Rearranging the Cerebral Furniture
This morning's email contained the monthly update of Jane Knight's e-Learning Centre. I traipsed over to Jane's What's New page, and now, an hour later, my head is swimming in cool new stuff and even more that I feel compelled to read.
What caught my eye?
Inspiring learning for all
MapZone
Collaborative learning environments sourcebook
Theory and Practice of Online Learning
thesocialsoftwareblog
How many social networks are too many?
Workforce Connections
Trackback, Where blogs learn their places
Visual interpretation of the Table of Elements
Free eBooks
Creating Streaming Media Presentations with Microsoft Producer for Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003
The CMS Matrix
Building a Learning Community online
Yoga Learning Center
Open-Source Learning
Effective - and ineffective - instructional strategies
RSS: A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers
The promise of online simulations
Many of those items left breadcrumbs to other interesting material but after three or four hops, I'd remind myself that I have to complete my taxes today and return to eLearning Centre.
I learn by recording new findings and insights on a blog or in my online journal. Categorizing factoids forces them to link into my wetware network. Selecting the right category is getting tougher and tougher, because my interests are expanding as I seek knowledge from a variety of disciplines. The old boundaries between fields are disintegrating.
In the last year, I've become intrigued by complex systems, social networking, contextual collaboration, content aggregation, value networks, realtime enterprise, business process modeling, the economic return from intangible assets, and more.
Earlier this week, I was giving a presentation at a conference. (I also learn by listening to myself; I don't know where some of this stuff comes from. Increasingly I simply channel my stream of consciousness, passing off the work of my subconscious mind as if it were something I'd consciously thought about.)
One of my points was a foundation of Sam's and my thinking at the Workflow Institute, namely that information of every sort is growing exponentially. The amount of information in businesses doubles every 18 months.
I like to look at problems from different levels. Is there a micro-level solution? If I go up a few notches, does a new pattern emerge? Have I been spending too much time immersed in the content, when I'd be better off tweaking the process?
A couple of things come to mind.
- A new personal taxonomy. I need to reconfigure my categories and their interconnections. I've been maintaining public pages on
Articles
Blogs
Building Community
CSS, Semantic Mark-Up, and codes
Design
First Principles
Glossary
How People Learn
Knowledge Management
Learning Links
Learning Standards
Making It Work (Implementing)
Meta-Learning
Metrics & ROI
Presentations
Psychology
Social Software
The eLearning Museum
Time
Visual Learning
Workflow Learning - ...and I've been using these categories to classify Internet Time Blog entries:
Blogging
Books
Collaboration
Customer care
Design
Emergent Learning
handbook
Just Jay
Learning
Meta
Networking
Outbound
Ref
store
Time
Visual
Workflow-based eLearningI'll probably draw a concept map using these topics and categories as nodes. Then I'll be able to recognize what I've been missing.
- Collaboration. Since there's no way on earth I'm going to keep up to date with these subjects by trolling source documents, I will hone the quality of my editorial network.
Perhaps I'll apply Rob Cross's notation for analyzing social links in business to people I learn from. Rate the editors, so to speak. Look out for echo effects, group think, frequency, freshness, disciplinary focus, etc.
Learning is work.
Posted by Jay Cross at March 3, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack
