From my Seminal Documents page:

Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World . Kevin Kelly. “The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.”"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.” Also New Rules for the New Economy. “The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade.”"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.”"To prosper, feed the web first.” Also, read We are the Web.

Kevin’s thesis is that we need a theory of technology. He thinks he’s found it. Lo and behold, evolution is it. And evolution is nothing more that information processing.

Technology is a cosmic force. What does tech want?

Technology has its own agenda. This is parallel to Richard Dawkins’ looking at the world from the vantage point of genes. Everything’s a struggle for procreation and replication.

Technology is inevitable. You could think of it as a seventh natural kingdom:

Kevin thinks big. There’s wisdom in his viewpoint. It’s in humanity’s best interest to pay attention to the biggest picture.

Nonetheless, I still can’t wrap my head around what Kevin’s saying. It sounds like an alternative religion.

Kevin traces the march of technology all the way back to the Big Bang. How could this be? It’s like the fall of the tree not making a sound when there’s no one there to hear it. Absent people, technology does not exist.

Kevin’s logic would make more sense if he just labeled his Technium tools. Or perhaps nature. Or stuck to the positive impact of evolution.

The wiki was born in an age when the people who were writing software knew a whole lot more about writing software than the academics. Getting programmers to narrate their work and talk about the way software is written changed the software development process. (There are of course direct parallels to how people learn their work in general.)

You don’t own your own text. That’s the foundation here.

Think how liberating this one idea is. It says collaboration is okay; it’s the norm. It makes everyone a potential participant. It recognizes that there’s always room for improvement and encourages the user to do it.

Ward began playing with a Hypercard stack at Tektronix in 1987 that foreshadowed the capability build into wikis. He incorporated the concept put forward by Vannevar Bush that people should be able to edit one another’s text.

The Hypercard app ran on Ward’s desktop machine — there were no networks at the time. People would take turns sitting at Ward’s desk entering information on people, projects, and ideas.

Using CamelCase links, a wiki can show conceptual interconnections. (CamelCase? “Wikipedia took off when they got rid of that one.”).

Wiki Design Principles describe how wikis work.

• Simple – easier to use than abuse. A wiki that reinvents HTML markup ([b]bold[/b], for example) has lost the path!
• Open – Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit.
• Incremental – Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet.
• Organic – The structure and text content of the site are open to editing and evolution.
• Mundane – A small number of (irregular) text conventions will provide access to the most useful page markup.
• Universal – The mechanisms of editing and organizing are the same as those of writing, so that any writer is automatically an editor and organizer.
• Overt – The formatted (and printed) output will suggest the input required to reproduce it.
• Unified – Page names will be drawn from a flat space so that no additional context is required to interpret them.
• Precise – Pages will be titled with sufficient precision to avoid most name clashes, typically by forming noun phrases.
• Tolerant – Interpretable (even if undesirable) behavior is preferred to error messages.
• Observable – Activity within the site can be watched and reviewed by any other visitor to the site.
• Convergent – Duplication can be discouraged or removed by finding and citing similar or related content.

Things build upon one another in the structure of the wiki.

I am taken by the add-ons to Ward’s basic principles, although he says they hold little interest to him.

• Trust – This is the most important thing in a wiki. Trust the people, trust the process, enable trust-building. Everyone controls and checks the content. Wiki relies on the assumption that most readers have good intentions. But see: AssumeGoodFaithLimitations
• Fun – Everybody can contribute; nobody has to.
• Sharing – of information, knowledge, experience, ideas, views…

“Publish, then polish.” Follow the principles of Wabi-Sabi: something can be valuable – and beautiful – even when it is not complete.

To Ward, the whole internet was made to do wikis. They just left out the config file. Things turned geeky for a while. We were watching streams of code on screen.

Ward believes in the transformative power of video. Let’s take a paragraph from Wikipedia, this one about the Louisiana Gulf oil spill. Imbed videos taken from different points of view.

