended animation so we can tweak the details without things changing all the time. Everything flows. You go with the flow or you are out of it. Every learnscape has a history and a future, but the present is a moving target.

The Tool Shed

Learnscape Design – strategic intent, shared vision, harmony

Preparing the Land – architecture, workspace design, organizational form

Pruning – 80/20 focus, pulling the weeds, unlearning

Maintenance – organizational network analysis, augmentation

Lifecycle – of the learners, of the ecosystem

Seasons – adaptation of the learnscape, cycle time

Tending each plant – I/O, progress, fit, connections, response rate

Nutrients – rewards, sunlight, stories, patterns, stability

Yield = revenue

Garden tours – customer feedback, beauty, charm

Experiments – plant exotic species, keep mutants, innovate often

Flows – the streams of information

Sunset Garden Book – double loop learning, meta-learning

Evolution

Courses end; learnscapes persist. Organizations and their members are living things, and the landscape/learnscape analogy invites us to consider nature, symbiosis, interconnections, genetic make-up, adaptation, the change of seasons, and life cycles. People are not plants, so the analogy doesn’t stretch into self-expression, thinking, identity, personality, and collaboration.

In the mechanical world, I’d wrap this up with a conclusion. In the natural world, this is but one step on a long journey. Nothing ends. So I’ll end here for now and pick up later when the situation is ripe.

Unservice, chapter n

2005-10-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

Dotster keeps pinging me with notices that my domain names are about to expire. Maybe I should sign up for Auto Renewal. Trouble is, I did that two years ago. They are bugging their Auto Renew customers to renew. What a waste of bits. When my renewal transaction was rejected for an improper Coupon Code (even though I had no coupon and had not entered a code), I clicked for a Chat with Customer Care:

This box popped up. Hey! I'm number 1 in the cue. Cool.

After five minutes, I realized no one was taking care of customers. This is all just for show.

Gartner Hype

2005-10-03T20:41:00.000-07:00

Gartner Highlights Key Emerging Technologies in 2005 Hype Cycle

Egham, UK, August 23, 2005 — Gartner today released its 2005 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, assessing the maturity, impact and adoption speed of 44 technologies and trends over the coming decade. From what I can see, this is hype. (Text of this color is Jay.)

"The IT industry is awash with hype and buzz words and Gartner's Emerging Technologies Hype Cycles cuts through this to offer an independent overview of the relative maturity of technologies in any given domain," said Alexander Linden, research vice president at Gartner. Translation: Our hype is better than their hype. "It provides not only a scorecard to separate hype from reality, but also models that help enterprises to decide when they should adopt a new technology." Buy low; sell high.

According to Mr Linden, companies can feel compelled to invest prematurely in a technology because it is being hyped or, conversely, they may ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early expectations. Sheep get shorn. He urged organisations to be selectively aggressive in identifying technologies that could be beneficial to their business and evaluate these earlier in the Hype Cycle. Think for yourself. "For technologies that will have lower impact on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and then adopt the technologies when they are more mature," Mr Linden said. Wait until the time is ripe. "It's less a matter of don't believe the hype and more a case of do believe the hype but only in the wider context of the market place, potential applications and ultimately the relevance to your business today and tomorrow." Don't be stupid. Pay Gartner to tell you what to do.

Gartner's Hype:

Collaboration is the chart-buster, but if you've been reading my blog, you already knew that. Examples of go-go collaboration technologies are podcasting, VoIP, desktop search, RSS, corporate blogs, and wikis. They're all here.
Next Generation Architecture is another comer, but if you've followed the Workflow Institute, you already knew that SOA, Web services, and BPXL were hot.
Real World Web is Gartnerese for Web 2.0, I think. Ditto.

Information Week: Meet Your New Teacher

2005-10-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

Meet Your New Teacher

New technologies revive interest in E-learning as businesses find that online lessons let them train more people and cut costs
By J. Nicholas Hoover

[Excerpts]

Many companies that have embarked on E-learning efforts simply want to cut their training costs and do a better job of tracking who gets what training. E-learning also has been viewed as a way to cut the time it takes to train employees. "Most thought they could shortcut what had traditionally been learning," says consultant Jay Cross, who coined the phrase E-learning in 1998.

. . .

Companies now have a wide range of E-learning options and technologies from which to chose, and they need to find the right combination to suit their needs. "There aren't any magic bullets," says E-learning consultant Cross.

One major challenge is how to handle informal learning, the typically unstructured learning that goes on each day in hallway or water-cooler conversations, company E-mails, or when employees have to learn a new task on the fly. It goes beyond what's taught in classrooms and represents as much as 80% of all learning, according to experts.

Do you believe in magic?

2005-10-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Blogger began acting funny; it seemed that the Dashboard had lost its stylesheet. Later, photos began disappearing from my blog. Then the clock to the left there disappeared.

This afternoon gmail stopped working. All I could get was an error message that "mail/?view=page&name=js&ver=foo cannot be found." Oh joy.

This brought back memories of the days when I counted my blessings if Windows worked for two hours without a crash.

The net had all kinds of advice, most of it pointless voo-doo, but several people said "Clear your cache." As soon as I did, Blogger, the Java clock, and gmail all sprung back to life.

Thank you, Lord.

Don't close it

2005-10-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Don’t stop what you're doing
In the 1920s, Bluma Zeigarnik watched a waiter taking orders in a Viennese café. The waiter could remember an elaborate order until he had delivered it, after which it vanished from memory. Zeigarnik hypothesized that people remember things that are not finished because they maintain a tension in the mind awaiting closure. Ultimately Zeigarnik proved that people remembered unfinished tasks about twice as well as completed ones.

Thus, if an instructor wants students to remember a presentation, she will end the class in mid-sentence, before drawing a final conclusion. Direct marketers use the Zeigarnik effect to whet their readers’ interest. To remember the book you’re reading, take a break in mid-chapter, not at a more natural stopping point. If you want to keep something actively in mind, don’t close it out. Let it hang.

Zone out
Exercise fanatics want to be “in the zone.” If you want to learn a lot, you’ll choose to be out of the zone. The comfort zone, that is. You can’t learn what you already know, so to maximize learning, you need to get out of your routines and encounter new and different things.

Your comfort zone contains what you know. You can’t learn what’s in there because you already have. For the moment, those chapters are closed. This is stuff you now take for granted. It’s the storehouse of patterns of thought you use to make sense of the world.

Other patterns in your head are less comforting. They are unresolved. Perhaps they are new and under evaluation. Maybe, like the orders for coffee, they are still in play, awaiting closure. Perhaps they are thought experiments (Einstein’s Gedankenexperimenten) such as what-if scenarios and imaginary prototypes. Sometimes they are things that “don’t add up,” i.e. they don’t mesh with the patterns in the comfort zone.

Learning takes place in your unresolved zone. Uncertainly engages the mind. Could ambiguity be the root of learning? Or at least an accelerant?

Are people driven to learn because we seek to perceive things as fitting our existing worldview? Is Attention Deficit Disorder fueled by the excitement of rarely closing everything? Does the Zeigarnik effect making multitasking possible? Can a lack of closure on too many fronts drive you crazy? Does it make sense for me to try to write the conclusion to my book rather than ending it abruptly in mid-sentence? Is it worth half a million

More to come...

Flat world challenges

2005-10-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the site for a conference I am keynoting week after next. It took me 20 minutes to find a description of what I was going to talk about!

HeartMath

2005-09-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

A group of us spent the better part of today learning about HeartMath from Joseph Sundram (left, showing where his heart is) and Regan Caruthers (below right).

My first brush with HeartMath was in the aisles of some training conference, and the sales people in the booth weren't adept at describing what they had; I figured it was more galvanic skin response hokum. When Regan raved about HeartMath, I figured it warranted another look; it did. The simple techniques we learned can put stress back in its cage. I could feel positive change during the workshop and plan to practice the technique for a while.

HeartMath is yet another topic for my research on Informal Learning. My definition of informal learning has grown to encompass all forms of human adaptation except genetic inheritance and formal instruction. If an intervention improves performance, I'll be generous defining its fit with informal learning. HeartMath improves performance by reducing worker stress and frustration, improving decision-making and emotional control, inhibiting knee-jerk reactions, and encouring holistic thinking.

Driving past the headquarters of Sun Microsystems en route to the workshop, I recalled how even in the days of lavish perks, Sun rejected programs such as HeartMath as being too personal. Admitting that feelings and emotions shape our lives was not in keeping with Sun's warrior culture. Of course, I could hardly disagree more. I'll take a group of grounded, balanced, content teammates over a bunch of frantic, burned out, hell-bent aggressors any day. I look at HeartMath as a worthwhile business tool, not touchy-feely fluff.

Emotions have not evolved a whole lot since we lived in caves. People do nutty, childish things. It is within our power to have childlike peak experiences instead. Some choice: stupidity or ecstacy. People naturally choose the former. The rate of depression has doubled every generation since the 20s. 73% of doctor visits are stress-related. Life is 44% more complicated today than in the sixties. We're stressed by time pressure, frustration with others, unresolved conficts, anxiety, and perfectionism.

The way out of the vicious circle of habitual stress is to push the freeze-frame button on your internal mind-movie at the first sign of it. Shift your focus from what's in your head to what's in your heart. Recall a previous peak moment. Whatever you do, don't get trapped watching replays of the stressful situation. Use Heart Intelligence to recalibrate your assumptions and reach a new normal where heart and head are in sync.

HeartMath provides compelling metaphors, research findings, and bio-feedback to build confidence in its message. Joseph and I hope to talk about how this has worked in the corporate sphere in the next week or two.

And my book? Here's a sliver of what I have in mind:

Jay to speak at Black Oak Books on Wednesday

2005-09-30T22:20:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, October 5, 7:30 pm

Education theorist Edward L. Davis, author of Lessons for Tomorrow: Bringing America's Schools Back from the Brink, is a pioneer in computer-based instruction and in applying cognitive science to learning design. He is joined by Jay Cross, a leading theorist on computer-based education, to discuss how public education in America has become an obsolete, entrenched, bureaucratic machine, disconnected from our real educational needs, and how we should redesign our approaches to teaching both children and adults.

Katrina PeopleFinder Project

2005-09-29T23:53:00.000-07:00

Around 3:30 pm today, an email arrived from Kaliya to alert me to a meeting of PlanetWork a few hours later in neighboring Emeryville. I showed up at 6:00 pm, having missed the fact that while the doors opened at 6:00, the actual event was to start at 7:00 pm. We met in a building that looked slummy on the outside but turned out to be a marvellous, modern open space inside. I had plenty of time to eat and schmooze before Eugene Kim called the meeting to order. A dozen of us sat in a circle to talk about the process of collaboration.

An hour and some minutes later, we turned to the main topic of the evening, Katrina FriendFinder, the grassroots response to the New Orleans disaster that showed that a couple of guys could pull together an impromptu team, the likes of which neither the Red Cross nor FEMA could do with a boatload of taxpayer dollars.

Kieran Lal read the situation and leaned on salesforce.com to provide the net infrastructuve. Ping Yee, a grad student at Cal who had brought together a similar response following 9-11, coded the software. Fighting bureacracy and recalcitrance at every step, they pulled it off. Katrina PeopleFinder became the ultimate source for getting word of who was alive and where.

Talking with Ping one-on-one, I asked if he had considered becoming a force for social good. Instead of FEMA hardwiring inadequate pre-packaged solutions to future uncertainties, the Feds need to develop the capacity to turn on a dime. I remember Ping from Bar Camp, the flash conference that came together in six days flat. Rather than wasting money on retainers for just-in-case disaster adminstrators, the Federal Government needs the phone numbers of a few Pings and a supply of hero medals and bonus payments to reward them.

Ping & Kieran

TechLearn 2005

2005-09-27T22:55:00.000-07:00

I dropped by TechLearn in Las Vegas this week because I wanted to witness the end of an era. I’ve been to TechLearn every year since 1998. This was the first year with no presence from founder Elliott Masie. I don’t expect TechLearn to last long without him.

Things kicked off Sunday night with a delightful cocktail reception on the back porch of the Bellagio. It was chock-a-block with old friends. Once the crowd was light-headed, we filed into the ballroom for the opening session. “This conference is all about networking with one another,” we were told. “That’s why we chose this venue, the magnificent Bellagio hotel.” Huh? It’s hard to imagine a place with more distractions. You have to walk past fine restaurants, clanging slot machines, buxom cocktail waitresses, live lounge acts, and half a dozen bars just to get to the Bellagio Conference Center.

TechLearn this year was combined with the much larger ICCM show for ~~call~~ contact centers because the two fields “have so much in common.” The two groups came together for keynotes but otherwise had no overlap (in spite of our commonality). Questex was the host of the event, not Advanstar, but no one mentioned the spinout which created Questex last April. Not a word was said about who these guys are and how they came to own TechLearn.

Ann Rhoades, a former executive and now board member of JetBlue who bills herself as a Culture Transformation Guru, gave an opening presentation on creating a value-driven organization. She advised us to let peers hire future members of their teams and to hire for values, not for experience. JetBlue’s best flight attendant is a 63 year old retired fireman. The ~~call~~ contact center people perked up upon hearing that turnover among JetBlue’s 700 home-based reservation agents is less than 12%. After what seemed like too long, Ann sat down, Josh Bersin took the stage, and despite pleas from the conference organizers, the call center people walked out, leaving perhaps 150 people in the ballroom.

Josh told us the “e” now stands for “enterprise,” and that industry revenue climbed 4.1% last year. He compared corporate universities to the old glass-house data processing departments that morphed into IT. The universities are becoming “learning services.”

Josh walked us through the results of a survey of two to three hundred companies. Their top priorities for learning are alignment with corporate strategy, improving program effectiveness, increasing usage, and cutting costs; these all strike me as fixing things that are broken more than building new capabilities. A third of the companies expect their eLearning to grow significantly; half expect slight growth.

eLearning is evolving to a higher level, “Learning on Demand.” My pal Eilif at SRI Consulting – Business Intelligence will be happy to learn he was six years ahead of his time in naming the latest trend. Learning on Demand includes performance support and RSS, which warms my heart; I don’t understand how this is positive for LMS vendors, since LMS do not track them.

