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If you want to stay current,
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Outbound
July 27. 2004
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You signed up to receive sporadic
newsletters from Internet Time Group. This is
person-to-person, how-Jay-really-feels sort of
stuff. Forgive the typos and over-the-top
language.
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What the Drunken Monkeys* are Jabbering About
What’s going through Jay's head this morning:- New perspectives on the time variable. Faster > cheaper, but accounting does a poor job of assigning value to it.
- Building a community of practice around workflow learning.
- Reinventing learning as a core business process, performance-centered design.
- Future jobs. New form of slavery or “flow” experiences? Real-time. We
can must influence this.
- "Flash meetings:" informal, neighborhood meetings of Emergent Learning Forum worldwide. Set one up in your neighbornood. How about next Tuesday evening?
- Metrics, creating the context for the measurement of value at all levels. It's all relative. My work involves helping training pro's understand and speak the language of business strategy.
- Future of IT and business: process management, loose coupling, adaptive, SOA, bottom-out, net-centric.
- Complexity and the breakdown of logic.
- On-the-spot, hassle-free authoring on the cheap.
*Buddhist metaphor for consciousness |
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Recent Articles
CLO June 2004. What would you think of an assembly line where workers didn’t know where to find the parts they were supposed to attach? Absurd, you say. Heads would roll. Yet for knowledge workers, this is routine. Consider a knowledge worker stymied by a lack of information—hardly an uncommon situation. In many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers.
CLO April 2004. Pioneering online communities turned into ghost towns until we realized that eLearning is a bundle of capabilities, not a silver bullet. When eLearning technology supplements traditional learning, it saves time, money and drudgery. Properly implemented, eLearning is a powerful, cost-effective tool. No longer the “next big thing,” eLearning has hit the mainstream. Next...
CLO February 2004. Ultimately, you’re responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation. Professionally, we design learning experiences to meet concrete objectives. We plan ahead to prepare for the future. We build systems to leverage the knowledge we already possess. We gather feedback so we can do better next time. My personal learning and knowledge management are too important to leave to chance. So are yours.
eLearn Magazine May 2004. A buff venture capitalist in a designer suit steps into my elevator. Soon she asks, “Workflow learning? What’s that?” I reply: “That’s something you won’t have to ask five years from now, for by then Web Services and the integrated, real-time enterprise will be commonplace. Learning will have become a core business process. It’s what will connect humans to their work.
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Housekeeping
Internet Time Group and the Workflow Institute maintain their mail lists in the same account at Constant Contact (good guys, recommended). This means you can easily join the Workflow Institute (free) by it visiting here and checking the Workflow Institute box.
Past Workflow Institute Newsletters: July 2004 | February 2004 | December 2003 Internet Time Blog has moved back to Blogger. Please use the www.internettime.com address to see it. RSS should be back up in a few days.
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Upcoming Presentations
 September 6-8, E-merging E-learning, Abu Dhabi
October 11-13, Workflow Learning Symposium, SF
October 11-13, Training Fall, SF
October 19-21, Elearning Producer, eLearning Guild, Orlando
November 14-17, TechLearn, New York
December 1-3, Online Educa, Berlin
Presentation Replay
Collaboration Supercharges Performance, ASTD 2004. Covers blogs, RSS, information overload, complexity, time acceleration, network models, value of collaboration, Emergent Learning Forum, social network software, and more.
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Recent Reading
 Wider Than the Sky by Gerald Edelman
 The Moment of Complexity by Mark C. Taylor
 IT Doesn’t Matter; Processes Do by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar
 Loosely Coupled by Doug Kaye
Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
Out of the Box by John Hagel
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White
The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas by John Hedgecoe
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On the bookshelf or nightstand:
About Time: Sync (Strogatz), Slowness (Honore), Competing Against Time (Stalk and Hout), A Sideways Look at Time ( Griffiths), Time for Life (Robinson and Godbey),
About IT: Web Services and SOA (Barry), Business Process Management, The Third Wave (Smith and Fingar), Workflow Handbook 2004, Workflow Handbook 2003
About value: The Support Economy (Zuboff and Maxmin), Business Without Economists (Hudson), ROI (Phillips), The Bottomline on ROI (Phillips), Dangerous Company (O’Shea and Madigan), Process Consulting (Weiss), Knowledge Management (Davidson & Voss), Good Business (Csikszentmihalyi), Thinkertoys (Michalko), What’s the Big Idea? (Davenport et alia), Who Really Matters? (Kleiner), How Images Think
Escapist: Kitchen Confidential, First Impressions, Balsamic Dreams
I need a sabbatical just to catch up! |
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Great Finds
Picasa organizes your photos. Free from Google.
 Firefox is a better browser than Internet Explorer any way you slice. it. Also Free.
