Yin and Yang of home computer maintenance

The Dark Side

When I participate in events at L. A. 's Staples Convention Center, I forego the expensive hotels in favor of staying with Patsy. Not that Patsy and I have a thing going; she runs a delightful bed and breakfast half a mile from the Convention Center.

Half a dozen years ago, graffiti appeared on walls and sidewalks in Patsy's neighborhood with a vengeance. She and others vowed not to buckle under. As soon as a graffito appeared, Patsy's SWAT Team painted over it. Armed with buckets of paint, they prowled the streets at three in the morning. Within six months, the vandals moved on, doubtless to a more complacent, less proud neighborhood.

This morning I could identify with Patsy. My inbox was host to hundreds of virtus-laden email bombs. Made for the quaint old days when viruses came in twos and threes, Norton Anti-Virus couldn't handle the situation. After answering "Yes" forty or fifty times to Norton's repeated questioning about whether I wanted to Quaranteen the offending email, I gave up.

I went to my server and deleted page after page of email with subjects like "Test" and "Hello."

In a more just world, the virus vandals would feel a little pain whenever I delete their garbage. I'd like to experience the hard-won satisfaction of Patsy's group, driving the jerks out of my space.

In the meanwhile, I wish Norton Anti-Virus would let me check a box once and for all time signifying that, "No, I never want to open virus-laden Spam."

Now it's as if the local police were to show up at my door every time they catch a criminal to tell me, "Look at what we did for you." Norton's bargain is, "I'll quaranteen your virus in exchange for my pop-up."

The Light Side

Monday night my blogs began to act strangely. I was unable to post an entry. This morning, after 90 minutes of getting through the email-ffiti, an email from Stephen Downes alerted me that the comment function on my blogs was down.

When I tried to post an entry, I got this in return: "Can't open file: 'mt_trackback.MYI'. (errno: 145)" I turned to the Moveable Type Support Forum, dreading a day of geeking through code in languages I don't understand. Could I run "phpAdmin"? Yes, it turned out I could. Soon, all my raw MySQL files were on the screen. A couple of keystrokes could banish years of entries into the aether. At this level, you work without a net. I put a checkmark next to the offending file and clicked "Repair." Everything works again! This is great. Wonderful. Something works!! On the first time!!! I walked the line and didn't fall. I don't need no stinking net!!!! Huzzah!!!!!

Yes!

elearnopaedia

Check out ADL's elearnopaedia. Lotsa links.

Initially I was miffed because I couldn't find my site. Then I turned to "Favorites," a select list of nine. Two are ADL's own sites. Another two are Marcia and Wayne's Learnativity in duplicate (and try Ageless Learner if you want to keep up with Marcia, who, not content with just writing a book, has two books coming out). Learning Circuits is a great choice but for some reason they are down today. Thiagi's site is always gamey; I mean about games. TechForum is represented with a lame events calendar which lists only their own (Go to Learning Circuits or eLearning Centre for a complete calendar). The glossary, curiously, is Australian; e-boolabong? e-digeradoo? And that leaves...ta-da...Internet Time Blog.

There's a lot more here than Favorites, so I'll want to poke around before giving the elearnopaedia anything but high marks for effort. A couple of areas for improvement:

• It would certainly be helpful to have a way for readers to rate the resources. Think of the time you'd save by cherry-picking and reading only the top articles.
  
• My site has more than 25 papers and published articles I've written and a dozen presentations, many available with narration. I maintain an extensive link list and special sections on workflow learning, visual learning, ROI, design, etc. Yet most link lists don't do deep linking. My 500 MB of material gets the same signpost as a three-page vendor site of unoriginal material. I don't mean to whine; I get visitors by the boatload but I do find that many link listers do their readers a disservice by not giving a very full picture of what's out there.
  
  Another example just came to mind. Have you ever visited the archives of Stephen Downes' site? It's awesome. Click one of these links

Another plus for ADL. They at least try to provide descriptions with links. Another reason I like eLearning Centre is that Jane Knight not only provides descriptions, she also tells what's good and what's not.

Use your head!

Brains and Brawn, One and the Same

By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: January 25, 2004

Researchers in Germany report that the brain is similar to muscles in that if you exercise, it will grow:

Since they can't observe what's going on at the cellular level, the scientists don't know if the new weight is due to new cells or new connections. The people the Times spoke with think it's the connections. There are plenty of them:

Prediction: This finding will appear in Training, T+D, and the other vehicles of the training industry's popular press with the fervor of The National Enquirer reporting Michael Jackson's affair with Liz Taylor.

Does reading garbage, memorizing the ball scores, looking at porn, and watching Harry Potter movies a dozen times make one's brain heavier? Just thinking about that makes it hard for me to hold my head up.

The Moment of Chaos: Warning

I just finished reading The Moment of Complexity by Mark C. Taylor. I picked up a few memes and some interesting tidbits. However, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't. Do yourself a favor and read my thoughts before wading into this tome's 275 pages:

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Fourth Moment of Complexity

When we left off at our previous moment of complexity, the author finally stopped dropping big names on campus (e.g. Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant) and got around to defining complex adaptive systems.

evolving complexity

My suspicions were aroused when the author launches into a ten-page review of Gödel, Escher, Bach. (A leftover from another project? A paper from a grad student?) Using the word "ant" as a transition, we're suddenly reading John Holland's observation that the economy, our central nervous systems, ecologies, immune systmes, the development of multicellular organisms, and the processes of evolutionary genetics are all adaptive nonlinear networks at heart. Murray Gell-Mann throws in culture and computer programs.

The instability of complex systems makes you consider them over time. Stuart Kauffman critiques Darwin, noting that organisms resemble Rube Goldberg machines. Kauffman's hot; without self-organization, he notes, evolution would not be possible. If you thought Holland covered a lot of territory, be aware that Kauffman's vision covers not only science but also society, politics, metaphysics, and religion. Kauffman is convinced that the emergence of order is spontaneous but not accidental. We're inevitably headed for a single, global culture wherein people, tech, economics, and knowledge all blend together all over the planet.

screening information

What does it mean if the electricity in our heads conforms to the rules of complex adaptive systems? The author doesn't ask that directly. Instead, he writes several pages worthy of Castaneda's brujo after a double-dose of peyote:

Wow. That's one hell of a paragraph. I read it three times. Web without a weaver. Nothing new under the sun. Reproducing, not producing. Nobody will re-engineer this one. Unless they look at it as denial of responsibility. Or taking on a new religion which submerges the individual. Or Mark smoking something.

Gotta love this one:

Oh, God. Kill me before I write again!

The title of Kevin Kelly's great bio book springs to mind: Out of Control.

Gell-Mann writes of cultural DNA, "borrowing a term from Hazel Henderson." Plate-o-shrimp. I'd never heard of Hazel Henderson until June of last year. She said that the economists who control the political side nationally pay attention to only four factors — unemployment, deficits, inflation, and interest rates. But the world is more complex than that. The economists are linear and therefore can’t grok complex systems. A “Post-Cartesian Scientific Worldview” sees interconnectedness, redistribution (recycling), heterarchy (webs), complimentarity (both/and), etc. Bingo! Later in the day I thanked Hazel for cluing me in to why I'd always thought economics was a crock.