With Peoplesoft, Docent, Thinq, Pathlore, and KnowledgeImpact losing their identities, more than half of all LMS customers own an LMS from a company that no longer exists. Only 56% of large enterprises have an LMS, 44% of medium enterprises and 12% of small to medium businesses. Josh and I must have a half empty/half full thing going on here. He says this shows there’s lots of LMS market left; it tells me lots of businesses have figured out they can live without an LMS. Almost half of LMS customers use them for tracking and reporting, twice as many as use them to manage enterprise initiatives or improve efficiency. I’ll take doing over reporting any day.

I like Josh’s taxonomy of learning governance: Soviet top-down, American federated, and anarchist. I turned in early so I’d have the energy to roll out of bed in the morning to hear John Cleese kick things off at 8:00 am. Unfortunately I had to hear a recap of the previous evening’s speeches before John came on stage. Wedged between two droll set-pieces, John recounted the message of Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind about taking time for reflection. Business culture so stresses snap judgment that stopping to think about something is easily mistaken for laziness.

TechLearn’s 51 exhibitors were squeezed into the back of the ballroom where the keynotes were delivered. Unlike Training or ASTD, the regulation 10x10 booths crammed together at TechLearn felt very small townish.

I took off for lunch at the bistro at Paris and then back to my room at the Monte Carlo to write. Monday's evening reception, this one on GeoLearn's tab, was another great chance to schmooze.

Tuesday I decided to take John Cleese's advice and stayed in my room to write and reflect. I got an automatic late checkout (the hotel's computers were down and they had no idea who was in what rooms). Around 2:00 pm I left for McClaren. I had set myself a new record: I did not attend a single breakout session. That hardly qualifies me to assess the event, but of course, I will do so anyway.

I think people will flock to Learning 2005 for networking and experimentation. Shoppers will crawl the aisles at ASTD. Shoppers who dislike immense crowds will go to Training instead. Online Educa in Berlin will continue to prosper. And within a couple of years, TechLearn will be no more. That's just my opinion. I might be wrong.

Jason Fish and his bride

P.S.

More and more, I believe that speaking person to person, in an honest voice, with sincerity and feeling, trumps advertising bombast and doublespeak. How can you trust someone who comes up with double helpings of BS like this?

Bigger and better than ever, the year’s most important and anticipated gathering of learning and training professionals is back, with the most actionable, practitioner-led program in its ten-year history.

TechLearn 2005 focuses with laser-like precision on your most pressing technology, process, and people-related issues. The insights and advice you’ll gain during the conference sessions – combined with the products and services you’ll find in the Learning Showcase – offer a cohesive and compelling set of solutions to your most mission-critical challenges.

Your performance -- and your ability to positively and measurably improve organizational performance through learning -- is TechLearn’s single most critical goal. We hope you’ll join us!

What a turn-off.

Hop in the Wiki

2005-09-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to build a conference agenda collaboratively with a dozen people in eight countries. It's a natural application for a wiki. The problem is that most of the people in the group have never seen a wiki, much less posted entries to one, though all are quite computer-literate. I'm having a tough time recruiting people to dive in.

Has anyone found a compelling pitch for getting people to participate in a wiki?

Here are the words I'm emailing the group today.

Wikis going mainstream
New to wikis? You are not alone. This is the first time for most of us. Until this year, wikis were a tool for geeks and early adopters. Now wikis are becoming mainstream. At four of the last five successful conferences I've attended, wikis have proven useful for planning, coordination, keeping people up to date, and capturing feedback from participants. "Why a wiki?" has become "Where's the wiki?"

Problems in the past
I used to hate wikis because they seemed so intentionally bare bones. Formatting text involved learning arcane commands. Wikis did not accommodate graphics. It was very easy to get lost.

Simple as peanut butter
We're using PB Wiki. *PB* is short for peanut butter. The concept is that creating a wiki should be as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich. Formatting is simple, putting brackets around its URL inserts a graphic, and a sidebar clarifies navigation. Click AllPages and you'll see there's even a SandBox page to practice on.

Great for collaboration
Just as a word processor is designed to serve one person at a time, wikis were made for working with others. Everyone has access to every page. The content of the wiki is our shared responsibility to create and improve. It's a more direct way of collaborating than the old method of trading documents back and forth.

Transparency
Our world becomes more interconnected day by day. Doing things out in the open makes it easier to forge new links. "All of us are smarter than any of us" but we can't take advantage of that unless we show more of ourselves and the wiki is a vehicle for doing just that.

Out of your comfort zone
Bottom-up tools like wikis can play a vital role in educational reform. You can't offer the best advice to others if you have no experience with it yourself. If you're a bit uncomfortable with the process, that's means you have an opportunity to try something new. Please participate in planning our agenda on the wiki.

More about wikis

Help! I've been depersonalized

2005-09-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

When I fired up Firefox today, it asked who I was logging in as. I figured a new version was kicking in. Then I was ushered to the default Google start page instead of my home page. My bookmarks were gone. My extensions had disappeareed. My memorized passwords are missing. This browser is as bare as the day it was born.

Probably missing a config file, eh? I searched my hard drive for user.js. No such file.

Can anyone tell me how to put things back in order?

Everyday cooktop design

2005-09-21T14:09:00.000-07:00

When Austin was in grade school (he's now a senior at SF State), I took him to hear Don Norman speak at Cody's Books in Berkeley. I did not want him to go through life blaming himself for mistakes made by designers. Don's canonical example of design gone wrong was the typical configuration of controls on a cooktop

You'd think even the slowest designer in the pack would figure out that it's best to mirror the layout of the burners in the layout of the controls.

When Don and I met last week to talk about informal learning, I was quite interested in the look of his stove. This is what I found:

I chuckled. The stove had come with his condo. Don pointed out that the knobs for the back burners were slightly closer to the back than those for the front. Better this than controls in a straight line along the side.

One of Don's sons works for Toyota. In Japan. Don told me how new management-track hires are brought into the company. First come two months of classroom. (Oh, no, I thought. I didn't want to find out that the world's greatest automaker relied on formal instruction.) Then came two months working on the assembly line. (Whew.) After that, two months selling for a dealer.

Don was going to make a presentation to Toyota's senior board, so he invited his son to attend. He didn't want to take part. How would this look? Dad twists his arm. As participants arrive, cards are exchanged. Don's boy pulls out his card. It is the dealership's card. No printed name. Snickers and chuckles. Then one executive says that he sold cars at that dealership when he first joined Toyota. Another inquired which plant Don's son had worked in. That exec had worked on the same line. He was one of them; the top and the bottom of the organization were members of the same community.

More to come...

Out of the Comfort Zone

2005-09-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

We learn by venturing out of our comfort zones, and conversation is probably the most effective learning medium ever invented. My mind is still reeling from attending the Accelerating Change Conference at Stanford last weekend. Scientists, mathematicians, and very deep geeks are not my usual conversational partners.

Here's a quiz. Where would you guess people from these places are coming together?

European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning
Giunti Interactive Labs, Italy
IBM Center for Advanced Learning, USA
INSEAD, France
Internet Time Group, USA
Intrallect, UK
LIFIA & FuturEd, Canada
Ministry of Education, Bahrain
PAAET, Kuwait
Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP), Portugal
School of Business "Career", Russia
Swedish Net University Agency
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Switzerland
The Learning Federation, Curriculum Corporation, Australia
Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
Warsaw School of Economics, Poland

Here is the full answer. More.

The Singularity is Near

2005-09-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ray Kurzweil presented the thesis of his new book, The Singularity is Near, at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference this weekend. During the presentation, slides appeared on screen as if erupting from an AK47. I couldn't keep up. Happily, the graphics are so good that you can devine Ray's story from the graphs alone if you're visually inclined.