.

.

We need to establish a video vocabulary parallel to the vocabulary used by programmers and engineers.

Co-creation is coming. Manipulatable video. Video mash-ups.

The youngest among us asked whether the video format might not impede innovation. After all, we can’t all trek down to Louisiana to shoot video.

Well, it might hold some things back but that’s the current exploration, too: figuring out how to slice, dice, and mash-up video elements.

Ward appears to be a great guy. Not only is he a software whiz of the first order, the projects he describes empower people to take part, to grow, to co-create… all of the things we strive to put into a workscape.

Jane & Charles

The conference program would lead you to assume that the Learning Technologies conference would be a hotbed of social and informal learning.

Jane addressed how L&D is changing. “People naturally learn from each other, and as technology-supported social learning becomes main stream, what effects can we expect it to have on organisational Learning and Development? She argued that social learning offers the L&D function great scope for widening its impact and increasing its effectiveness. But it is also a potential threat: people will use social learning regardless of L&D – so where does this leave the L&D department of the future?”

Charles talked about experiential learning, saying “Most learning takes place outside formal training events. It comes from our daily experiences and from practice. It also comes from conversations and from reflecting on our experiences and on those of others. Smart organisations and managers recognise this, and make space for staff to cultivate these different approaches to developing their capability.”

My friend Mark Oehlert presented, “‘Making social learning work in your organisation”, drawing on his experience establishing a social learning environment at Defense Acquisition University.

BT’s Peter Butler noted, “Formal learning is costly, takes time to produce and more often than not it takes the employee off the job. BT’s new web 2.0 social learning environment enables more informal learning. The results, according to Peter Butler, are lower costs, improved time to competence and less time ‘off the job’. In this session Peter examined data from 11,000 users of the system showing its popularity and usefulness.”

Thomson Reuters’ Andy Jones described the journey from eLearning to knowledge-sharing, saying “Thomson Reuters Technology Operations has taken business-focused learning to a new level. In the 2,000-strong department, things move so fast that normal courseware production isn’t viable. Instead, learning is built into each project though a unique L&D workshop engagement model: Content is produced by experts on the project (facilitated by a learning consultant), published on the project SharePoint server, and the delivery medium decided by whether the content is conceptual or skills-focused.”

However, in our debrief yesterday, both Jane and Charles reported that many attendees are only just starting to shift to delivering some eLearning. Social and informal learning are not on their radar.

Lots of training directors have yet to grasp the concepts of learning through collaboration, the power of social networks, and less is more. Bear in mind that people who attend Learning Technologies are the leading edge. If they are just beginning the journey away from the classroom, imagine what things are like for those who don’t attend!

Americans should not feel smug because their brethren in the U.K. don’t get it. “New data on e-learning usage do not signal the death of the classroom. And despite some of the buzz, the direction of e-learning has not shifted much over the past several years,” report Allison Rossett and James Marshall in an article in this month’s T+D magazine.

Opportunities are being left on the table. Today, there is little evidence of collaborative and user-centered approaches in corporate and government settings, though there are suggestions of influence to come in the future. It is the same for mobile devices, ranked last in reported current practice, and jumping closer to the top of the list as practitioners look forward. The virtual classroom and blended learning were also less prevalent in reported practice than anticipated.

Old favorites dominated in our study. E-learning today appears to be mostly about delivering assessments and designs, testing, personalization, scenarios, and tutorials. All these are familiar, and they all have deep roots in the training and development community. Should we lament that the habits identified in this study are not much different in 2009 than they were in 1989 (although, of course, enabled by technology)? Is this good news or bad? And most important, what do you intend to do about it?

Reading between the lines, I suspect that many organizations are accustomed progressing one step at a time. They expect gradual, comfortable change. One step a year seems a break-neck pace.

Incrementalism is the worst enemy of innovation. We’re playing a new game now and it’s fruitless to follow yesteryear’s pathways.

