Euro links

eLearningPost points to Content Village, a page of useful links to eLearning, mainly in Europe (although Internet Time is there, as well as Meta-Learning Lab).

The 22 Laws... of Branding

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries, Laura Ries.

That's about as deep as this book gets. The "Laws" could be termed the "Observations." Most of them say one thing, "Focus." Less is more. Don't try to be all things to all people.

Oh, by the way, don't name yourself this:

Time by Design

Time by Design makes watches and on-screen clocks that are intriguing but difficult to read.

Their site is a charming collection of quotes and observations about time.

Thinking about 2012

What should business be prepared to address in the next decade? The Global Business Network asked fifty well-known people and has shared selected quotes on their site. The whole lot will appear in What’s Next? Exploring the New Terrain for Business.

These quotes grabbed my attention:

If you made a model of the ideal global economy, does it make the most sense to have only a few specialists make the things we need and have them ship those things to wherever they’re needed, or does it actually make more sense to have many local origins for those things? Kevin Kelly

In China, they’re discovering that when you redecorate your bathroom and get ten pairs of platform shoes and a nose job, you’re still unhappy. Orville Schell

The way to create healthy, vibrant economies and societies is through diversity. We know that scientifically. Any system that loses its diversity loses its resiliency and is more subject to sudden shocks and changes from which it can’t recover. The corporatization of the world is the loss of diversity—it’s forcing uniformity upon people. Paul Hawken

That’s what this Cultural Revolution is about: How everything fits together than now appears disconnected. It’s the search for coherence in what is increasingly incoherent. We’re trying to get into the box. We are trying to create a new box. Thinking outside the box turns out to be so yesterday. Joel Garreau

You can’t have part of the world where there’s a small, aging bubble of Western elites and then this massive, throbbing, younger, and increasingly impoverished group of people. Jaron Lanier

The question is whether we’ll have a youth culture with old demographics. Youth culture, geezer bodies—does that work? Kevin Kelly

I believe we are heading toward a single global culture. That’s a very scary thought to most people because they see that if they’re not part of the dominant culture, then their culture will be wiped out, their values will be wiped out, the things that are important to them will be wiped out. Yet, I think that it is absolutely inevitable. Danny Hillis

There’s a perfect storm coming at the 100-nanometer level. Information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology are all converging on that scale. Stewart Brand

Education is where medicine was about 100 years ago. A hundred years ago, most of medicine was empirical—somebody tried it and figured out whether it worked or not. Gradually, over the last century, medicine has become half scientific and half empirical. Over the next few decades, I suspect the same thing will happen with education. William Calvin

If you get microbiologists drunk, or at least a few beers into them, it’s not rare for them to say they’ll have aging solved in 20 years. Robert Carlson

I think by any rational standards you’d have to say that the proposition we call China is a mass of almost insoluble contradictions. I could be wrong, but 1.3 billion people trying to have a lifestyle like Orange County? Can you imagine just the environmental consequences of that? Orville Schell

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

Family timeline

26-year family timeline

InfoRomanticism?

InfoRomanticism on the Internet
Romantic sensibility in the design of online content

To stimulate the visualization of potential answers, apply the art of drawing. This takes the form of hard sketches. Other synonyms include models, diagrams, renderings, thumbnails, storyboards, flat prototypes, studies, and "wireframes" (a term that I recently picked up). The benefit of drawing is to quickly provide a relative map of elements, text and graphics, in a playful format to expedite exploration of ideas. Drawing promotes an organic growth of concepts. Toggling between risk-taking and discovery-making is inherent here. Such a conceptual evolution provides an engaging platform to determine distinction and relevance of a variety of approaches. This, in turn, streamlines a concept's approval and translation into code.

Clear Sky, Pure Light

Clear Sky, Pure Light

Clear Sky, Pure Light is a collection of Henry David Thoreau's writings compiled by Christoper Childs. It's a beautiful little book physically, with a striking wood engraving of Thoreau on the cover, rich paper, and printed letterpress in an edition of 2000 copies. When I found it in mint condition for $4 at Pegasus Books, I couldn't resist. So for the last couple of weeks, Thoreau has entertained me whle sitting on the porceline throne in the scullery adjoining my office.