Daniel Dennett takes memes seriously. He figures they can reprogram with operating system of the brain. Memes and genes are in a coevolutionary, coadaptive relationship. Ray Kurtzweil goes further: our human software will replace our bodily hardware.

the currency of education

Uh-oh. In this chapter, the author hops on the dot-com era eLearning bandwagon. He says "education is a commodity that is distributable through telematic technologies." He repeats lines from Merrill Lynch's gushy The Book of Knowledge.

The founder of Knowledge Universe was telling academic institutions "We are going to eat your lunch." (A couple of years after this, Milken had bailed, closing the doors of almost all of his educational acquisitions except Leap Frog, which has become such a big winner it has more than covered Milken's losses in the rest of his Universe.)

Bankrolled by investment banker Herbert Allen, the author founds Global Educaiton Network. His faculty critics just aren't seeing the big picture. "The most important legacy we can leave the next generation is the hope that creative change is still possible."

>hr>

This final chapter has next to nothing to do with what comes before. It's as if Mark needed another forty pages to fulfilll his book contract, so he excised parts of his business plan for GEN and his diary from that time, and just slapped them onto the end of the manuscript.

Now the "book without an author" theme which I found capivating the first time through seems an apologia, a rationalization for starting a book but not finishing it.

Mark C. Taylor's webiste at WIlliams

The website of the Global Education Network has a screenshot, an 800 number, and the words "Our website is undergoing maintenance.
We apologize for the inconvenience."

Personal or professional?

Where does one draw the line between personal interests and professional interests?

The line between personal and professional gets blurry, particularly if you have a home office and if you live what Bill Gates used to call "the web lifestyle." My email inbox contains project updates, appeals for help, ads for credit counseling and penis enlargement, invitations to speak at conferences, and a note from Mom. I take photos of new products and of my dogs.

Perhaps a better question is "Where should one draw the line between personal and professional?" My time used to be something like this:

I didn't confuse hobbies and vacation with managing a software start-up or selling training programs to large banks.

Yesterday I finished assembling a website for capturing and sharing the history and romance of Berkeley's paths for the Berkeley Path Wanderers Association. A hobby, right? Until I used the same skillset to put together a blog for the Workflow Institute.

If I kept a timecard (perish the thought), I'd have to give most of my waking minutes multiple codes:

It's Saturday morning and I'm preparing a presentation for Tuesday's meeting of the eLearning Forum. That's personal and professional.

I don't have an answer yet. I'll toss it to my subconscious neurons to work on. My high degree of personal and professional activites works for me. I get to do what I like in either realm. This feels right, so long as one sphere doesn't limit the scope of the other:

Do others think this way? Is there a problem?

A Third Moment of Complexity

critical emergence

The "critics" that are critical here are structuralists, deconstructionists, and worse. They argue over meaning but always make the same point, namely that, "systems and structures inevitably totalize by excluding difference and repressing otherness."

Uber-structuralist Lévi-Strauss looks at language as if phonemes and morphemes are like protons and neutrons, enabling one to construct a periodic table of the language. "I have always aimed at drawing up an inventory of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitary data to some kind of order." So...the world is simple, we just have yet to discover the code.

Along comes Foucault. (I'm glad I graduated from college before this crew began to publish.) Structure? Patterns? Thinking? All of this is context-specfic. Do the cultural archeology and you find that language, perception, and practice are all constructed.

Derrida, Kirkegaard, Hegel, Freud, Baudrillard. Regarding "The End of Production," Baudrillard wrote, "The first shockwave of this transition from produtction to pure and simple reproduction took place in May '68. They struck the universities first, and the faculty of human sciences first of all, becuase that was where it became most evident (even without a clear "political" consciousness) that we were no longer productive, only reprductive (and that lecturers, science and culture were themselves only relays in the general reproduction of the system.)"

Yawn. May '68. Productivity on campus. Hmmm. The month before, I started attending the eight-week Army Office Basic Course at Ft. Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. My roommate and I drank beer and watched reruns of "Combat" for homework. (We'd swagger into class the next day, mouthing the World War II solider talk Vic Morrow used in the foxhole.) Then we'd play 'Nam Arty' for gunnery practice. You played Nam Arty by lying on your back behind the sofa with a handful of darts. You'd lob the darts over the side, trying to hit the target pinned to the back of the closet door across the room. The other player, your spotter, gave feedback with which to correct your aim. My roommate and I both graduated with Top Honors and Expert Marksman status. Who cares about non-production on campus? We were preparting to fight a war. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

strange loops

René Magritte, Derrida, Isaac Newton, Schiller, Hegel, and Heidegger. Remember the story about the guy who visits prison. One prisoner says "35," and the cell block rocks with laughter. Another con says "84," again followed by gales of laughter. Puzzled, the newcomer asks what's up. He is told that since everyone's heard all the jokes, they numbered them to save time. The visitor shouts "23." Total silence. Nothing. Why happened? he asked. Why aren't they laughing? "It's all in how you tell it," he was told. To which I reply "Descartes!" "Kant!" "Humberto Maturana!" I'm not laughing over this chapter.

"Descartes set in motion developments that eventually led to 'the will to master,' which has resulted in twentieth-century techno-science. Just as sociolcultural constructivism leads to a form of subjective idealism that negates objectivity by consuming the natural world, so the will to mastery issues in a 'subjective egoism,' which is ultimately destructive. " Ho, ho, ho. Those professors can really tell 'em, can't they?

noise in formation

You must understand the relationship of information to complexity and vice-versa in order to appreciate the importance of the emerging network culture. If you'd read Claude Shannon, you can skip this chapter.

emerging complexity

The task of making meaning out of randomness is what self-organization is all about, wrote Henri Atlan in his inexplicably untranslated L'organisation biologique et la thé de l'information (1972).

Defining complexity is complex. Besiders, humanity always lusts for simplicity. Newton was more metaphysician than physicist. He wrote more religious treatises than science works. One God, one way things happen.

Herbert Simon said complexity came from a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way.

Complex systems are different from complicated systems. A snowflake is complicated but it comes from simple rules. It doesn't change form until it melts. Nor is a complex system chaotic; chaos is the lack of all order, because the internal parts are not connected.

The characteristics are complex systems are:

1. Many parts, connected in multiple ways
   
2. Diverse components interacting both serially and in parallel
   
3. Spontaneously self-organizing
   
4. Can't be reverse-engineered
   
5. Interaction of parts changes the whole
   
6. Open, adaptive, evolving
   
7. Emergence occurs far from equilibrium, on the edge of chaos

Large systems with many components evolve to a critical state way out of equilibrium. One more snowflake may precipitate the avalanche.

"32!" Oh wait, I meant to quote the author, saying, "A few lines later, he concludes the novel with a 'Chorous Logico-Philosophicus' which parodies Wittgenstein while suggesting the point of the tale the authors have spun:

Emergent complexity
Bear us aloft!

Don't you love it when professors talk dirty?

Complex behavior comes from the interplay of organisms, not from the action of any single organism.

For hundreds of years, we've been praying in Newton's church. Complexity is a new system of beliefs. It's impossible to build faith in complexity by singing from the Newtonian hymnal. Hence, to become polytheistic and embrace both new and old, the complexity liturgy must be repeated until it penetrates our resistances. So, one more time:

---

Jay's Ruminations

Today Bob Horn told me he's being awarded a lifetime achievement award from ISPI. He described some of his current work on "messy problems" for the likes of NASA. Since I was in the midst of my complexity readings, I said that the ISPI I had known treated every situation as a closed system. Bob's acceptance speech may address instructional design solutions to messy problems. This I'd love to see.

Reading through page after page of philosophical horsefeathers, I ask "Am I getting anything out of this?" Enough to make it worthwhile continuing, I guess. I've got about a hundred pages to go. Several evenings of speed reading and page-turning with a yellow marker in hand. That's bedtime stuff.

Earlier today I started reading Dave Snowden's papers on JIT KM. He draws heavily on complexity but makes it useful rather than a vocabulary and postmodern Euro-vocabulary test. My take on Snowden's work will pop up in other posts here.

You might compare the definition of complexity here with the one in It's Alive.

Bear with me through this trying journey. My gut tells me the complexity paradigm is vital to our understanding of the world. It also suggests immediate practical applications. Don't let my thinking out loud drive you away! This is a short journey through the abyss of academia.

"Maxwell's equations, Schrödinger's equation, and Hamiltonian mechanics can each be expressed in a few lines. The ideas that form the foundation of our worldview are also very simple indeed: The world is lawful, and the same basic laws hold everywhere. Everything is simple, neat, and expressible in terms of everyday mathematics, either partial or ordinary differential equations. Everything is simple and neat, except, of course, the world. Every place we look outside the physics classroom we see a world of amazing complexity. The world contains many examples of complex ecologies at all levels: huge mountain ranges, the delicate ridge on the surface of a sand dune, the salt spray coming off a wave, the interdependencies of financial markets, and the true ecologies formed by living things. Each situation is highly organized and distinctive, with biological systems forming a limiting case of exceptional complexity. So why, if the laws are so simple, is the world so complicated?"

Simple Lessons from Complexity written by Nigel Goldenfeld and Leo P. Kadanoff in Science (vol. 284, 2 April 1999:

eLearning Forum & 2014

Another reason to come to eLearning Forum this Tuesday:

Door prizes!

You must register by this evening!

RSS Winterfest 2

Jay's takeaway: Criticizing blogging by looking at individual blogs is akin to denying the importance of books after looking at individual pages. Pages may inform but the power is in their aggregation into books. Individual blogs inform but a sea of blogs may change our lives and work. The sum is greater than the parts.

Back to realtime notes. I'm tuning in late and wandering in and out of the room. Chad Dierson and Bob Scoble are going to talk about enterprise apps. Chad is the CTO of InfoWorld. He's going to dicuss how InfoWorld uses RSS internallly.

RSS is so simple that it saves days of phone deliberations. Negotiating with other content providers is a snap, e.g. how to mark up a headline. (The slides are out of sync. Joking about how these slides are clunkier than RSS.) InfoWorld uses blogs to share information internally. Chad shows a page -- but notes that this is the first time he's really looked at the raw blog because he gets all this through RSS.

RSS as PR http://www.idc.com/en_US/st/rss/idcpressreleasees.xml
PR newswire http://rss.prnewswire.com

See www.newsgator.com/casestudies/triplepoint.aspx for more on using RSS in the enterprise.

RSS? RDF? Atom? InfoWorld chose RSS 1.0 because they need to exchange RSS with their sister companies. The public feeds are RSS 2.0. Chad uses Moveable Type (used to use Radio) because he wanted to be able to post from anywhere he was; Radio generally runs from one machine. No single system meets all needs.

IT choices are often top down, but with RSS, things can be bottom-up. ("We're bottom-up at InfoWorld. The desktops here are virtually uncontrollable.") We tell people to install whatever tool they want.

Scoble: Things won't take off (in business) until there's pressure to post. There's no cross-team collaboration until you can see who's posting and find them. You can import and export RSS feeds via SharePoint. We're constantly trying to evangelize RSS internally at Microsoft.

Rumor has it that Disney is using RSS internally.

Via .NET, you're going to be able to see live news notices in the sidebar of your browser. Put a few feeds right there.

We gave up on Groove because it wasn't apparent when someone added something new.

Some people mistakenly think that blogs are just diaries for teenagers' journals. They don't appreciate that this is a great way for people to collaborate.

NewsGator is a way to introduce things because "everyone at Microsoft lives in Outlook."

Scoble gets through to his own execs by writing things in his public blog. He posted something about SharePoint needing to incorporate RSS and heard back from the general manager within minutes.

Microsoft is trying to become more transparent. It's not fast enough for the revolutionaries.

At InfoWorld, a weekly column takes a week of leadtime -- for fact-checking, edit, etc. But when a reporter posts to his weblog, it's out there immediately.

InfoWorld uses Technorati and Feedster for market intelligence.

Robert Scoble, who is fighting the good fight to clue in Microsoft and make the company take the Cluetrain pill, kept pushing his mantra, "I read 1200 blogs a day in an hour." Then he threw in "plus 200 internal Microsoft blogs." As the day wore on, this morphed into 1,200 blogs in an hour or two.

Scobelizer magic

One hour = 3600 seconds.
1,200 blogs/hour = 3 seconds/blog
but.... Stop to read, say, 30 blogs. 10 take a minute to read, 10 take three minutes to read and contemplate. 5 take two minutes to read, comment, and pass along to someone else, and 3 require five minutes to read, interpret, reflect upon, and respond to the author.
So subtract (10 x 1) + (10 x 3) + (5 x 2) + (3 x 5) = 60 minutes.
That leaves 0 minutes to read the feeds in the first place.

Something here is overevangelistic.

Copernic Summarizer & ROI

At Winterfest RSS this morning, Bob Scoble talked of blowing people's minds by showing how he can keep up with 1,200 blogs in an hour a day. (RSS lets you read the headlines and drill down only when an item is of interest.) I'm applying similar logic to reading from dead trees (AKA paper).

I have a dozen white papers I'd like to read in the next couple of days. Well, "read" isn't quite the rigth word. I want to extract and retain any new information from them that ties into my current quests.

1. First I would like to assess which papers are worthwhile putting some time into and which are not.
2. Some chunks of the remaining papers will be more worthwhile than others. I'd like to be able to focus on the high-return sections and breeze through the rest rapidly.
3. My days are full. When I'm not reading for pleasure, I want to read as quickly as I can while still retaining the message.

Copernic Summarizer is going to enable me to do all that and more.

As they say on the Copernic website,

I turned Copernic loose on Workflow Leaning, 285 pages (124,000 words) of technical matter and explanations. Minutes later I had a 1000-word summary. Click of a button and I had a 250-word summary. Click, a 100-word summary.

Each summary is a selection of representative sentences. Reading the summary tells you what you want to take the time to read the old-fashioned way. There's some sort of artificial intelligence doing a good job behind the scenes here; the summaries make for great reading.

It's hard to believe technology like this is available, especially with a price tag of only $60. You can try a full-featured 30-day demo for free.