Business is operating to an ever-faster metronome. Cycle times for product design, manufacturing, and deployment are shorter and shorter. The pace of change itself is picking up. The future is unpredictable. Our old models of training can no longer keep up. They’re racing along so fast that the wheels are falling off.

As the environment becomes more complex, linear approaches are giving way to emergent behavior. People take different paths to learn what they need to do. Our task is to prepare them for things we don’t even see coming!

Former IBM visionary Irving Wladawsky-Berger cautions us to expect resistance.

When first launching a project based on a new technology or idea, you really don’t know what lies ahead. You cannot answer lots of the questions people will have. Incremental changes are much easier, because you are essentially improving existing products and services while continuing to sell to and support a similar client base. But, with disruptive changes, the new products and services you will be working on are likely to be quite different from what you have done in the past….

One of the major reasons why breakthrough innovations have been very difficult for large, established companies is that they treat such efforts as they do any other projects. If the new venture is organized and managed based on typical business metrics, it will be buried within a much larger operational unit. It is then only a matter of time before the effort is forgotten and eventually terminated.

Disruptive change requires buy-in, something L&D professionals have not traditionally excelled at.

It is thus imperative to reach out to other parts of the company, sit down with their management and technical leaders and see how the new innovation you are leading can help their existing business. You want to make them feel part of your virtual team if at all possible. It is hard for another part of the company to support your new efforts if they feel that it will compete with them for funds, senior management attention or customers in the marketplace.

The fundamental shift toward informal learning is taking place on internet time. Instead of plodding along step by step, Internet Time Alliance is encouraging organizations to leap over the intervening steps and adopt social and informal learning patterns immediately. Our model looks like this:

Our proposal is analogous to implementing telephone service in developing countries. In much of the developing world, fixed telephone infrastructure is poor. In 2008, India had only 3.3 fixed telephone lines per 100 and Nigeria 0.9 lines per 100 inhabitants. Rather than planting telephone poles and stringing copper wire, developing countries are going straight to mobile. Fixed telephone infrastructure is costly to set up, while wireless technology is cheap to deploy.*

Courses, delivered in-person or online, are the phone poles and copper wires of learning technology.

Are you laying land lines or going directly to wireless? Here’s a final note from Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

There are many reasons why disruptive innovations fail. A surprising number do so not because the company put together a flawed strategy, executed it poorly, or the market was not ready. They fail because proper attention was not paid to the organizational and cultural changes required so that the institution and its people will embrace the innovation and work hard to make it succeed. In the end, these human elements of innovation are likely to make the most important difference between success and failure.

What’s Old is New Again, Allison Rossett and James Marshall, T+D Magazine, January 2010

The Informal Learning Page

Disruptive Innovations and Organizational Change, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, January 2010

I bought a Flip HD

The Flip UltraHD camcorder is a breakthrough learning device. Two hours of high-quality video from a cam that slides into your pocket. All for less than $200. Here’s a sample:

I continued to experiment with learning video. I prepared these videos to show at Online Educa.

• Verna Allee describes Value Networks
• Mark Oehlert discusses Identity and Authority
• Ellen Wagner summarizes the Future of Learning Technology
• John Foster talks about People Policy at IDEO
• Kevin Wheeler and Murray Christensen laugh at Talent Management
• Eileen Clegg explains Visual Learning
• Michael Allen tells about a futuristic, object-oriented authoring system
• Workshop participants practice project elevator pitches
• Dart Lindsley explains Business Architecture

Design Thinking

Had my design consciousness raised at Overlap ’09 in Monterey. The press thought our meeting nefarious.

Business Week tells you “what went on at the clandestine affair.”

This year’s motley bunch included an assorted portfolio of designers; businesspeople, investors and MBA graduates; a tech systems architect who was also a former Navy Seal; and a tai chi master. The mean age was in the high 30s, with several people over 60 and a few in their mid-20s. “Despite coming from different backgrounds, we’re all risk takers We don’t fit in normal places so we make positions for ourselves,” says Dila, 45, who also has a PhD in philosophy.