Color

This evening I read Bill Horton's Illustrating Computer Documentation, the Art of Presenting Information Graphically, On Paper and Online. (1991)

What a practical book! Now out of print, you can buy an electronic copy for $20 from Bill's website. Such a deal.

Bill goes on to give lots of information about color, some of it, ah, eye-opening. What freaks me out is how little use of color one finds in books, cases, "white" papers, and so forth.

The next chapter, Enriching Graphics, describes such things as how to number graphics and captions. Captions! Authors will spend hours getting the words just right or diddling over a comma, but dash off captions as if they were a useless bother. I have news: People read subheads, then captions, and then, if they're still on board, the body copy.

So many reminders. Page design. Cultural nuances. Symbol libraries. On and on. Illustrating Computer Documentation is chock full of rules of thumb and practical advice.

Engineer's UI

So much depends...

An Introduction
to the hard Semantic Web...
...in simple Haiku

A precious present,
Poetic semantic web
Everything flows.

from Stephen Downes

Communities of Practice

Etienne Wenger and Bill Snyder

A hundred of us are tuned in on Saba Live (AKA Placeware), listening to these two champions of communities of practice (CoP). This month's installment of Saba's Human Capital Live!, hosted by Saba CLO Brooke Manville. I found this quite worthwhile.

We're talking about professionals. One definition of professional is "active member of a professional community of practice." Brooke: "In the knowledge economy, learning is doing." Trust is required to make CoPs function, but this isn't honesty so much as authenticity in relationships -- being reliable, making a contribution, and upholding community standards.

There's "more."

Looking at how communities spread and grow, small groups connect with others through people whose role is linking them. (Think of the people Malcolm Gladwell calls "connectors" in The Tipping Point. Think of communities as the informal learning objects of larger professional organizations. You can string them together into meta-communities, i.e. communities of communities.

This isn't so much a matter of technology, for communities can work with video conferencing, application sharing, listservs, websites, and the standard bag of Internet tricks. The telephone. Rhythm and ritual are key to keeping a community strong. The technoogy can be simple but the social aspects can be quite complex.

CoP is the formal organization recognizing that the informal organization exists. The formal organization should nurture and listen to the CoP, not try to control them. (I wonder how many traditional organizations will be able to facilitate CoP without unduly messing with them.) 2/3 of the participants just surveyed don't recognize community participation in indvidual performance reveiws.

CoP is knowledge up; KM is knowledge down. Experience validates the CoP.

Johnson & Johnson has maybe a hundred CoP. They look at how well they support their communities. Sponsorhsip, resrouces, barriers down, cultural issues, and technology. This is sort of an audit of CoP.

The "Tech Clubs" at Chrysler evolved into more strategic entities. In time, the Clubs helped Daimler and Chrysler come together as one organization.

What are the incentives that make a robust community work? In the SafeCities program, showing up at the teleconferences was the ticket of admission. F2F meetings reinforced the social context. These people are practitioners. They are accountable for improving their craft.

Strategic knowledge management cycle. You must identify the domains of knowledge that are critical to your strategy, find the communities, tie the learning to achieving results, and feeding the knowledge back into the business strategy. Brooke: Does the strategy feed the domain, or is it the other way around?

Metrics? Sometimes there's simply an intuitive belief that this is what to do. At Xerox, they calculate how much value is added. At HP, where they collect stories, they let the community tells its stories. At Shell, they tell the story of revitalizing a dry well -- the benefits pay for the donuts and travel forty times over. You need the stories to generate the numbers. The results come back on the job. If you save a few weeks, you can put a number on that.

Critical success factors: Domains energize core group: Executive sponsorship from client organizations. Enough support but not too much.

CPsquare is a CoP on CoP, a meta-community. (This strikes me as a community of prospects for Etienne and Bill.)

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The CoP story has a familiar ring. Deja vu. You see, at Princeton, I majored in Sociology. Our topic was culture. CoP and traditional cultures have much in common. A "Tech Club" at Chrysler has parallels to a camp of Trobrian Islanders. Sociologists in my department were more interested in aberrations than normalcy. Crimilnology (AKA "Sluts and Nuts") was extremely popular. We spent a lot of time looking into the dysfunctions of Soviet society (which included an entire underground economy to circumvent the failings of official society.) Russia would have ground to a half without the role of tolkach, the fellow who bartered under the table and off the record to swap carrots for tractor parts and so on. Food for thought: CoP as small group psychology in a wired world.