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Capacity
Last week a small but hot young company was genuinely surprised when I told them that I had time to help them launch, to write papers and web copy, craft presentations, train the sales force, and introduce them around.That's what I do. Call me. |
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Links
Internet
Time Blog
Learning
Circuits Blog
Workflow
Institute Blog
eLearning
Jump Page
Workflow
Institute
Jay Cross
Internet Time Blog
email: jaycross@internettime.com
voice: 510-528-3105
web: http://www.internettime.com/
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Outbound
| Psst! The economy is coming back.
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March 29, 2004 |
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You signed up to receive sporadic
email from Internet Time Group. This is
person-to-person, how-Jay-really-feels sort of
stuff. Forgive the typos and over-the-top
language.
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Leveraging unpredictability
Everywhere I turn this year, I bump into the
meme of complexity . This is disturbing.
Why? Because complexity challenges the bedrock
of Isaac Newton, rationality, cause and effect,
and an ordered universe. Nonetheless, I am
buying the
conecept because my old worldview no longer maps
to reality. This new world defies logic.
Anything can happen. Uncertainty
abounds.
Letting curiosity take me where it will, I've
been studying complex adaptive systems, social
networking, contextual collaboration, content
aggregation, value networks, realtime
enterprise, Web Services, business process
modeling, and the
economic return from intangible assets. At
first glance, this appears to be a dog's
breakfast of
unrelated subjects.
Last week, driving home from the annual think
tank at IBM's Almaden Research Center, the
threads began to connect, like a jigsaw puzzle
magically assembling itself. MIT's Tom
Malone had made a convincing
case for new models of
business organization: extreme decentralization
with bottom-up management.The Workflow Institute has been
finding parallels in the evolution of computing
and workflow learning.
Organizations
without
bosses, software without programmers, a web
without a weaver, and
learning without instructors. Control is
migrating from the top to the bottom in
commerce, computing, and culture. My focus at
Internet Time Group is shifting to helping
people, particularly workers, be productive and
happy in this new world.
If you share
those interests, please get in touch.
Contact Jay
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Workflow Institute News
Sam Adkins and I are delighted to announce that
Gloria Gery has become our first Workflow
Institute Fellow. Gloria invented Electronic
Performance Support. Her concept of intrinsic
EPSS was the forerunner of Workflow Learning.
At long last, technology has caught up with
Gloria's vision.
Workflow Institute now has a blog. If you want
to keep up with real time learning, please check
there.
We are busy as beavers doing market studies,
developing sales tools, and tracking Web
Services. However, since almost all of this is
under NDA, don't expect to see the results for
months to come.
Workflow Institute Blog
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Emergent Learning Forum
The eLearning Forum is no more. In late January
it morphed into Emergent Learning Forum. Here's
why. This is a 17-minute presentation in
Macromedia Breeze. Click a slide title to hop
around if you like. In short, eLearning has
become mainstream. We would rather focus on the
future. Expect fireworks.
Membership
is still free!
Following the instructions on many Berkeley
bumperstickers, sometimes Emergent Learning
Forum will "Think Globally, Act Locally."
Instead of blowing half a day down in Silicon
Valley, this month's meetings will take place
informally, in neighborhood pubs. If you're in
the East Bay, please join me for a very local
gathering of people interested in learning the
evening of April
Fool's Day. The place: LaVal's on Euclid
(Northside), Berkeley. The time: 5:30 -
7:30. The agenda: networking, fun,
whatever you bring to the party.
Emergent Learning Forum
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Jawboning and Writing
Upcoming Dialog
- Jay will lead an online discussion of
Emergent Learning for Horizon Live on April 13,
2004, 3 pm Eastern, noon Pacific.
- Jay will be speaking on Metrics, A Pragmatic
and Contrarian View at e-Learning: From Practice to
Profit at the Queens School of Business,
Kingston, Ontario. May 5-7, 2004.
- Jay will be speaking on Collaboration at the
ASTD International
Conference in Washington. May 23-27, 2004.
Recent Talking
- Sam Adkins' post on Learning Circuits
Blog, We Are the Problem: We Are
Selling Snake Oil, generated sixty
comments and was splashed all over the net. In
early February, Sam & I presented the antidote
to snake bite in a sold-out Macromedia Breeze
webcast. Here's the replay.
 - I gave the Plenary Address at eLearn International in
Edinburgh In February. It was great to hob-nob
with the likes of Etienne Wenger, Don Norris,
and Don Clark.
- Global Business Network's Jonathan Star and
I discuss "The Edinburgh Scenarios",
where eLearning is headed in the next decade. 34
minutes, Macromedia Breeze.
- I participated in a panel on where eLearning
is headed with Harvey Singh, Dexter Fletcher,
Ellen Wagner, and Brenda Sugrue at TechKnowledge
in Anaheim
- I took part in a six-way webcast, What Experts Do to Prepare for a
Killer Web Event, with Robin Good.