Seeing is believing, so up ahead, I'll show you a few summaries of my eBook, Metrics. Who knows but what you'll see enough to make you want to order the full version of Metrics. For the price of Copernic, you could buy two copies and have enough left over for a cup of coffee and an hour of online wireless time at Starbuck's.

Here is Metrics in 100 words:

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

Here is Metrics in 250 words:

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

"Investment" is what you pay to achieve the return.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

If you're growing into a new area of capability, you may spend half your time learning.

"People engaged in learning and creating the future together can move beyond the old structure, strategy, and systems philosophy of running the business.

International Data Corporation studied the buying behavior of corporate and IT training managers and concluded that, "ROI will no longer be measured in 'savings' or 'reduced cost of training.'" Instead, attention will be directed to "measurable changes to business metrics resulting from training investments.

Until you know what an individual manager is trying to accomplish, you can't talk to them about potential results.

This eLearning infrastructure would give Charlie a platform for broadcasting and reinforcing his message about transforming our organization.

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen.

Finally, here is Metrics in 1,000 words:

Few others were pointing out the absurdity of traditional accounting measures and the famous "four levels."

In either case, you need to convert the return to profit, or profit contribution.

Applying reasonable rules of thumb, the 15% increase in customer satisfaction could become $1.5 million in profit.

When you talk with an executive, you need to talk about execution.

At a breakout session at TechLearn several years ago, I could hardly sit still while a researcher told four dozen training managers how to use ROI to sell their programs.

You want to build a set of shared assumptions and a logic train that translates training activities to business results.

The vice president of operations and technology training told us how she drummed up management support of eLearning.

The CIO of the bank and other top managers have dubbed her "e-Laura" and use chance encounters for updates on the bank's eLearning progress.

For example, if Chevron-Texaco's accountants uncover a $32,000 error in the sales department's expense budget, they don't make Chevron-Texaco note the error in its annual report.

A very conservative businessperson values these as "soft" benefits and doesn't factor them into ROI calculations.

In sum, following accounting conventions to the letter can lead to making the wrong decision.

"Investment" is what you pay to achieve the return.

When you add up the cost of development, salaries of people out of the field for training, and implementation cost, your "all-in" cost for the project, soup-to-nuts, is $1 million.

If you're growing into a new area of capability, you may spend half your time learning.

"People engaged in learning and creating the future together can move beyond the old structure, strategy, and systems philosophy of running the business.

Training has earned a bad reputation in executive management.

Join me for a fresh look at ROI in the information age.

International Data Corporation studied the buying behavior of corporate and IT training managers and concluded that, "ROI will no longer be measured in 'savings' or 'reduced cost of training.'" Instead, attention will be directed to "measurable changes to business metrics resulting from training investments.

Until you know what an individual manager is trying to accomplish, you can't talk to them about potential results.

When you're working with the right client, measuring results is not difficult.

Accounting conventions play a major role in ruining numbers' reputation.

"Good Heavens, this effort is going to cost us $8 million and change.

This eLearning infrastructure would give Charlie a platform for broadcasting and reinforcing his message about transforming our organization.

A Fortune 50 company used eLearning, knowledge management, and collaboration to bring new-hire sales people up to speed in six months instead of fifteen.

Throughout most of 2000, SmartForce was among my marketing clients.

SmartForce ran off the rails -- It's a complicated story -- but accelerating employee time-to-performance remains one of the biggest paybacks of any investment in corporate learning.

Accelerate the development of the direct sales force.

HP VARs who participate in eLearning build better customer relationships and make more sales.

Schwab and others provide user-friendly, high-quality, and effective learning tools on their Web sites, thereby creating more knowledgeable investors and increasing the likelihood that they will become long-term customers.

The cost of implementing eLearning throughout an organization the size of Widgetware (not just for the sales force) would be approximately $1 million.

Dell didn't get to be the number one computer company in the United States by ignoring customers' needs.

"Why would a world-class company offer anything but world-class learning opportunities to help its customers get the most out of their computers?"

IC Growth has developed models and formulas that link intellectual capital management to economic profit.

Business looks and feels radically different from in your father's day, and it's changing so fast you will hardly recognize it a decade hence.

Accounting -- a system of assumptions and conventions for identifying, measuring, recording, and communicating economic information.

Unlike the cost of an asset, the cost of an expense does not provide a future benefit to the business.

In this case, the roi du soleil.

In Fall 2000, a panel of ROI gurus joined in conversation about the state of ROI calculations today, what needs to be measured, and the ROI of eLearning.

Welcome to today's roundtable on return on investment, part of our series on Making eLearning Work for You.

If people want to know more about what we're discussing today, they should read Ed's Running Training Like a Business and Jack's Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs.

I spent most of my career on the customer side of the equation, so I come at this from the point of view of having been a customer of training providers for many, many years.

All the business people I know want to take the time to understand the return on the investments they're making.

To make a credible ROI argument, you have to start before any intervention takes place.

Because otherwise it's like the cartoon where Charlie Brown shoots an arrow and then goes and draws the target around it.

Personalization, where learning is tailored to my style, what I need to know, and where I can test out of things I already know, saves time and makes it interesting.

Most business and university executives know better than to base strategic decisions on a two-decimal-point difference in ROI figures.

But they insist on ROI and other metrics as a form of business discipline to get myopic unit managers to consider the mission of the overall organization, not just the operations of their own department.

This is bound to be a challenging transition because many training professionals need additional skills to assume the new role, upper level executives need see learning as a strategic asset, and there need to be examples that demonstrate this new role and its benefits.

Where infrastructure investment is concerned, as is the case of many of the initial costs associated with eLearning (including training a first generation of trainers and administrators), this should be obvious.

Copernic, where were you when I was in college?

RSS Winterfest

I'm plugged into RSS WInterfest, an online conference and roundtable about the future of syndication. Currently there's an online discussion among Dan Gilmour, his brother Steve, Bob Scoble, Chris Pirillo, and Jon Udell. The wiki is here.

"Civilians don't understand ."

"People get syndication when they see it. If they know Google and email, they say, sure, I see how to use that."

"The power-user audience is the key to the rapid acceleration of the RSS environment."

Jon: says "A lot of the action has been around the writers. They tend toward being geeks. The big action will happen as readers come on board. They will gravitate toward their own groups, e.g. doctors, lawyers, etc." Steve Gilmour thinks we're further along.

Scoble has been evangelizing RSS at Microsoft. It's amazing how few people have heard of RSS or know how to use it. When they see Bob reading through 1200 blogs in an hour, they get it. All of the presidential campaigns have RSS feeds which shows that RSS is crossing the chasm.

Chris Pirillo woke up when he noticed that half his traffic was coming through RSS. It's not a replacement; it's augmentation. Lockergnome gives equal billing to RSS and email delivery. Rolling Stone, Virgin UK, and Warner Bros. have RSS feeds. Advertising within the feed may help bring things on.

"Once you find one blog in your area of interest, you can springboard to people with similar internests. Technorati is looking at assembling groups by interest."

Dan Gilmour brings up the notion of RSS news delivery. Hand-RSS works on a Treo. This can be big. His brother concurs that the multiplatform aspects are important. Steve foresees RSS morphing into a rich client, an information router, in the middle of the corporate desktop.