Internet Time Alliance

Jane Hart, Jon Husband, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn, and I formed the Internet Time Alliance to help organizations innovate in learning. We are outspoken advocates of curriculum-free, interactive, self-service learning. Organizations call on us to grow ecologies where work and learning are one and the same, where people help one another build competency and master new crafts, and where all strive to be all they can be. Open, participative, bottom-up, networked, flexible, responsive: that’s learning with business impact.

Last month we selected Charles Jennings to be our CEO; I will serve as Chair. I am really looking forward to working with my esteemed colleagues, who are also great friends.

Chair and CEO of Internet Time Alliance

Provided marketing and distribution advice to half a dozen web 2.0 companies, all of whom wish to remain anonymous.

Learning is Not Enough

Began to embrace idea that Learning is not enough. “Learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for working smarter. Dictionaries define learning as acquiring knowledge and skills. But we all know skilled, knowledgeable people who don’t get things done, don’t we? Learning that doesn’t lead to doing is no better than not learning at all.”

Articles

Informal Learning 2.0

In the world of business, the era of networks is crowding out the Industrial Age. Network connections are replacing rigidity with flexibility, penetrating internal boundaries and silos and obliterating the walls that have separated businesses from their customers.

Networks reduce transfer costs to zero, enabling companies to focus on what they do best while outsourcing what others can do better. Networks also speed things up, often at a terrifying rate, making the corporate world unpredictable. In sum, networks are ushering in new ways of doing business. Corporate approaches to learning have to change, as well.

Productivity in a Networked Era: Not Your Father’s ROI

Today’s networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created.

The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness.

The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

More Human that Human

My last column called for the abolition of corporate training departments. Now some instructors and traditional instructional designers see me as a job threat. They needn’t worry. Enlightened e-learning requires more people, not fewer.

Ten years ago, venture capital firms issued lengthy reports explaining why e-learning would take the world by storm. Their underlying economic argument was cost-cutting: less travel, fewer facilities and no more salary expense for instructors. It was a classic industrial age proposition: Replace humans with machines. That first round of e-learning largely failed for precisely this reason. You can’t remove the humans from learning.

Whose Learning Are You Responsible For?

Last month I conducted several workshops to inject informal and social learning practices into hidebound organizations that were anxious to ramp up to the future. I encouraged them to address the needs of people who had traditionally been left out of the corporate training agenda.

Come Together

Organizations have woken up to the power of people working together. Collaboration gets things done and is the most powerful learning tool in the CLO’s playbook.

Workshops

I conducted several onsite workshops to inject informal/social learning practices into hidebound organizations that are anxious to ramp up to the future. My intent is to challenge a couple of dozen managers to each come up with a major change project and shape up a pitch to sell the idea to their organization. I intend to coax them to plant dozens of seeds. If one or two take root, it may ignite the process of organizational transformation. This has me thinking about where companies should be placing their bets.

By the way, I can do this with your organization for a nominal fee. Virtual or face-to-face.

Clark Quinn and I gave a one-day workshop on implementing networked learning architecture the day before DevLearn. Here’s a podcast prequel.

Lenora Routon Cross 1920-2009

Mom, my brother, and me (in plaid) in the early fifties.

Largest magnolia tree in the South, on our family’s homestead in Washington, Arkansas

Sitting in Bill’s cabinet room chair at the Clinton Library in Little Rock

Endless rows of FEMA trailers parked in Hope forevermore

Un-books

Released several editions of Work Smarter at $19.95. Changed tag line to better reflect the content: Informal Learning in the Cloud.

North to Alaska

Until you’ve been to Alaska, it’s tough to imagine how large it is. In July, Uta and I joined our son Austin for vacation in Denali and Wrangell National Parks.

Gave a talk on Meta-Learning: Process of Learning in the Network Era and the VI International Seminar on Open Social Learning in Barcelona.

