“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” goes the refrain when managers ask why their organizations should get involved with the informal learning/web 2.0/learnscape religion that I preach.

The answer is that while past practices may not be broken, they’re becoming obsolete. The pace of change of anything Continue reading →

I’m halfway between Anchorage and Seattle, sitting in First Class on Alaska Airlines, trying to read Groundswell by Charlene Li and John Bernoff on my Kindle. A few observations:

Mechanical aspects
The text is clear. This puppy has great resolution. You can enlarge or diminish the font, and I’ve Continue reading →

We fly home to California tomorrow morning. Alaska is inspiring, but I can hardly wait to eat decent food again. And to dry off.

This is a test of Flickr’s video embedding:

The evening of Monday, July 28th, Clark Quinn and I will be facilitating a discussion on the future of the book at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley. I love books; my shelves are perpetually overflowing no matter how many cartons I give away or recycle. Nonetheless, the form of the book as we’ve Continue reading →

My table of five here at the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum analyzed Yahoo! to try out Future Exploration Network’s Strategy Tools. We looked at Yahoo! past, present, and future along the dimensions of connecivity, interfaces, relationships, services, content, and standards.

Yahoo! Continue reading →

Years ago, a pitchman on television said Alpo dog food was so healthy, he fed it to his own dogs. Among software developers, using one’s own programs became known as eating the dog food. Don’t just talk about something. Do it. Eat the dog food.

My forthcoming un-book is about getting things done Continue reading →

Wordle creates beautiful word clouds from text, tags, or RSS feeds.

This morning I pasted the URLs of fifteen blogs I frequent into Wordle just for the hell of it. Here’s the result.

Here’s a larger pdf of the same image.

See if you can match the word cloud to the blog of: Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Continue reading →

Text books cost a fortune these days. And they don’t age well. And they don’t contain local information.

This morning I had a chat with former textbook publisher executive Erik Frank, who’s out to change the situation. He and another text veteran formed Flat World Knowledge to reverse the tide.

Flat Continue reading →

Responding to the Big Questions(s) of the month:

• Should workplace learning professionals be leading the charge around these new work literacies?
• Shouldn’t they be starting with themselves and helping to develop it throughout the organizations?
• And then shouldn’t the learning organization become Continue reading →