Folks who experience this as reading only have one particular experience; it's awareness transmission. When you also begin to publish, it becomes collaborative.

Directories? Check out 2rsss.com. DMOZ has syndic8.com.

As a learning experience, it's great to listen in on a conversation among experts. For me, note-taking cements things in my memory. The downside of taking part in this sort of event is the general problem of distractions when learning on the desktop. Several phone calls broke my concentration. One of these kicked off a new business relationship, so I was happy for the interruption.

My take on RSS and parallel efforts: This is technology in the making. It's very important. It's how individual blog-islands will bridge together.

The mainstream press seems oblivious to the power of the hive in this. The New York Times writes as if blogs were little but teenie-boppers' online diaries. John C. Dvorak suggests that blogs are a failing channel for geeks. Pundits discount the importance of hundreds of thousands of individual voices because most blogs never go anywhere; they miss the point that this occurs because the barriers to entry (no cost and intuitive set-up) are so low. If five hundred thousand people were to take up any other new pursuit, e.g. frizzbie golf or roller-blading, that alone would be news. We wouldn't see news stories that "Roller blading may not last because five million people thought about doing it but only one in ten actually took it up."

The future of eLearning -- this Tuesday

Today I met with Jonathan Star at Global Business Network to refine our presentation at this Tuesday's session of the eLearning Forum. Our theme is the Edinburgh Scenarios, the ten-year scenario learning exercise being funded by Scottish Enterprise.

For information on our public session at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Conference Center in Mountain View, see the eLearning Forum website.

To participate from afar, sign up to attend over the 'net, courtesy of Interwise.

As I was printing a few pages about the Edinburgh Scenarios, I got a new warning message, words that tell me we already live in "The Age of the Smart Machiine."

TechKnowledge Travel Plans

I just booked my flight and room for ASTD TechKnowledge in Anaheim the second week in February. This will be about my umpteenth time working across Katella Boulevard from the Kingdom of the Mouse.

You don't need to stay at the Convention hotels. I have never stayed at the Hilton or the Marriott on the Convention Center grounds. Too rich for my blood. Five years ago I stayed at a cheapo motel on Harbor for $40/night; it's since been torn down.

This time around, I'll be at the Anabella. It's on Katella, a five-minute walk from the Conference Center. Clean. Friendly. Laid back. I had a good experience there two years ago.

A deluxe room goes for $64/night ($55 before tax) from hotel.net.

My flight from Oakland to Orange County is costing more than I'd planned on: $111 roundtrip (Alaska Air, orbitz.com) because I didn't reserve far enough in advance to qualify for Southwest's $60 ticket.

I wouldn't dream of paying to go to DisneyLand. (I did it long ago; my son has outgrown it; I consider Disney almost fascist). However, you can get the Disney aura by walking through Downtown Disney, a Disneyesque shopping mall with restaurants. It's walking distance from the hotels.

Drop me an email if you'd like to meet while I'm in Southern California.

Books Update

Sellout!

The first printing of Lance Dublin's and my book, Implementing eLearning, has sold out.

Don't worry. It's at the printer now. New stock will be ready in ten days.

Lance and I are still offering a free Implementation Action Planning Template to anyone who requests it.

---

I just updated my Books page. It's dangerous work. (I simply must get a copy of this one. )

You're more likely to find what I'm reading now here.

A second Moment of Complexity

from grid to network

Enormous changes are afoot.

The grid = modernism. Purity of form. Le Corbusier.

Up the hill from my house, there's a Lutheran seminary. The chapel is a knockoff of Le Corbusier's church at Roncesville. The chapel is atop a hill overlooking the great valley of Tilden Park -- but the orientation of the chapel is such that you can't take in the beautiful view. At first I thought this really stupid. Having read a bit of Cobusier in this book, it was probably on purpose. Corbu though geometry was heaven-sent. He wrote, "Modern art and thought -- after a century of analysis -- are now seeking beyond what is merely accidental; geometry leads them in mathematical forms, a more and more generalized attitude."

Straight lines may not appear in nature but they prevent us from becoming distracted. Right angles are precise; the outside world is messy. Corbu was a champion of reason over feelin and of mind over body. The grid is what defines machines and order; the grid is where philosophy, art, life, and architecture converge.

Le Corbusier goes so far as to suggest that "We must build on a clear site." Chop down those trees and bulldoze the irregularities. Start sterile and end up clean.

Last year our family vacationed in Toronto. One day we walked ten blocks in the underground tunnel system and emerged in a complex of absolutely beautiful buildings by Mies van der Rohe. Four towers, each a black rectangle on stilts sheathing a major bank, surrounded a quadrangle where some musicians were tuning up for a lunchtime concert. The aesthetic was palpable. The drama of this complex outshown all the other buildings we saw in town -- and in Toronto, that's saying something.

"Less is more," wrote Mies, knocking some of the ornamentation off Corbu. Think of the Seagram Building. A simple box on stilts on an unadornted, expansive plaza. None of the gimcrack ornamentation that's pasted on the facades of classical, baroque, or Victorian buildings. Just pure form. Corbu's straight lines. The grid.

In 1972, Robert Venturi and his colleagues Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour ushered in the postmodern era with their book Learning from Las Vegas. Amazon's review notes, "Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments."

Venturi's take on Vegas was that its complexity showed through in its jumble of signs, facades, local oddities, casinos, and fast-food joints.

To Venturi, grid-thinking is over-simplification. There's nothing natural at all in Mies van der Rohe's boxes. To Venturi, "Less is a bore." However, he can't always pull it off. His firm has the most garish website I have visited in some time.

On a road trip a dozen years ago, I was appalled to find the same formula shopping malls in each of half a dozen cities across the U.S. Was I in Cleveland? Or Columbus? Or Dallas? Every two-tiered "galleria" mall had its Banana Republic, Limited, Victoria's Secret, Waldenbooks, Brookstone, Nature Company, Radio Shack, Tie Rack, Gap, Foot Locker, Old Navy, Sunglass Hut, Gymboree, Crabtree & Evelyn, The Body Shop, Lenscrafters, Talbots, and a food court with McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and Sbarro's. No surprises.

Upon my return to Berkeley, a city with no shopping mall, I dreamed I was walking along a row of shops in an iffy neighborhood in Philadelphia. Junk stores, mostly, these were owner-operated. The range of things on the shelves was staggering. I was having a wonderful time because there were so many different things to look at. I didn't know what I'd find. Shopping was exciting, like wandering through the Paris Flea Market or an Eastern bazaar. Complexity erases certainty.

I remember going to the first Gap, the first Banana Republic and the first Nature Company. They were funky. They reflected San Francisco, Marin County, and Berkeley, respectively. On the way to franchising, rough edges were sanded off and local color removed. These one-time innovators were homogenized into standard mall tenants. The first Gap, which ironically sold only Levis, closed long ago. Gap, Inc., bought Banana Republic, but store #1 is gone. The original Nature Company closed, the company was purchased, the new owners foundered, and the Nature Company is no more.

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Architect number three is Frank Gehry, the postmodernist's postmodernist. The Bilbao Guggenheim was built for the post-grid age. Gehry always leaves things unfinished, allowing their complexity to ooze out. Gehry doesn't obliterate the grid; he uses the computer to twist and bend it. The Bilbao museum echoes its surroundings. Form itself becomes complex.