Barcelona

Stephen and George in Barcelona

Amazing meal at Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava

DevLearn marked a significant shift in the field of corporate learning. Content and planning have become secondary to getting the job done. In today’s world, that means trusting workers to learn for themselves. The natives are taking control. Learning is mobile. Curriculum is toast.

Charles Jennings, introducing Internet Time Alliance.

Heike Philp, putting Online Educa online with simulcasting

Chaired a well-attended session at Educa on neuroscience and learning. I feel we’ve left some of the obvious findings of brain science out of our designs for learning environments. The scientists at the session warned us not to draw too many conclusions from the wiggles on fMRI charts.

Speaking

Here’s my shot at Pecha Kucha at Educa:

I was determined to improve my ability to excite an audience this year. A few months earlier I’d performed an Ignite session on the stage of Gnomedex. I’m practicing now and plan to have people on the edge of their seats a few months hence.

See also the Pecha Kuchas of Daniel Stern, Robin Good, and Heike. More to come.

Talent Management overtook Learning & Development in corporations this year. I led sessions on the future circa 2015 at the Future of Talent Institute Retreat. (I’m on the faculty; hard to believe this was my fifth retreat.) It was my second time at Asilomar in six weeks.

George Siemens began the day by challenging us to see the world as a set of trade-offs. What’s the optimal balance point?

Asking people to jot ideas on the white board, the line that divides presenter from audience began to blur. We’re all audience; we all presenters; it shifts back and forth. Few things are black or white; most are shades of gray. As George said, it’s nutty for only one person to do the talking among a group of 125 people. Group scribbling on the white board proved a catalyst to discussion. I think it’s like taking notes: you don’t have to re-read the notes to end up with stronger memories.

Internet Time Alliance took the stage to reflect on the overall event and to field questions. We had a rollicking good time — and I think the audience was with us.

The six of us began by recounting why we came together to form Internet Time Alliance. I preach collaboration — but found myself working in isolation. I was already turning to others for help: Jane Hart for social learning and tools, Jon Husband for KM and competencies, Harold Jarche for open source and design, Charles Jennings for the major CLO’s view, and Clark Quinn for learning theory, m-learning, and serious games. We started Internet Time Alliance in order to learn from one another.

Audience questions guided what we talked about today. We had the requisite PowerPoints at the ready but we ended up showing them in random order as questions arose.

Next we brought our customers into the loop. Six heads are better than one; seven or eight are better than that. Our engagements often begin with an organization presenting a question. Could we point out pitfalls in a new plan? Which supplier would we trust? How would we roll out knowledge in their organization? We help refine the question and then hash out solutions and observations as a group. We come back with recommendations and models. This is our loss-leader proposition. For as little as $1000, we return with consensus advice from six of the leading thinkers in organizational learning. Here’s what we’ve been pondering lately.

My conclusion from this event is that not only is learning the work, it’s also the most important work.

Chris also cautioned us against going off half-cocked:

You can learn more about the DAU story from Leading a Learning Revolution, a book by Chris and DAU Chief Executive Frank Anderson.

At one point, Chris showed a slide saying 20% of learning is formal; 80% is informal. He said he’d found no proof, only one person citing another. During his talk, I pulled together this page on the source of the 80 and the 20.

M-learning: Pervasive. Get learners to complete tasks while going about their day-to-day lives.

Laptops are mobile but not in Judy’s book. She wants something you always take with you. It’s always connected. It’s instant-on.

When is learning needed? (from Conrad Gottfredson)

• When learning for the first time
• When wanting to learn more
• When trying to remember
• When things change
• When something goes wrong

Modules for assessment, content, mobility, performance. Quiz. Recordings. Augmented reality. Sim. Games. Job aid. Checklist. Decision support. Coaching. Conferencing. Reminders.

Ray Kurzweil: “Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to all human knowledge.”