Everything you can shake a stick at is progressing exponentially.

Ray is not the only one to find this broad exponential growth of evolution.

By 2040, computer processing power will surpass total human intelligence. (I know, you're skeptical. Look at Ray's full presentation, especially the part about reverse-engineering the human mind.)

This is all coming on VERY fast.

Learning takes place when you depart your comfort zone. I've learned a lot from Ray.

Accelerating Change 2005 (2)

2005-09-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

DAY TWO

Mark Finnern
SAP Developer Network

SAP Developer Network …points for recognition. Hiring pool. SAP overall: 12 million users. 88,700 installs. 1500 partners. 28,900 employees. Focus now more on product life cycle and business process change as well as business process change. (Cf. Shai Agassiz talk at Accelerating Change 2004).

Walter J. Freeman, on the Poetry of Brains at the August Future Salon, said we focus too much on the individual brain instead of on the collaboration of groups of brains.

Still working to fulfil Doug Engelbart’s vision: As much as possible, to boost mankind’s collective capability for copying with complex, urgent problems.

Theme: Large-Scale Collective IQ: Facilitating its Evolution

A World that would work for all of us. Martin Luther. Even if the world would end tomorrow…

Richard Branson’s mother asked her young son, “Do you know the way home?” He thought so. He let him out to make his own way home. Ah-ha. On the way home, he realized he was responsible for his life.

In the break area, I hailed a fellow passing by to ask him, “How does your purple hair play at Microsoft?” He told me he had been working on the team for a product named Indigo. Now Indigo has become Windows Communications something-or-other. He’s only been on board six months, so because his on-boarding is still fresh in his mind, I asked him about becoming acclimated to Microsoft. He described an avalanche of information and meetings. Too much email. Everyone at Microsoft complains about getting too much email – it’s the downside of being transparent.

Note to self: check WFF: Workflow Foundation, a new element release last week in beta.

Tom Malone
Future of Work

Today’s topic is intelligence amplification. Tom will talk about amplification by organizing the intelligence of many humans.

The Technology Stack
Organizations ?
Application software
System software
Hardware

Wikipedia. Stated 2001. Already over 730,000 articles.
We are in the early stages of an increasing in human freedom in business…that may be as important as the change to democracies has been for governments.

Now possible to have the economic benefits of large organizations without giving up the human benefits of small ones (freedom, creativity, etc).

Lower communication cosgts mean many people have enough information to make more decisions for themselves. What will dirve these changes is what people really want.

eBay. 430,000 people make their living from selling on eBay. If they were employees, eBay would be the second largest company in the nation.

Bands (Decentralized, unconnected) ? Kingdoms (Centralized) ? Democracies (Decentralized, connected)

Business 1900, 1950, 2000. Small, local businesses ? Large, centralized corporations ?Empowerment, outsourcing, networked organization

People making their own decisions are more motivated and have more fun.

Central-----------------------------------Decentral
Loose hierarchies Democracies Markets

Linux, AES, R&D, Movies, buildings
Consulting VISA, Mondrago

Cinematrix for group flying sim

Cheap communication is making feasible whose new regions of the design space for organizations. To take advantage of these new possibilities, we have to invent them.

You probably have more choices than you realize. To make the choices wisely, you need to think about what really matters to you.

Answers can only go from our own inner world.

Small is beautiful

“What can I actually do? The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology…but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.” Small is Beautiful, 1973.

Dileep George
Numenta
www.numenta.com

Understanding and Modeling the Neo-cortex…to accelerate our understanding of intelligence

1 mm thick cortex. All memory, six layers of neurons.

Common cortical algorithm. The neo-cortex is everywhere functionally uniform than hitherto supposed to and its avalanching enlargement in mammals and particularly in primates has been accomplished by replication of a basic neural module.”

“There is nothing intrinsically motor about the motor cortex….
Neo-cortex atop this
Reptilian brain. Senses in, behavior out.

Drifts into Hawkins’ Intelligence theory

SPECT and the Future of Mental Health
Daniel Amen, MD
Change Your Brain; Change Your Life
Making a Good Brain Great

Three years in marital therapy
• Furniture factory worker
• “He’s an asshole”
• Being fumed to death

Standard of care
Brain imaging in clinical practice is the next major advance in psychiatry

Your brain has to do with everything you do
Who you are as a spouse, friend, parent, manager

When your brain works right, you work right
When your brain doesn’t work right, you have trouble

Descartes was wrong
Society figures free will is zero or 100%
Give us a couple of drinks and it’s 50%

Healthy, happy, effective, consistent, successful
Unhealthy, sad, troubled, inconsistent, unsuccessful

Your brain is really complicated
100 billion neurons, trillion supporting cells
2% of body’s weight, uses 20-39% of kcals
More connections than stars in universe
A piece of brain tissue size the of grand of sand contains 100000 neurons

Brain is very soft
Consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard or between an egg white and jello
Skull is really hard. Many sharp ridges
Brain injuries matter
Kids should not play football

Care more about our faces, boobs, bellies, butts than our brains

Most problems are not simple disorders. 13% family doctors oversimplify. ADD or depression is not single or simple disorders.

Imaging is important in clinical psychiatry
It’s as if an orthopaedist took a history, then recommended surgery…
Or a mechanic who talked about your car’s problems, then told you needed a new carburettor without raising the hood

You can change your brain. Right interventions help; wrong interventions hurt.

Myth of the perfect brain. We all need a little help.

Brain is not completely developed until age 25. We need to take care of young brains. Early brain injuries, drug abuse, many colleges, malnutrition are disasters for brain development.

SPECT = single photon emission computed tomography.
Opens the mind to other treatments—medical, nutritional, supplemental, and psychotherapeutic elements.

Brain envy.
You can tell nine years before Alzheimer’s becomes apparent

Why are shrinks the only medical specialists the only doctors who don’t look at what they’re treating?

How to Optimize the Brain. Protect. Feed. Nourish. Work. Exercise. Coordinate. Thinking skills. Making love. Supplements. Early treatment.

When I remember all the crap I learn in high school, it’s a wonder that I can think at all.

We can change our brains and our lives. You have a choice: which brain do you want?

Panel
Ruzena Bajcszy
Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society, UC Berkeley

Citris
Alan Kaye, Croquet, (1) Take images & video to create your own gallery. (2) Have built a library with 42 cams that can digitize whatever you are doing. See video.

Group interactions in Tele-immersion: meeting in the virtual space.

Shun-Jie
Journal of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Only university with required course in future studies. First private university in Taiwan.
How to be a country….

Sr. Denise Lawrence
Brahma Kumana World Spiritual Organization

The Role of Meditation in Intelligent Learning

What meditation has done for me.
Non-religious, no guru, practical, run by women, allied with United Nations.
Able to have better control of myself. When I change, the world changes.

Conventional learning. Based on conventional scientific methods, relies upon externally acquired data. Input limited to the five senses. Disregards the world of consciousness: intuition, association, memory, inspiration, subjective analysis, etc. Influenced by prevailing ideas.

Intelligent learning. Based on CS, cog sci, AI, educational learning theories, and multi-agent approaches. Ideally incorporates social and emotional intelligence. Promotes learning with understanding and transfer.