"Every architect who's any good, no matter what they say, is trying to make some kind of personal mud pie." -- Frank Gehry

The Beatles Strike Again

A number of years ago some politico was horrified to discover that the song he'd been praising, "With a Little Bit of Help From My Friends," was about drugs.

I'll be speaking at WebEx's premier User Conference in San Francisco. My invitation just arrived.

You figure it out.

EdSearch

Ed Hatton is a very cool guy I met in Dublin when he was managing an advanced eLearning studio for SmartForce. At the time, Ed maintained a personal search site he dubbed EdSearch. I've linked to it for years.

Ed has since professionalized EdSearch into one of the handiest one-page search tools I know of. I especially like Ed's eLearning page but the Books & Comics page is also a gem.

Mispelling? Us? We help people decide on degree programs.

Press Release Source: eLearners.com Inc.

eLlearners.com(SM) Launches Free Online Assessment Tool to Determine if Online Education Is Right for You
Wednesday January 14, 7:30 am ET

eLlearners?

HOBOKEN, N.J., Jan. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- eLearners.com Inc., creator of the leading website for connecting learners to online education, announced the launch of eLearners Advisor, a new tool designed to assist prospective students in determining their readiness for online education. The free seven-minute assessment tool asks 42 targeted questions designed to evaluate the user's preparedness. eLearners Advisor then provides comprehensive feedback and information that students can use to help them decide if an online degree program is appropriate for their needs.

---

Press Release Source: eLearners.com Inc.

Correction -- eLearners.com Inc.
Wednesday January 14, 8:54 am ET

In the news release, eLearners.com(SM) Launches Free Online Assessment Tool to Determine if Online Education Is Right for You, issued earlier today over PR Newswire by eLearners.com Inc., the company name was misspelled in the headline. It should have read "eLearners.com" rather than "eLlearners.com" as incorrectly transmitted by PR Newswire.

Generic Corp's Implementation Advice

Now that Generic Corp has a mission, they need to tell customers how to implement their products.

The Moment of Complexity

Yesterday I stopped by Avenue Books in the Elmwood, another independent bookseller unable to withstand the Borders/Barnes beast, and found a book I hadn't heard of, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture by Mark C. Taylor. Wow!

I'm only up to page 28, but my head is already swimming. Taylor is a master synthesizer. He grabbed my attention from word one:

Taylor's introduction rapidly brings up Derrida, Duchamp, Warhol, Mies van der Rohe, Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, Foucault, Kant, Hegel, Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, John Holland, Stuart Kauffman, Murray Gell-Mann, Chuck CLose, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennett. It's going to be quite a trick to meld these characters into a coherent story.

A back-of-the-book blurb by William Mitchell, Dean of MIT's School of Architecture and author of the delightful City of Bits, says "Somewhere inside Mark Taylor's head, worlds collide; Kant and Hegel run smack-bank into cyberspace. The result is an incandescent asteroid show of ideas."

Has anyone else here read this tome? Please leave a comment telling me what you think.

Presentation: trends in collaboration

Here is the presentation that kicked off the Collaborative Learning 04 conference. It's 25 minutes but you can pick and choose what you want to see. This is recorded in Macromedia Breeze; the live recording didn't turn out that well.

After listening, please leave a comment below. Thanks.

Culture swings

InstitutionsIndividuals

Cycles. To everything there is a season.

The focus of our culture seems to swing from technology to people and back. From institutions to individuals. From central authority to decentralization. From top-down control to bottom-up.

Extreme swings toward technology and institutions were Taylor's Scientific Management, robber barons, Business Process Reengineering, and narrowly-defined eLearning (removing all the people to make it work.) The pensulum had swung far in the opposite direction when we had flower children, itinerant hippies, anti-war protests, and, more recently, the Open Source movement and the proliferation of blogs.

I recognize the main current crashes into a lot of rocks. Eddies go the opposite direction. We can have guards with machine guns rooting through everyone's suitcases at the airport at the same time the power of the 'net gives a louder and louder voice to the people.

In yesterday's presentation for Collaborative Learning 04, we asked "In business culture, where's the pendulum this year?"

And the group replied:

Emphasis on institutions 0

In the middle 60%

Emphasis on individuals 40%

Blogs? RSS? Huh?

Yesterday I gave the opening presentation to fifty or sixty people online for Collaborative Learning 04. When I came to trends in social software, I conducted a poll:

Do you have your own blog?

1. Yes, I have a blog
2. No blog, but I read RSS
3. No blog, no RSS
4. Don't know what a blog is

Want to guess what the results were? Mind you, these are people who are into collaboration.

1. Yes, I have a blog -- 40%
2. No blog, no RSS -- 20%
3. Don't know what a blog is -- 40%

Blogophiles, we still have work to do. I may assemble another "what's it all about" tutorial this afternoon.

Mission of Generic Corp

Some day I plan to write a generic proposal for a generic product sold by Generic Corporation. In preparation, I collect content-free business puffery I find on the net. This is what you get when you click "Mission" on one corporation's home page:

I am not making this up.

It takes a special view of the world to write such a buzzword-laden, self-centered, meaningless piece of tripe. Wow. I am in awe.

Collaborative Learning 04

Collaborative Learning 04 starts Tuesday. Tomorrow. Three days. On line. $199.

The on-screen brochure says my opening presentation on The Future of eLearning will discuss,

What are the key trends and developments in online learning? How will e-learning change over the next few years? Jay Cross has been credited with coining the now-popular term "e-learning". Join Jay for a live web conference to hear his predictions for the future and to obtain answers to your most pressing questions about the direction of the field.

That's not really what I intend to talk about. This is a Collaborative Learning event. I've decided to talk about collaboration. In fact, here's my agenda.

We'll dwell wherever you want. Join in. (I receive no compensation for this, no commission, nothing beyond your adulation and payback to an area I really believe in.)

Universal Principles of Design

Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler

I finished this in a mere two months, reading several of its one hundred design principles each evening before drifting off to sleep. Each lefthand page describes a principle or idea; the corresponding righthand page gives an illustration. The illustrations are clean and attractive. Ironically, the text on the left is a size too small for my eye, especially since it's printed in light gray.

My general take on knowledge is that you might as well have never learned what you've completely forgotten. Likewise, bringing something back into consciousness after it had disappeared is as valuable as learning it the first time. So I enjoyed the book, even though I'd internalized most of its content before. Some of the history and examples were new to me, enough to keep me plowing through to the last page. And it is pleasing to riff through a set of design rules just to make sure they're at your beck and call.

What does it cover? Such things as affordances, archetypes, baby-face bias, chunking, cognitive dissonance, consistency, convergence, entry point, face-ism ratio,the fibonacci sequence, and the figure-ground relationship, Fitt's Law, and the golden ratio.

Face-ism? If all you see is a person's face, you judge them to be more thoughful and intellectual than if you see their body as well. Which of these two look more brainy?

Feminists, please note: When college students are asked to draw pictures of males and females, they draw men with prominent, detailed faces and women with full bodies and minimally detailed faces.

Figure-ground is what's going on when you see the vase...or the faces...and back.