Computer, recorder, cam, scanner, reader, connectivity, GPS, and, oh, phone.

How mobile differs from eLearning?

• More personal
• Networked
• Fun
• More interactive
• Spontaneous
• Shorter in duration
• To the point
• For instant use
• Engaging users to contribute and share

Sami Leppanen (Nokia)

mlearnopedia

Cough in your phone and get a diagnosis!

whoops…

Phone call interrupted. I have a new client but missed the larger part of Judy’s presentation.

Happily, all of our LearnTrends events are being recorded and will be available on the LearnTrends site.

]]> http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learntrends-live-mobile-learning/feed/ 0 http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learntrends-live-harold-jarche-on-pkm/ http://www.internettime.com/2009/11/learntrends-live-harold-jarche-on-pkm/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:46:03 +0000 Jay Cross http://www.internettime.com/?p=3214

Personal Knowledge Management

BIG KM (corporate) | Little KM | Personal KM

Lots going on. Books, blogs, bookmarks, tags, etc.

Harold asked himself, “What is it I actually do?”

“Sorting” means filtering one’s sources.

Weekly overview of interesting stuff found on Twitter: tagged as Friday Favorites and posted weekly.

“Categories” are your personal folksonomy.

“Making explicit” is tagging and pigeon-holing.

“Retrieving” is recall.

“Connecting” is following people.

“Exchanging” is conversation, swaps, etc.

“Contributing” is writing articles, sharing tips.

Tools? They switch over time. Microblogging is new.

Your blog is homebase.

Delicious is delicious.

Magnolia disappeared – catastrophically. Harold downloads his Delicious files monthly.

Harold has tags for clients, for projects, and for subjects.

After a while, you realize the power of other people, sharing their bookmarks and tags.

Lilia Effemova’s model

Dave Pollard’s notion of critical thinking overlaps Harold’s PKM model:

Thomson Reuters

Charles Jennings

Largest information company in the world

70/20/10: 80% of learning takes place outside of class
Learning through experience: 70%
Learning from others: 20%
Learning formally: 10%

Think of your major lessons. They weren’t formal, were they?

Note: the 80/20 ratio for informal/formal was the case before networks kicked in

Social learning: sharing experiences
Jerome Bruner: difference between learning physics and being a physicist
Physicists take part in the practice.

Our world is others. Can’t learn alone.

Workplace learning and performance support

EPSS the silver bullet.
Craftsmen used it.
GPS on desktop helps navigate the map

LiveLabs & scenarios
routers live
scenarios, virtual worlds

learnscapes: immersive simulations

Andy MacGovern

Social Learning Exchange

working with Sun on this
cross between YouTube and i-genes (?)
focus on knowledge that organizations typically have difficulty sharing: tacit knowledge

Focus is on game-changing moves

http://learntrends.com

Two years ago, DevLearn and KM World took place simultaneously in downtown San Jose. I sensed that learning and knowledge management were converging and invited bloggers form both sides to get together at the Tidehouse to share viewpoints and guzzle beer. Adobe was kind enough to pick up the tab.

2007

class=”alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-3188″ title=”jon” src=”http://www.internettime.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/jon-150×150.jpg” alt=”jon” width=”150″ height=”150″ />

KM World 2009 is next week. Looking through the program, I’m delighted to see that many of the sessions could easily play at DevLearn and vice-versa. I’ll be in Hope, Arkansas; Washington, DC; and Barcelona during KM World this year, so I’ll miss the show. If you’re into meta-learning, you should track what’s going on there.

Corporate learning and KM are both about getting the job done. I can’t tell where one stops and the other begins.

How different are these KM World talks from the topics we covered at DevLearn?

Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business – MIT Sloan School of Management and Author, Enterprise 2.0

LearnTrends 09 starts this coming Tuesday. Our topic is convergence. It’s free and online. I wonder if many KM fans will join us.

Related entries:

Beer and blogs

DevLearn and KM World