- Shared the stage with Darin Hartley to open
the eLearning Track at WebEx's first user
conference, "Come Together." I asked marketing
director David Thompson if they were aware of
the double-entendre of the name of the show. He
assured me WebEx understood. "WebEx
advertising...," he began. I cut him off. Yeah,
this was the outfit that blew their initial
marketing budget on a Superbowl ad featuring
transvestite RuPaul. Inuendo? Sex? Us? Got to
talk with Regis McKenna, the marketing god
(Apple, Intel, etc.).
Recent Writing
- Emergent Learning, CLO,
April 2004
- Personal Intellectual Capital
Management, CLO, February 2004
- Connections: The Impact of
Schooling, CLO, December 2003
- Informal Learning: A Sound
Investment, CLO, October 2003
- Continued working on Metrics, convinced more than
ever that most people in training, including
those with ROI Certificates, don't understand
how to measure what business people care about.
Taking the advice of my customers, I raised the
price from $25 to $250 a copy. Still cheap at
the price. Here's a review from the ISPI
newsletter.
Recent Reading
 Business Process Change by Paul
Harmon
 It's Alive by Stan Davis and
Christopher Meyer
The Future of Work by Tom Malone
Creating Value with Knowledge by Eric
Lesser and Larry Prusak
The Moment of Complexity by Mark
Taylor
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
 The Sorcerer's Apprentice: My Life
with Carlos Castaneda by Amy Wallace
The 80/20 Individual by Richard
Koch
 Emotional Design by Don Norman
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared
Diamond
= Not finished. Too early to
rate.
I review most of the books I read in the Internet
Time Blog book department.
Links
Internet
Time Blog
Learning
Circuits Blog
Workflow
Instute Blog
eLearning
Jump Page
Workflow
Institute
"I think this may be a theme for the decade-that we're going to take packages of things and unbundled them and reassemble the parts. It happens with cultures and biological organisms. It also happens with governments." Danny Hillis
Jay Cross
Internet Time Blog
email: jaycross@internettime.com
voice: 510-528-3105
web: http://www.internettime.com/blog
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Outbound
| Carpe annum!
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January 31, 2004 |
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Happy New Year!
You signed up to receive sporadic
email from Internet Time Group. This is
person-to-person, how-Jay-really-feels sort of
stuff. Forgive the typos and over-the-top
language.
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The Future
My predictions for 2004: Conflict in the Middle
East, Taxes Rise, Time Flies, Entropy Increases,
Shit Happens, Study finds "There's No Free
Lunch," and consumers ask "What's in it for me?"
If you want to tackle something tougher, try
looking at 2014. You need to divorce yourself
from the present to get there. That's the role
of scenario planning, a discipline for looking
way out there.
The Edinburgh Scenarios focus
on eLearning circa 2014. You're invited to take
part. I'll be co-hosting a free webinar on the
Edinburgh Scenarios the morning of January 20.
eLearning Forum will take them as their January
focus. I hope you'll share my enthusiasm for
brainstorming the possibilities and shaping our
vision of the future. Monitor
internettime.com for announcements and
invitations. Since Scottish Enterprise is
sponsoring the scenario project, some
participants will win wool and whisky.
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Metrics -- Does It Matter?
My eBook on measuring the value of eLearning has
met with mixed reviews. A KM guru I truly
respect wrote me, "I love this book! You have
both the sizzle and the steak. Great style,
great look, great content." Another industry
leader emailed me, "Can't imagine anything I'd
add or change ... for anyone looking for a real
understanding of ROI, as well as various ways to
calculate their return, this is the best A-Z
guide I have read. And you hit the nail on the
head ... it's ultimately about performance and
the cost of improving performance." The only
other comment I received was a consultant
writing a book on performance evaluation who
said, "I found it to be mostly a essay on
various miscellaneous metrics topics, but it was
not very useful. There was a lot on what
shouldn't be done and the weaknesses of existing
metrics, but not much on WHAT SHOULD BE DONE."
You can order Metrics for $25 and see for yourself.
How to Order...
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Push and Pull
I enjoy reading the New York Times and the
content it pushes at me. On the
other hand, I prefer picking and choosing
websites to catch up with rather than
overloading my inbox with their email alerts. I
go to sites that exert the strongest
pull on me at the time. I asked a
fellow at eLearning Producer how I could improve
my blogs; he told me to add more push. Okay.
(This is for you, my friend.)
I'll continue to send out sporadic emails, but
if you want to keep up with my doings, or lots
of blogs and news items, on your own schedule,
you really need to get into RSS.