The Golden Ratio is an amazing number (1.61803398874989484820458634...). Objects conforming to these proportions appear beautiful to the human eye. It sneaks in unexpectedly in many realms.

Kafka lives in Washington

Time again to pay tribute to the Feds to fund illegal wars, insider fat-cats, and tax cuts for the coupon-cutting rich. See the postscript.

I need to send out a few 1099s. So I go to the IRS web site and request information on Form 1099. Hundreds of entries pop up. I choose 2003 Instruction Form 1099 ALL and wade through 92 pages. Nope, no blank forms there. I go to the Form Finder. Advanced Search. WTF? I can choose by the date material was posted to the site; I wonder if anyone has ever used that feature.

I choose to search for documents containing the word "1099-MISC." The result? "1444 results found, top 500 sorted by relevance." Oh joy. Then I notice that the first of the 1444 results is titled, "2003 Form 1099MISC." Cool. Then I read the description: "Attention: This form is provided for informational purposes and should not be reproduced on personal computer printers by individual taxpayers for filing."

Ah ha! I'm getting wise to their game. I return to the search page and enter "2003 Form 1099MISC." Damn. Again I get the form I'm not allowed to use. I open it anyway. Now I see the problem. "Caution: Because the IRS processes paper forms by machine (optical character recognition equipment), you cannot file with the IRS Forms 1096, 1098, 1099, or 5498 that you print from the IRS Web Site."

Oh. Now I see. I'm supposed to go down to the library to pick up a supply of Forms 1099. And then fill them our by hand so that a machine will be able to read them.

This whole procedure, only the first thirty minutes of what will end up being days of bureaucracy and blind alleys, is bizarre. My $99 scanner has no problems reading output from my printer. How is the IRS not able to do the same? For that matter, why doesn't the IRS simply use the same scanners they use to process 1040s and all the other forms you are allowed to print for yourself?

Beyond that, hasn't anyone at the IRS considered the 80/20 rule? Why do the instruction books have to cover every eventuallity? Shouldn't they have one path for the majority of users and another for people with arcane or oddball situations? Why are the instructions locked in Adobe Acrobat rather than in HTML, which would let you click through to what you want to look at?

In a couple of months, we'll be reading stories in the papers about how one in four answers the IRS gives to call-in questions are dead wrong. (But you'll be penalized if you follow their bad advice because they assume no responsibility for the accuracy of what they tell you.)

I bitch and moan about gaffes in eLearning. The IRS is in a different league. Super-SNAFU.

As a taxpayer, permit me to offer a one-word suggestion:

USABILITY

Well, that was a fun rant, but now I have to take it back. (And no, that's not a revenooer behind me holding a gun to my head.)

Having found no paper 1099 forms at the local library, I went back to irs.gov and took a different path. They have an 80/20 path just like I was asking for. I'll report back if it gets me to any forms.

---

Most post offices have tax forms. Not the main Berkeley Post Office, I found out. So I drove to Oakland, parked at City Center, and walked into the Ronald Dellums Federal Building. The IRS has a rack with tax forms just inside the door; it did not contain 1099s. Okay, I thought, I know their regional office is right inside. Oh silly me, I forgot that we're on alert. I was eighth in line to go through the metal detector. Five minutes later I showed my picture-ID and demonstrated that my cell phone could display 1-2-3. I walked through the metal detector without incident. My satchel passed through the xray machine.

The guard came to the other side of the conveyor belt and asked me if I were carrying knives or scissors. No, I said. I unzipped the bag. He said he was not allowed to reach inside. Could I dump everything out into a plastic box? Did I not have a knife in the side pocket of my bag?

Do you mean this? I asked.

Federal marshal: "We can't let you in here with that."
Me: "Can you hold it for me until I come back?"
Federal marshal: "No, you'll have to take it back to your car."
Me: "But my car is not close by."
Federal marshal: "You have no choice."

I turn to leave.
Federal marshal: "You can't go out that way. You have to use the exit."

In the lobby, I approach a couple of guys handing out literature for the University of Phoenix.
Me: "Would you guys mind holding my weapon while I pick up some tax forms?"
Phoenix: "No problem. A few minutes ago we helped a guy who tried to sneak in with a life-threatening nail-file. "

I re-entered through security and walked into the IRS office. Three large double-sided cases of forms. I find the slot marked 1099-MISC. It is empty. A note says to pick up Form 1099 at the front desk. I wait in line. I approach the desk. The clerk looks off in the direction of my left shoulder. She is blind. I telll her I need four 1099s. She knows right where they are. Whew!

I'm glad that escapade is behind me.

Personal World Clock

From Norway comes this great -- and useful -- example of personalization. I just selected the cities/time zones I'm working in most frequenty. timeanddate.com configured a Personal World Clock for me on the web. Instead of everyone's time zones, I immediately see the time zones that matter most to me.

Time zones & the current time in each.

Monthly Calendar

The service is free.
Related info: Jay's Time Page

Wayne & me

Wayne Hodgins and I chatted for 2 1/2 hours today. Wayne lives in the future and thinks waaaaaaaaaay out of the box. Friends have told me they can't understand a word he says. Some of us find him a visionary and inspiration.

With apologies to Steve Martin, Wayne suggests, "Let's get small." Granular. So small that we can glue the grains together to construct anything we can dream up. Like configuring personalized lessons for everyone in the world.

Metaphor #1. Dell Computer. You build your own computer. They get it to you fast because they maintain an inventory of standard components. Dell doesn't have factories that make things; it has warehouses that assemble things. Question: Is Dell selling products or services? Can we do a Dell on learning?

Metaphor #2. Planeload of soldiers flying to the battlefield. As they take off, they don't know where they're going or what role they'll be expected to play. They must be ready to handle the unexpected. How can the military make sure the troops have right competencies? Or can learn them on the way? Competency is more important than content because the objective is to accomplish the mission.

Metaphor #3. Personalized lessons for each of the 6.3 billion people on earth. ("What if the impossible isn't?" Wayne is underwhelmed by our expectations.) Modular assemblies, open architecture, Web services/interoperability, and learning grains as small as possible but no smaller, are all parts of the solution. But how can we avoid the manual tweaking and closed-system mentality that held back Performance Support?

We count on emergence -- organization and structure that are already there but not yet visible. That's what underpins the automated collection of metadata, expert locators, pattern recognition, smart graphics... self-organization.

Metaphor #4. Parameterized design, AKA emergent design. Feed the parameters of the desired output into CAD and have it instruct the computer to create a 3D prototype. Or design a boat hull on the screen and the computer-controlled mold shapes itself to the pattern. One-off's become as economical as mass-producted. (This gets me thinking that Business Process Modeling will evolve into parameterized workflow. It's all in your head. Or on your hard disk.)

How small can we get? What do the atoms look like? Wayne considers Bob Horn's information blocks the minimum. They're as small as you can go with and still have them stand alone. Any atom has four distinct elements. Each atom, or grain, is composed of four basic pieces: "pure" content, presentation, sequencing, and meta-data.

You want to play with these things, you need IMOTO,

• Identifiers
• Meta-data
• Objects
• Taxonomies
• Ontologies

Wayne's and my thinking overlap in numerous areas. (And, having written that, I realize it's akin to saying that I agree with Hawking about string theory and Gell-Mann about quarks.)