How does medication add to this mix: Meditation alters the quality and process of thought. Thought processes become influenced by inner stillness, intuitive clarity, creative insight, and innate moral wisdom. This is reflection, looking at how I think. Meditation gets you in touch with yourself. Understanding acquires depth and is viewed in context. Intelligent learning comes out of the box and into consciousness. Meditation is experienced: it’s more than information.

How does this happen? Deep silence. Becoming a listener. Taps your well-spring of original thought. Your thinking becomes focused, disciplined, coherent and contiguous. Enhances and brings healthy balance to your personal and professional life, if practiced regularly.

Incorporate into intelligent learning environments. Still inner environment. Reflective breaks.

Responding to a question: The self was the most neglected aspect of his life before meditation. Is he selfish? Yes. Should he be? Yes.

Robin Raskin
Digital Mom
Responsible Computing
Rearing Digital Kids

De-celerating change 2005.

Things done maliciously. Unethically. Theft.

Recent emails
Parents of suicidal children
Teachers of kids who’ve violated online space of others

We can’t accelerate tech change without social change

Cyberworld is the last outpost of freedom in overscheduled lives.

Risk beyond XXX
Social networks: Counting friends exponentially, social activities migrate to workplace, reputation-building: differentiating low-value, low-trust relationships. Online bar scene equivalent. Dangers of interpretation. Spin the bottle. Rate your teacher.

Notions of privacy: Schools are clueless about the net. 40%
Handheld everything
Theft: music 10:1, plagiarism, truth (?)

Effect on workplace behavior
Intelligent, informed choice of best communications medium.
Non-private, malleable discussion.
Audit trail that goes un-audited
One word, out of context decision-making from crackberries

Jayson Blair…
Global Crossing, Tyco, WorldCom, etc
Email the culprit

Solutions
Systems that build good behavior
Money for education programs. Industry tithes,
Graduated internet driver’s license

Dichotomy of Design & Evolution
Steve Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurvetson

4999 early drawings
299 dedicated design work
19 brought to market
1 works

Hotmail, ICQ – what is so special with these network companies zooming up into growth. Skype. Kazaa. Zero to ten million users in 14 months.

Ecosystems of innovative dreams, networked memes, libraries of genes

Vetter does genome of 1 millimeter of sea water, seeking the DNA of an ecosystem

Biological Muse to computer science
Algorithms: evolving complex systems, nanotech futures, AI and IA
Libraries: interface questions

Technology Exponentials
Evolution, computation, storage, bandwidth, internet, genes mapped, MRI scan resolution. “Technology is the evolution of evolution itself.” Kevin Kelly

Open Evolutions
Genes, Memes, Blogs, Ecosystems, Volume

Evolved systems
Emergent layers of abstraction
Subsystem inscrutability: bubble sort, neural networks, wisdom of crowds
Computational Equivalence – no simple shortcuts

Dichotomy

Design Evolution
Control
Brittle Out of control
Robust, resilience
Simple problems Complex
Subsystems clarity
Portability
Modular reuse Inscrutable subsystems
Hierarchical subsumption
Path dependence (sensory I/O, AI, algorithm survival)
Co-evolutionary

Implications
Bifurcation of approach? Blending? Sequencing? Theory? Quantum Computational Equivalence

Portability
Co-evolutionary islands
Path dependence; algorithm, senses
Alien I
AI vs IA

Jurvetson.blogspot.com

Blake Ross
Firefox

People want a simple, easy-to-use browser. How do you progress? Openly.

Microsoft sees value in the Internet
Tamgotchies -------------
Tickle Me Elmo-------------
Internet---------------------------------------------------------------

AOL killed Netscape. Put a Shop button on the toolbar. Optimize for one site.

Feel the pain.
Jane says: #(&$#^!
Marketing says: Can we synergize voiceover XML based RSS podcasts?
Developer says: Marketing’s drunk again
Usability Lab says: User 12b experienced mild discomfort with…

2001 Microsoft disbanded the IE team.

Fixing open source
• Open source developers have egos the size of Manhattan
• The first thing we did was rip off the competition
• Open source is about more than developers. Projects are wasting talent!

SpreadFirefox!

Second Life
Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab Video.

Panel: the ASF Core Team
John Smart, President
Jerry Paffendorf, Community director
Iveta Brigis, ASF Board
Jim Turner, Executive Director

Jim Turner

Jerry Pallendorf

Incorporated 2002
Acceleration Studies Foundation

Panel: What next?

Alex Lightman
Kids learn more from adults than from other children. Being in business is almost a spiritual pursuit. What is the one thing all this is representative? They are all learning curves. In terms of this weekend, what value did you bring? Tell people about it. Start your own Future Salon.

Steve Jurvetson
Lot of ideas that don’t yet have a theory. Think biology & the messiness of it all.

Cecily Summers
Push Institute. Accelerating change, accelerating chaos. Forgot to bring cell phone charger. Realize how tech is reorganizing us as people. Track human nature as well as tech.

Joi Ito
Venture capitalist. On the board of every group you’ve ever heard of. Open Source, Mozilla, Creative Commons, etc. Monopolists at work: Hollywood, phone companies that want to make the net into a cable t.v. network. Brazil Russia India China (BRIC): they don’t give a shit. The world is a lot more international than it was. Linux, IRC.

Beth Noveck
Intellectual property form. Lot of discussion about the brain, individual and collective. Group > individual. Institutions fear the mob. Interface to help us see ourselves and the tech. Have to direct tech and groups in support of social justice. How to pull all the smart minds together.

George Gilder
All the exponential curves are experience curves. The Education of Henry Adams started it all with the acceleration curve of human progress. Learning has to do with information. The laws of chemistry and physics not information-rich to the extent of biology. Proteome follows genome. Learning in the future will occur in processes of synthesis and integration. Life is information: that’s what differentiates life from other forms. The reason all information is migrating to the electro-magnetic spectrum is because the spectrum is low-entropy.

Rudy Rucker
One of the few Wolframites aside from Stephen Wolfram. The Lifebox, The Seashell, and The Soul. As Bucky said, I seem to be a verb. Assuming we advance in hardware as predicted, where are we going to get the software? The new hardware comes with a blank hard drive. Will is unpredictable, therefore free. Hive Mind. The dream of the universal library. | The world is a computation…

Accelerando.org? Singularity science fiction.

Jay: I’m math-challenged, and value gut feel over calculation. Joel Garreau wrote Radical Evolution. Ray Kurzweil is the rosy optimist, Bill Joy the doomsayer, and Jaron Lanier between the two. What do you guys think?

Alex: Rivers of Time, Brin. All three are true. Sudan to become a Chinese pumping station. America will be in the middle

John Smart: Avatars. Peace, justice, all the time we want.

Steve: Near-term: g-fear. 50-50 odds > Club of Rome disaster. More wealth in fewer hands.

Beth: It depends. On our willingness to take control of the situation. What are the structures that will get us there? Tom Malone: what do we mean by democracy? How do we structure the architecture? How can we make humanities and tech converge? Law has focused on the dark side; and we become the tools of our tools?

George: Capitalism overcomes inequality and poverty. We’ve just enriched a billion Asians.