Syndication. RSS ("Really Simple
Syndication") lets you to sift though an amazing
amount of information, only drilling down to
detail when you are interested. A free program
called BlogExpress shows me the headlines and a
teaser from several dozen blogs I enjoy keeping
up with. If I see something I like, I click for
more. Bloglines, a free hosted service, tracks
more obscure things for me. It alerts me to
items that mention Workflow+Learning or
Internet+TIme+Group. Take it from me, this is
simple.
Go to Edu_RSS
to get a feel for what I'm talking about.
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The 20/80 Rule
On Learning
Circuits Blog last month, Sam
Adkins posted an item entitled "We are the
Problem. We are Selling Snake Oil," that
declared that Training doesn't work, eLearning
doesn't work, Blended leanring doesn't work, KM
doesn't work." (Disclaimer:
Sam and I are co-founders of the
Workflow Institute.) Sam expected to
start a debate, but instead he began a
movement. His article was emailed far and wide.
A record number of people responded on the
Leanring Circuits blog. Few disagreed that
learning and KM were out of touch with the
requirements of business.
This lit up my cerebral panels. If Sturgeon's
Law ("90% of everything is crap") applies to
learning, isn't it time to take out the garbage?
If lectures, courses, shovelware, PowerPoints,
and assorted chrome aren't doing the job, let's
flush 'em down the toilet. We can simplify our
lives and improve out reputations by eradicating
exercises that are irrelevant, unclear, poorly
packaged, dogmatic, boring, unsupported, or not
engaging.
We would become champions of purposeful
learning that works. I imagine we'd be promoting
discovery learning: watching others, solving
problems, creating one's own vision, picking
things up from others, and taking time to
reflect. Conversation, dialog, and debate are
great teachers. We'd make learning part and
parcel of figuring things out, from Googling an
answer to being prompted by a smart system.
Teaching others works because it requires
reflection and making our own connections.
Storytelling works because our internal
storytellers create our own private versions
that relate to what we already know and believe.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Workflow Institute
Sam Adkins and I have opened the Workflow
Institute to promote the understanding of
real-time enterprise-level learning in industry
and government. We're giving presentations,
writing white papers, helping vendors educate
their customers, and providing a news feed on
the convergence of learning and enterprise
applications.
We're experiencing some pushback from people
who think Sam and I are calling for turning ALL
training into some Orwellian nightmare. For
example, Stephen Downes wrote,
"Honestly, if
it's all about productivity, I want to pack up
my computer and take up a new line of work.
These predictions by Sam S. Adkins of the
Workflow Institute seem well grounded, but they
miss the wonderment that defines real change.
'Enterprise Application Integration
accelerates.' Yawn. 'Productivity gains from new
mobile technology explode.' Sigh. Where's the
motivation, the urgency? He could have written
all his predictions in one line: online learning
will continue to be commodified and co-opted. Is
all this what people really want out of our
great new internet?"
No, we're not saying Workflow Learning is all
people want out of the Internet. We are
predicting a new era in corporate training
fostered by enterprise application integration,
web services, contextual collaboration, and
learning at the point of need. The motivation
and urgency come from replacing lackluster,
ineffective training programs with something
more effective and less expensive. Our vision is
new, so we're groping along with too many
four-syllable words and three-letter acronyms.
Yawn. Co-opted? C'mon. Sam and I are trying to
share some good news, not commodify our life's
work.
Rendezvous in Q1?
You'll find me at:
- Collaborative
Learning, online, January 13-15
- Webinar with GBN on Scenario Planning,
January 20
- eLearning
Forum, Scenario Planning, January 27
- ASTD
TechKnowledge, Anaheim, Feburary 10-12
- eLearninternational,
Ediburgh, February 18-19
- eLearning Forum, Open Source, February 25
- eLearning Forum, Advanced Learning
Technology, March 19
Parting Advice
If you value your privacy, please follow my
example by running AdAware and Spybot to kill
off the spyware villains installed on your
computer when you weren't looking. (Download
these from tucows.com or download.com.) And
don't tap anything into a computer at a
cybercafe or at a conference's free email
stations: they're probably sending your every
keystroke to some dubious character.
Change your passwords. Frequently. And don't
be stupid. Somewhere this year I read about a
scheme that could crack into the systems of most
major corporations. Bait senior executives with
a free, high-quality porn site. Most of those
who sign up will use their single, all-purpose
passwords. Use those passwords to access their
corporate accounts. Could this happen to you?
All the best!
Jay Cross
Internet Time Group
email: jaycross@internettime.com
voice: 1.510.528.3105
web: http://www.internettime.com
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Workflow Institute News
November 2004 | August 2004 | July 2004 | February 2004 | December 2003
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May 2006 |
January 2006 |
December 2004 | July 2004 | March 2004 | Janaury 2004 
Wishing you
a happy and prosperous 2006!
There's a new blog in town.
The 