• recognition that competence outweighs content
• the challenge is to be ready for the unexpected
• we've only just begun the exponential ride
• many things arrive in the wrong size packages (e.g. gimme the slide I want, not a full PowerPoint presentation)
• serving the customer is the ultimate value proposition

Turning hurredly to the Edinburgh Scenarios, Wayne suggests we consider our linear dimensions as if they were loops:

I'm still puzzling over that one. Mobius strips?

Inevitable Surprises & Scenario Learning

Inevitable Surprises by Peter Schwartz

Hang on tight, for we're all going on a roller coaster ride. Science? Politics? Culture? It's all going to change so much you won't recognize it. The gusher of new information doubles in volume every year. Networks reach out to one another, connecting at an ever more furious rate, to the point of merging disciplines. Biotech, nanotech, and the human cognome are fusing. It's all codes and nodes. Our cycles have higher ups and lower downs, and both are relentlessly coming on faster and faster. Amid this turbulence, lots of us are looking for stable ground.

Peter Schartz, a fellow resident of the People's Republic of Berkeley (we live atop the same earthquake fault), offers an enlightened view of how we ought to think about this.

Next, Schwartz echoes Eamonn Kelly, the current CEO of GBN, the firm Schwartz co-founded. This is not the time to stick one's head in the sand. Denial and defensiveness skirt the problem and leave us totally unprepared to deal with the inevitable surprises. As Darwin wrote, it's not the fittest of the species that survives, it's the most adaptable.

Personally, that's why I'm putting energy into nurturing the Edinburgh Scenarios. They may be a little out of alignment, but it's better to ask the question than to act like a know-it-all.

How about heading over to the scenario planning exercise on the Learning Circuits blog?

The Edinburgh Scenarios

Please join the discussion of how eLearning will evolve over the next ten years.

Brief Project Overview

Explanation of the Project

The scenarios:

• Back to the Future


• Virtually Vanilla


• U Choose


• Web of Confidence

Join the threaded discussion on the Edinburgh Scenarios

What's Next?

What's Next? is a compendium of thoughts from fifty illustrious members of the Global Business Network. Their thoughts dwell on the world ten years from now, the same timeframe as the Edinburgh Scenarios.

If you're not familiar with GBN, just reading the membership list will be a treat. Where else are you going to find the likes of William Gibson, Laurie Anderson, Jaron Lanier, Eric Drexler, Doug Engelbart, Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Bill Joy, Michael Porter, Clay Shirky, and Michael Murphy in one place?

GBN’s president Eamonn Kelly sets up the interviews by making a convincing argument that complex times call for deeper understanding to underpin our decision-making. "This in turn, is key to gaining adaptive advantage: the ability to anticipate and sense change, and the capacity to respond quickly and coherently."

Everywhere I turn recently, I find myself tripping over complex adaptive systems. Business flows, everything is connected, we don't see the whole picture, surprises are on the way. I'm tempering my view several months back that the "science of complexity" is simply another way of saying "You don't get it." Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah-nyah.

The "new terrain" posited by What's Next? is composed of these categories, which also organize the chapters of the book:

People
• Cutures & Socities
• Values & Belief Systems
Planet
• Civilzation & Infrastructure
Environment & Sustainability
Potential
• Technology
• Science
Power
• Economics & Finance
• Geopolitics & Governance

Constructed largely of 500-word quotes from GBN members, What's Next? is perfect bathroom reading. Unless I succomb to diarrhea, I won't finish reading it until mid-month.

The old in-and-out

Surfing around to see where other people are at, I stumbled into the site of Epic and this absolutely wonderful list from Donald Clark. Not only do I heartily agree with his list, I was able to do so in about 15 seconds. Pure essence.

I have yet to meet Donald Clark, but I like a man who speaks his mind:

Scenario Learning (2)

Scottish Enterprise has enlisted a gaggle of gurus, Global Business Network, and various professors and school children to specuate on the shape of eLearning ten years hence. I feel so fortunate. Just as my prognostications for this year are petering out (See below), I've been invited to join this project and present findings at eLearninternational in Edinburgh next month. I plan to spend the coming month living in the future.

Why don't you join me? No, silly, not in Edinburgh. I mean online. There's a discussion starting up on the Learning Circuits Blog. A discussion board just popped up here.

Collaborative Learning: Put Energy into E-Learning Conference takes place January 13-15 on the net. I'm giving the keynote at 8:30 am on Jan. 13th on the topic of (surprise!) The Future of eLearning. The event is great if you're interested in Collaborative Learning. Admission is only $199. However, as a speaker, I get 10 free passes. I'll give passes to the first 10 people who email me, giving their first and last names, and email address. Dont tarry, because I am supposed to turn in the names by January 5.

Scenario Learning

In November 1998, I gave a presentation on Learning in 2004 at TechLearn. At the time, 2004 seemed so far away that far-out predictions went unquestioned. Predictions can go astray, I pointed out, quoting:

H.L. Menken, "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is concise, clear, simple and wrong."

Decca Records in 1962, "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Rejecting the Beatles.)

Jay Cross in 1986: "I think I'll pass." (To then start-up Cisco Systems.)

I described the Scenario Learning I was doing, and my online vehicle, the "Internet Time Machine." (I couldn't stomach the term Scenario Planning. I wasn't planning anything. I was learning about the future.) Michael Porter had said, "Scenarios aim to stretch thinking about the future and widen the range of alternatives considered." That's more what I was after.

I spent six months talking with people, devouring books, and surfing the web. The future became clear. Training was going to follow the same path as e-commerce -- and for the same reasons.

Web services were an obvious direction we were headed:

Some of my predictions were a bit optimistic. (I've been expecting cheap wall-mountable TV for the last 35 years.)

My "vital questions" from five years ago remain unanswered.

Only one of my possiblities for the web has come to pass, and it's pretty primitive.

Whole systems for whole persons

Whole Systems for Whole Persons, The Future of Executive Development Jay Ogilvy, a co-founder of the Global Business Netowrk is a wonderful one-pager on what's wrong with executive development programs and what to do about it.

Most current programs for executive development are deficient in three respects: First, they fail to see things whole, in systemic, inter-dependent terms. Second, they fail to treat their students as whole persons with minds, bodies, and emotions. Third, they fail to treat their students as if they will have both careers and a life. This article treats each of these deficiencies in turn.

Isn't this the truth?

Trouble is, when it comes to doing business in the real world, you don’t find the economy located on one block and the politics on another, or markets in one place, logistics in another. In the business world of today and tomorrow, whole systems, rich with interdependencies, confront strategist and marketer alike.

Ogilvy addresses executive education. This enables him to keep down the word-count. After all, most of us are familiar with the structure (and foibles) of MBA programs. Reflecting on it (I've just read Ogilvy's piece three times) makes me wonder if this is not appropriate for all business training:

All three of these recommendations for the future of executive development—a new emphasis on whole systems, whole persons, and whole lives—are within reach. The tools are available and the need is real. Whether business schools and executive development programs rise to the occasion is largely a question of will and leadership. If we accept the challenge, both our businesses and our lives will be the better for it.