Finale

Iveta Brigis

John Smart

The Thinker, Futurist version

Sibley Verbeck, StreamSage

Accelerating Change 2005 (live)

2005-09-17T09:02:00.000-07:00

Accelerating Change 2005
Stanford

This year's theme is AI-IA. Artificial intelligence ("AI"), broadly defined, improves the intelligence and autonomy of our technology. Intelligence amplification ("IA") empowers human beings and their social, political, and economic environments.

KnowledgeBase: slides, pdfs, Q&A

John Smart. How many people have read The Age of Spiritual Machines? Half the hands go up. This is the only conference dedicated to a multidisciplinary look at accelerating technological change. We aim to move the dialogue beyond… Awareness, education, advocacy. Future Salons popping up all over.

370 people are here. World today is a network more than a hierarchy, and amazingly enough, this has come about in the last decade.

Today you’ll hear about the singularity, age of spiritual machines, Ray Kurzweil’s new book, think of ourselves as ambassadors to the future, Google OS?, AI, a new model of neural network, more connections in our brains than there are atoms in the universe, Terry Winograd on design, birds of a feather (this is a working conference).

Verner Vinge
vinge@cs.sdsu.edu
www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge
www.rohan.sdsa.edu/facluty/vinge/misc/ac2oo5

Exponential. You hear people say “That’s exponential.” Exponential growth doesn’t last very long. Perhaps a catastrophic crash. Or the levelling off of saturation. Moore’s Law predicts computers with more oomph than the brain. And what happens one cycle of Moore’s Law after that? A technological singularity. Life is only the prologue to human intelligence.

What if the singularity doesn’t happen? Could be a Russian roulette situation.

Ray Kurzweil
When Humans Transcend Biology

www.KurzweilAI.net
www.KurzweilAI.net/pps/ACC2005

What will protect us from strong, predatory AI?

Soft technology, we can plan for, like we prepared for Kristina… (laughter). People intuitively think of the future as a straight-line projection of today. The Paradigm Shift rate is doubling every decade. Lots of logarithmic growth. Life at -10¹⁰. Six epochs of evolution: chem., DNA, brains, tech, tech+human intel, universe wakes up. Computer evolution similarly exponential. You must see the slides Ray's a firehose.

Informal learning note: Ray Kurzweil is easily one of the brightest people on the planet. Why then did he show us 88 powerpoint slides, almost all of them complicated graphs of exponential curves? In terms of audience comprehension, 3 or 4 slides would have been plenty. Even though I was sitting in the center of the first row, my brain seized up, and I slept through most of Ray's presentation.

Panel

Neil Jacobstein, Teknowledge
njacobstein@teknowledge.com

The Evolution of AI Applications

“If it works, it isn’t considered AI.” (laughter) Pattern recognition, control, date interpretation, design, search, training, etc. Many ways of looking at AI.

Federated services on the web a la Kevin Kelly’s Wired article in August 05. Nanotech:matter::computing:information. Advanced molecular mfg will eventually provide personal computing devices with a billion Pentium class processors.

“What is the use of the ever-faster, ever-slicker, more nearly perfect implementation of rotten plans?” asks Stafford Beer.

Falling Water. Designed late, non-standard components, no continuous improvement. Residents lived with many bugs but were asked to take ownership of them by its authoritarian architect. Over 40 years, Toyota workers have made 20 million suggestions, going from making junk vehicles to top in the world.

Rules: Balance long and short term pragmatics. Combine new and mainstream AI tech for specific application solutions vs picking the “one best way.”

Patrick Lincoln

SRI

Main point of AI is for intelligence augmentation. Tools for this growing in power exponentially. Capability gap between computing capability and human capability. Foolish to bet your life on an iffy system; insane to bet the life of society at large. Forty years ago we deal with a dozen variables; now we can handle 10 million.

But systems are too complex for a personal to understand. Hence, we must cross the abstraction barrier. Property-sensitive abstractions. Scaling up and down, slicing…

Effort required for high assurance analysis. 80s: huge teams required. Now: takes an hour. We must support designer and user interaction at the right level of abstraction at the right time. Extremely powerful symbolic reasoning tools make this almost possible. We are accelerating > Moore’s Law. Most pressing problem in the world: “Collectively getting better at solving urgent and important problems.” Engelbart, March 1951.

Peter Norvig

Google

AI in the middle. Machine learning. Knowledge engineering. AI in the middle.

Machine learning: don’t know how to do it.

Knowledge engineering: missing key stuff in 1991. costs $10K/page.

Search: n

Mediocrity augmentation

Bruno Olshausen
Neuroscience and Future Prospects for Intelligent Systems

baolshausen@berkeley.edu
redwood.ucdavis.edu/bruno

Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, UC Berkeley

Theoretical neuroscience seeks to understand intelligence by studying these:

Psychology: behavior, perception/cognition, performance characteristics
Neurobiology: neurons, neural response properties, signaling mechanisms, synaptic transmission
Math/computer science: information, signal transformations, efficient representation

Reality is a hallucination, most of which comes from the brain and not the retina.

Dimensions

Spatially invariant or specific
Slow or fast changing
Objects vs features/details

Esther

Peter Barrett
Chief of Engineering
Microsoft Television
IPTV

“IPTV is better TV.” Broadband network for t.v., data, and telecomm. No room on the coax for a hundred channels of HDTV. Ditto satellite. Overall broadband capacity is growing fast and will dwarf traditional channels within five years; video bandwidth is declining.

Origins of tv. IP since ’70. Now many varieties. Live 8: phone-cams, commentary.

The Long Tail: Gilligan’s Island episode 73, the “Citizen Kane” of television. Baby pictures as killer app.

Mark Finnern & Zack Lynch

Terry Winograd
Teaching Innovation
Stanford D-School

University looking for mini-singularities. A new insight. Engagement in the world.

What is design?

Professionals, e.g. interior designers.
Set of skills learned in a common way, e.g. studios
Methodology for working “Conversation with the materials” (Schoen), “Iterative plan-making” “Iterative user-based prototyping” “Integrative thinking”

Design thinking: innovative, user-centered, iterative, integrative, reflective

“Enlightened trial and error is more effective than perfect intellect”

Tech (feasibility)
Business (visibility)
Human Values

Design spaces. Info posted on walls.

Philip Rosedale, Linden Lab (Second Life)

Moira Gunn interviews Ray Kurzweil

Eileen Clegg captures Kurzweil

Missing Jon Udell's sellout talk:

Writely

2005-09-16T18:31:00.000-07:00

Check this out. Free word processing. Write directly to a file on the web. Free. Web 2.0 marches on. This is lightweight and brilliant.

Flat earth travel

2005-09-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

It's one thing to read about globalization and buy into Tom Friedman's perspective on the world. It's another to live it.

Looks like I'll be spending a few days in Taipei with the Industrial Technology Research Institute before my odyssey to the UK, UAE, and Germany.

We are sorry...

2005-09-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Ironically, this popped up, taking the last 20 minutes of work with it, while I was reading a great Don Norman essay on how there should be no error messages.

This is analogous to hiring a plumber to fix your bathroom toilet. He comes to the house, says "It's not working," and leaves, as if his job is done.

Know what? I don't really think they're sorry for my inconvenience.