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Brooke Manville, Saba's Chief Learning Officer, has conducted a dozen of these one-hour sessions, including Peter Cappelli on Next Generation Employee Development, Jon Katzenbach on Motivation and Performance, Doug Smith on Value and Values, Laurie Bassi and Karen McGraw on Measuring Human Capital Capacity, Marcia Conner on Informal Learning, Tom Davenport on Baking Knowledge into Work, and Clark Quinn and yours truly on Applied Meta-Learning. On November 7, Wayne Hodgins will speak on New Process Models for Enhanced Productivity.

Archived presentations are available on Saba's website.

I don't have the patience for much of what passes for eLearning, but Human Capital Live has always justified investing an hour of my time. Check it out.

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A tech note: With Placeware, you see slides on the web in your browser; the sound comes from a toll-free telephone call. This provides a measure of redundancy. Thank goodness. My browser dumped me -- I could see the frame around the content, but not the content itself. The speaker phone kept me informed while I fired up my laptop to look at the slides.

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Why does Jay bother to document stuff like this? It helps me learn. And it's my contribution to the eLearning Community of Practice.

Legislating the last war

The Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act passed the Senate and awaits the President's signature. The American Library Association describes the law and its implications for Distance Education.

So. What about learning objects? What about learning as a process, not an event? What about learners building personal portfolios of lessons? What about replacing courses with short learning events?

By the way, the passages above were quoted under the doctrine of fair use.

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How is TechLearn changing since Advanstar bought it?

For one thing, Elliott didn't hire telemarketers to twist my arm once a week.

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LMS Purchase

This morning a colleague told me about several learners in a recent seminar he was leading who faced a tough challenge. Their organizations had spent almost their entire budget buying and installing learning management systems. They had next to nothing left with which to buy content.

This is like spending so much building the new library that there's no money left over to buy new books. Geez.

Knowledge "Management"

Criticizing Knowledge Management is about as challenging as shooting ducks in a bathtub. Nonetheless, it's fun to look at the extremes, and Darwin magazine has a humorous take on why KM isn't K or M.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Ideas BY ERIC BERKMAN begins with this apt description of the KM show in Santa Clara:

Generic Corporation

I've been thinking of writing sales literature and a dazzling PowerPoint for the generic 21st century enterprise. That last paragraph contains three or four universal truths and generic gripes:

1. It's the people that count, not the technology.
2. It's best to decide what you're trying to do before selecting the way to accomplish it.
3. The vendors are out to confuse you. (Surprise!)
4. Being an honest fellow, I feel compelled to warn you about the vendor charlatans. Trust me on this.

Another vendor warns, "It's mostly techie snake oil. They tell you, 'Enter a keyword and something will happen.' And that something is one of two things. Either they'll find a document for you or they'll go find a human with some sort of profile matching the keyword. But who cares? The information could be out-of-date."

Generic Corporation could use this paragraph to describe eLearning or Quality Management or the study McKinsey did for us or the Atkins Diet : "I don't know of a vendor out there willing to say, 'This is the business value you'll get, and I'm willing to be compensated based on how much value you'll receive,'" he says. "That's not how the industry works. It's, 'Buy my software and good luck.'"

Low-tech works.

Let's close with a few more truisms for Generic Corporation:

Don't forget: Buy low and sell high. Collect early and pay late. Start with the end in mind.

October 11, 2002

Blah, blah, blah

I mentioned yesterday that I'm assessing whether or not to take a daily hit of Distance-Educator.com. I just followed a link in today's issue to "An Assessment of the Effectiveness of e-learning in Corporate Training Programs" by Judith B. Strother of the Florida Institute of Technology.

This article is drivel. Thoroughly worthless. It addresses but one aspect of eLearning: lower delivery costs. It finds value in smile sheets. It brings up Jack Phillips' ROI approach (which I find anitquated) but cites only one application of it -- and the example is not eLearning.

The conclusion is the usual call for more study of the matter.

C'mon. Why no mention whatsoever of RESULTS? Outcomes? Meeting the objectives that justified conducting eLearning in the first place?

I rely on publications to screen their recommendations and save me time. Strike One.

Time Inflation

It shouldn't be a surprise, but it never fails to grab my attention: a one-hundred year-old menu listing steak for a dollars, scrambled eggs for a quarter, and beer for a dime.