Jay's Conference Itinerary 9/05-12/05

2005-09-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

TechLearn 9/25-28 Las Vegas

Collaborative Communities of Practice Online Conference, 9/27-28 Online

Black Oak Books 10/5 evening Berkeley

Future of Talent Symposium 10/9-11 Tomales Bay

eLearning and Corporate Conference 10/11 Helsinki (on line)

eLearning Forum 10/21 morning Mountain View

Learning 2005 10/30-11/2 Orlando

Industrial Technology Research Institute 11/9-11 Taiwan

~~World of Learning 11/15-16 Birmingham~~

e-Merging e-Learning 11/19-21 Abu Dhabi

Online Educa 11/30-12/2 Berlin

Say hi!

Web 2.0 musings

2005-09-15T10:09:00.000-07:00

I have one hell of a lot to do today, but the Web 2.0 phenomenon is stealing my mental bandwidth this morning. Web 2.0? Some say it's the "web as platform" or "almost an operating system." Others call it the "read/write web."

Web 2.0 means different things to different people. No one has her arms around the definition because there isn't one; there are many. Here's mine: Web 2.0 is simply the next step in the evolution of the web. That means it will probably involve lots of fine-grained content, pages assembled from many sources on the fly, mash-ups (putting several interoperable apps together to create something new and different), lightweight applications, and more power and personalization in the hands of the individual user. Web 2.0 is not a technology; it is not a thing; it has no standards: it is a dreamspace. It's what we label anything that smacks of innovation on the web. That's good. We sometimes need new pages on the community's virtual flipchart on which to sketch new ideas.

Google just introduced a blog tracking service. It's missing a few pieces but it will be a winner. The Google brand legitimizes new services the way putting "IBM" on a PC created a mammoth market, even though the technology wasn't compelling. Gmail and Google Maps and GoogleTalk are Web 2.0, as are RSS feeds.

Check out the new Google blog searching tool. Not much different from Technorati, you think. But hey, the interface is not intimidating. By saving a link to a search, the user can easily create a custom, repeatable look at an array of blogs. Web 2.0 is giving ordinary mortals the power to write programs intuitively. The sum of the Web 2.0 parts is exponentially greater than the individual parts.

See Tech Crunch's review. Try these...or roll your own. It's the Web 2.0 way.

Google Blog Search for metatime jay cross by date
Google Blog Search for 2005 metatime by date
Here's the advanced search form. Fill in the blanks.
Here are the last 100 posts to Internet Time Blog.

Measuring Intellectual Kapital

2005-09-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

Measuring Intellectual Capital

09/05 - How can one measure the worth of what’s in people’s heads? The value of intellectual or social capital should be of vital interest for companies, but it is often underrated by the management. Leading learning experts, such as Jay Cross from Internettime Group, USA, devote themselves to the questions of how we learn and how learning processes can be evaluated ...

MORE

Join the American contingent headed for Berlin for Online-Educa this December. More info at Online-Educa.us.

verbals

2005-09-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

connections

words are sometimes a clutzy way to communicate.
words lack precision.
words require mental translation.

words force us to play an internal game of telephone,
whispering the message to ourselves,
reverberating back and forth as the mind seeks patterns.

the mind messes with the message
as much as a chain of conniving, deceitful interpreters,
misunderstanding & shaping & rejiggering the original
into what they want us to hear.

some educators tell stories
to make an end run around the interpreters,
to convey meaning even when a few details are out of whack.

others turn to multiple media.
if i hear it, see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, try it, practice it, challenge it, & teach it,
the better the odds that i will learn it.

all of which makes one wonder why
we cling to words
as if words are the only way
to teach
and to learn.

A little irony from Workforce Management

2005-09-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Corporate ecosystems

2005-09-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

I’m of two minds. Please read one of the following:

Business decision-makers, read this
I’m going to show you a simpler, more effective way for business organizations to connect with customers, increase revenue, contain costs, boost innovation, improve processes, reduce cycle time, and take advantage of the creativity of their people. Generally, you’ll be doing more with less, so this is not going to cost a lot of money out of pocket.

or…

Knowledge workers, read this
I’m going to show you ways to cut stress, stay abreast of change, make yourself heard, leverage your network, balance work and life, and be happier in whatever you do. People will find you more fun to work with and you will get more accomplished.

It’s all the same thing.
It doesn’t much matter which paragraph you read because they are the same story, told from two different perspectives.

Growing a business successfully requires the loyalty, dedication, and know-how of people who enjoy working hard at it. Enjoying one’s work requires fair treatment, a worthwhile goal, trust in your ability to get the job done, and an appropriate degree of challenge: the opportunity to be all that you can be.

All we gotta do is act naturally
Joe Jaworski is spot-on when he says, “Our mental model of the way the world works must shift from images of a clockwork, machine-like universe that is fixed and determined, to the model of a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities.”

The key word here is “living.” For a while, I struggled with the concept of nature as the appropriate analogy for business organizations. My brother, who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency after a career teaching biology, set me straight. Nature is a self-contained system. A business enterprise is more like agriculture, which has a specific goal. You’ve got to get the fertilizer right to grow the hay; you need the hay to feed the cattle. Small farms follow natural cycles and constitute sustainable agriculture. Factory farms squeeze as much as they can out of the land, often depleting the soil or planting clone monocultures that are vulnerable to total wipe-out if attacked.

Adaptation to change
The world is changing fast. Learning is adaptation to change. Businesses that fail to clear the path of the obstacles of bureaucracy, hypocrisy, and irrelevant leftovers from times past will not be able to keep the pace.

We generally think of learning as something a person does; being “learner-centric” is all the rage in training departments. But this is only a piece of a much larger whole. It’s like the Italian tailor who had an audience with the Pope. “What’s he like?” asked his friends. The tailor replied, “He’s a 39 Regular.”

The responsible leader operates in a broader domain than that of learners. She must optimize the operation of an entire business ecosystem. Adaptation on this scale involves networks, physical layout, innovation, the diffusion of new ideas, bonds with customers, support systems, organizational agility, and other factors, many of which are not addressed by traditional organizational structure and are not assigned to any department’s budget.

‘Scuse me. It’s time to herd the cows into the barn, feed the chickens, bale the hay, and mend the fences over on the back 40.

Jazzed about Learning

2005-09-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

CSTD (the Canadian Society for Training and Development) and LearnNB asked me to post this notice of an upcoming event. They're nice people, so why not? (Hi, Gary! Hi, Darcie!)

If you plan to be in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on September 15, be sure to drop by Jazzed about Learning, a one-day event featuring, among other things, a live webcast from Elliott Masie on Extreme Learning. Afterward, attend the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival in downtown Fredericton. Oh, and as proof that distance doesn't matter, the entire eLearning event will be webcast, and it's free. Follow the link but be sure to note that New Brunswick runs on Atlantic time, an hour ahead of EST.

Before you click to the next blog, remember that you only learn when you venture outside of your comfort zone and that's probably where Fredericton resides on your mental map.

Lobsters are big here.

Picture a moose.

Market day

Local history

Down by the riverside

Remix

2005-09-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

This morning I was reading Robin Good's blog, looking for an assessment of a particular web conferencing app, when an article on Web 2.0 highjacked my attention. One article linked to another. I thought it would be interesting to sample what I was reading from half a dozen sites and remix it into a composite essay.

Understanding comes from exploration

What a concept: the Web as Platform. Is that what Web 2.0 is? It depends on who you ask:

Jon Udell (as quoted in a classic essay by Tim O'Reilly): "Don't think of the Web as a client-server system that simply delivers web pages to web servers. Think of it as a distributed services architecture, with the URL as a first generation "API" for calling those services."
Deep Green Crystals: "The next generation of web applications will leverage the shared infrastructure of the web 1.0 companies like EBay, Paypal, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, not just the "bare bones transit" infrastructure that was there when we started..."
Jeff Bezos: "web 2.0...is about making the Internet useful for computers."
computeruser.com: "Yesterday’s challenge of producing elegant and database-driven Web sites is being replaced by the need to create Web 2.0 'points of presence'"
Mitch Kapor: "The web browser and the infrastructure of the World Wide Web is on the cusp of bettering its aging cousin, the desktop-based graphical user interface for common PC applications."

So... Web 2.0 is net-centric, interoperable, and user-customizeable. By the way, O'Reilly's Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0 about a year and a half ago.

Evolution of Web 2.0

In Web 1.0, a small number of writers created Web pages for a large number of readers. As a result, people could get information by going directly to the source: Adobe.com for graphic design issues, Microsoft.com for Windows issues, and CNN.com for news. Over time, however, more and more people started writing content in addition to reading it. This had an interesting effect—suddenly there was too much information to keep up with! We did not have enough time for everyone who wanted our attention and visiting all sites with relevant content simply wasn’t possible. As personal publishing caught on and went mainstream, it became apparent that the Web 1.0 paradigm had to change.

During the early years of the Web, before content had semantic meaning, sites were developed as a collection of “pages.” Sites in the 1990s were usually either brochure-ware (static HTML pages with insipid content) or they were interactive in a flashy, animated, JavaScript kind of way. In that era, a common method of promoting sites was to market them as “places”—the Web as a virtual world complete with online shopping malls and portals.

In the late 90s and especially the first few years of the 21st century, the advent of XML technologies and Web services began to change how sites were designed. XML technologies enabled content to be shareable and transformable between different systems, and Web services provided hooks into the innards of sites.

Enter Web 2.0, a vision of the Web in which information is broken up into “microcontent” units that can be distributed over dozens of domains. The Web of documents has morphed into a Web of data. We are no longer just looking to the same old sources for information. Now we’re looking to a new set of tools to aggregate and remix microcontent in new and useful ways.

(This makes me wonder if the all the fuss about learning objects is barking up the wrong tree. Why invent a new way to replicate what the mainstream web is going to do anyway? Clay Shirky: "The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move.")

Networks trump PCs

Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.

Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content. This is truly powerful. Anyone can build an interface to content on any domain if the developers there provide a Web services API.

Jerry Michalski recently wrote that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs created stand-alone systems while Doug Engelbart envisioned connecting with others. Microsoft hit the big time with a disk operating system for IBM's defacto standard PC.

I bought one of the early IBM PCs. Connecting to the outside world involved buying a Hayes modem and some shareware software (I used Andrew Fluegelman's PC-Talk). This enabled me to participate in bulletin boards at a blazing 300 baud.
Jobs then took the highly networked visions created at Xerox PARC and somehow turned out a brilliant, but completely isolated little anthropomorphic machine. For some time, he didn't want it to have a hard drive, a network or a larger/color monitor. Sheesh.

We're still stuck with the (my) desktop metaphor, and on top of that, with mere personal productivity applications. We ship one another bulky Word and PowerPoint files, praying the versions don't get mixed up in transit. Those documents are too large for collaboration, and their proprietary formats don't allow the linking and remixing needed for creativity.

Other people? Other places? They're over there, on the H: drive or in the "collaboration" application.

Why have these magical platforms neglected our social nature for so long? Why are these features still being glued on as afterthoughts, like antlers on a jackalope? Can't we loosen up, move things around a bit so that collaboration, annotation, search and linking are always at hand, for every object, as native functions of every window?

Web 2.0 is going to change all that. The future resides in connections.

Whither Microsoft?

Microsoft's ... focusing on yesterday's market. Microsoft's dominance of the desktop is as relevant to the future of computing as Union Pacific's dominance of the railroads was to the future of transportation in the twentieth century. Here's a sampling of reasons why Microsoft is history:

Microsoft wants everyone to have a rich desktop experience, Google wants everyone to have a rich Internet experience.
Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day.
Microsoft looks at the world from a perspective of desktop+Internet. Google looks at the world from a perspective of Internet+any device.
Microsoft wants computers to help individuals do more unaided. Google wants computers to help individuals do more in collaboration. In the Internet age, who wants to work alone any more, when all the unexplored opportunity is in collaborative endeavor?

Communities Building Social Information

One feature of Web 1.0 that seemed to change everything about publishing was the ability to make changes to the primary publication at any time. There are no “editions” or “printings” on the Web like there are in the print world. There is simply the site and its current state. We are used to this paradigm now, and an optimist can hope that Web content will only get better with time: metadata will be added, descriptions will get deeper, topics more clear, and references more comprehensive.

What we see happening in Web 2.0 is a step beyond this, to where users are adding their own metadata. On Flickr and Del.icio.us, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, bookmarks, images). The tagging aspect of these services isn’t the most interesting part of them, though. What is most interesting are the trends we see when we put together everyone’s tags.

Let’s say, for example, that we tag a bookmark “Web2.0” in Del.icio.us. We can then access del.icio.us/tag/Web2.0 to see what items others have tagged similarly, and discover valuable content that we may not have known existed. A search engine searches metadata applied by designers, but Del.icio.us leverages metadata applied by folks who don’t necessarily fit that mold.

Check what you get by going to http://del.icio.us/tag/web2.0 Of course, you're seeing a page generated especially for you. It's probably quite different from the page I looked at.

In olden times, say, before 2002, people who wanted to get direct benefits from software had to contort themselves to mimic machines. You want ERP? Fine, but first let's change the way you do business. Computers demanded "Do it my way."

Now software and systems are embracing flexibility and bottom-up change. Users can give as well as take. Intelligent networks are becoming much more important than any of their nodes. Computing is adapting to us. We're headed in the direction Jerry called for when he asked for us to loosen up, move things around a bit so that collaboration, annotation, search and linking are always at hand, for every object, as native functions of every window. Connections count!

Let's go up on the balcony and take a look at the patterns of this loosely-defined Web 2.0. From here, many aspects of Web 2.0 are parallel to what I envision coming in corporate learning. Bottom-up, read/write, addressable chunks, application independence, mash-up and remix, and integration with real life.

So, is there a future in text-remix? Should Jay become a TJ (text jockey)?

I pointed Copernic Summarizer at the text then on this page and requested a 250-word summary.

Remix.

This morning I was reading Robin Good's blog, looking for an assessment of a particular web conferencing app, when an article on Web 2.0 highjacked my attention.

Networks trump PCs. Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web.

Web 1.0 was an era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is an era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. Instead of visual design being the interface to content, Web services have become programmatic interfaces to that same content.

Jerry Michalski recently wrote that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs created stand-alone systems while Doug Engelbart envisioned connecting with others. Microsoft hit the big time with a disk operating system for IBM's defacto standard PC. But Microsoft documents are too large for collaboration, and their proprietary formats don't allow the linking and remixing needed for creativity.

Microsoft wants everyone to have a rich desktop experience, Google wants everyone to have a rich Internet experience.

We are used to this paradigm now, and an optimist can hope that Web content will only get better with time: metadata will be added, descriptions will get deeper, topics more clear, and references more comprehensive.