The surprise comes from confusing the value of 1902 dollars with that of 2002 dollars. Thanks to the ravages of inflation, one 2002 dollar is worth one 1902 nickle. Expressed in today's values, the old menu's steak goes for $20, the eggs cost $5, and the beer is two bucks. No surprise there.

We live in a world that has sped up since 1902. A hundred years ago, my great grandfather might spend half an hour writing a letter and half an hour each way carrying it down to the Post Office to mail. These days I dash off an email in a matter of minutes. An hour is worth more to me, at least in business terms, because I can do more with it than in the past.

So, what's the time equivalent of the obsolete prices on my old menu? Is time really more precious now than it used to be?

At this point, all I have is questions.

Procrastination

Walking saves time. Huh? It's true. The Washington Post says so.

Jay's Overview of eLearning

Last Wednesday, I gave a guest lecture on eLearning to a group of seniors in the business program at San Francisco State University. Aside from the fun of it, preparing something like this forced me to evaluate where we are with eLearning. Today I chopped back on the slides (the talk on campus was two hours; you don't have the patience) and narrated a description of what's what. Cut on your speakers and listen to the talk .

Please drop me an email if you hit any glitches listening to the presentation. Thanks!

New Definition of Literacy?

Stephen's Web features an article today entitled The New Literacy.

Academics are wringing their hands over the decline in student literacy. Professors lament that their charges can't write a sentence, follow the rules of grammar, or read a complex passage. Last year researchers found that most of the students on the campus of a California State University lacked the skills to read the textbooks in their heavy backpacks.

Perhaps the current crop of students fill in for reading with other forms of literacy. They are "polyfocal."

Stephen Downes says,

Stephen purports that

Perhaps taking in many short bursts of information in parallel is superior to the text-only communication we are accustomed to. Stephen concludes, "The new literacy may not be an even greater grasp of the fine points of language, but rather, a capacity to move beyond the limits of text and to manipulate experience directly."

Robert Horn tells the story of a medical student at Stanford who whizzes through medical texts, taking in their messages by reading only the pictures.

There's not so much wrong with having a short attention span for a person who can grok deep meaning in tiny bursts of time.

R.I.P, ASAP

The New York Times reports, Forbes ASAP, Magazine of New Market, Shuts Down

Drat! Forbes ASAP was one of my favorite magazines. Its special one-topic issues were absolutely wonderful; I read them all cover-to-cover. The issue on Happiness featured articles from P.J. O'Rourke, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, George Plimpton, Noall Bushnell, Lance Armstrong, John Perry Barlow, Jesse Jackson, and Christie Hefner. For me, ASAP's special issues were the timeliness of a magazine combined with the quality of a damned good book.

It's ironic that the final issue deals with feedback, since feedback from the marketplace is what's closing ASAP down.

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Last night I attended a presentation at Silicon Valley World Internet Center that touched on "real-time analytics." This is a buzzword for immediate business feedback. Example: WalMart's systems notice an upswing in sales of flags on September 12, 2001, and automatically begins buying up the inventory of flag suppliers.

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Heinz Von Foerster

Heinz Von Foerster, one of the pioneers and co-founders of the field of cybernetics, died yesterday in his home on Rattlesnake Hill in Pescadero, CA. Converge magazine recently printed an interview with this wonderful man. Excerpts:

Also see Ted Kahn's commemorative page at Design Worlds.

Distance Educator

Distance-Educator.com provides a daily news summary and articles on eLearning.

• MIT's Open CourseWare debuts with 40 courses.
• Robert Gagne has died at age 85. Gagne is best known for linking a taxonomy of learning outcomes with nine instructional events and provided instructional designers with specific strategies that were based on a hierarchy of intellectual skills.
• There's a link to a light-weight article in IT-Analysis on The Future of eLearning
• E-learning finally gets on its running shoes, an article from the Sydney Morning Herald, reports on a shoe retailer that tied training records to cash-register data, finding a 10% to 20% boost in revenues attributable to training.
• A linked article in eSchool News reports on education in 2020. However, it turns out that the link is to an article about a study, not directly to the source material.

I signed up for the daily news and will decide whether this is worth my time or not in a week or two. At first glance, I think eLearningPost will continue to meet my general need for eLearning news.