Eugene Kim announced that Ward Cunningham was our opening keynote speaker for the West Coast WIki Conference. Only after the talk did he mention that Ward invented the wiki (1995) and is a prime mover in both the Agile Software Movement and Software Patterns.

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.

Bugatti Veyron in parking lot at Concorso d’Elegance

In my youth, I dreamed of having a Ferrari. No longer. Ferraris are too commonplace. Yesterday I toured acres of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and DeTomasos.

Besides, after spending $320,000 for a new car, I’d want better mileage:

My biggest charge came from finding a Fiat 850 Spyder. I had one of these when I lived in Germany in the late sixties. Designed by Georgietto Guigaro, to my eyes this is one of the prettiest little cars ever created. Mine cost $2,000. The owner of this one told me he traded two Fiat X19s for it.

Surrounded by so many mind-blowing cars, the mind focuses on details. Here are Ferrari red and Ferrari blue:

For sheer sex appeal, this Alfa is hard to top:

After the Concorso, I went to an auction in Monterey:

Is this Delahaye not incredible? What a head-turner!

Today I am off to the Consours d’LeMons.

Nielsen Business Media is shutting down Training magazine and its companion Web site, trainingmag.com. The March issue will be the publication’s last. The move includes the elimination of 11 positions, a spokesperson said.

I first saw Training magazine in 1977. At the time I didn’t know the training business from a hole in the ground. “You mean there’s really a magazine about this stuff?” I became an avid reader. Training helped professionalize a rag-tag industry. Training taught me many lessons.

(Embarrassing. I had the one on the right as a professor at B-School.)

The editors and publisher of the magazine were promoters of the training business, much as O’Reilly Media supports all things internet these days. The company nurtured the Instructional Systems Association. Ron Zemke and Jack Gordon wrote and shaped a thought-provoking magazine.  Jerry Noack and Phil Jones helped the training industry progress. Julie Groshens managed not only the Training conference but also the Training Directors Forum, Online Learning, and other events. Leah Nelson somehow worked magic to make events go smoothly. This is quite a contrast to the Nielsen regime. Their editor told me not to submit articles because I wasn’t a full-time journalist.

I’ve keynoted Training and spoke at TDF several times. I wrote a cover story for Training. I’ve spoken at Online Learning — and learned a whole lot there. While I stopped reading it several years ago, I’m sad to see the magazine snuffed out. It feels like the end of an era. I kidded Phil Jones years ago that they should change the name of the magazine to Learning to keep up with the times. In retrospect, that would only have prolonged the death-spiral.

Workflow Learning gets real

This afternoon I walked the Wildcat Canyon fire road from start to finish. It’s a beautiful stroll on manicured pathways.

In 1774, Juan Bautista de Anza scored a commission from the King of Spain to explore Alta California. Don Juan set off with 3 padres, 20 soldiers, 11 servants, 35 mules, 65 cattle, and 140 horses, and made his way through the canyon in the valley just below my walk.

Too bad the de Anza party didn’t ascend the hill to where I ended my walk. From there, the San Francisco Bay unfolds, with marvelous vistas of Marin, the Golden Gate, and the San Francisco Peninsula. So near and yet so far.

The de Anza expedition missed San Francisco Bay entirely, leaving it to other to discover two years later.

“Jay, given what you’ve just told us, what do you think will happen to colleges?”

“You mean the campuses? I think many of today’s campuses will make swell resorts and hotels.”

A story from Washington Monthly, reprinted in this morning’s New York Times, spells out the vision.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF ONLINE COLLEGE

Kevin Carey examines the promise of online education in The Washington Monthly:

The day is coming — sooner than many people think — when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people. A lot of silly, too-expensive things — vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research — will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

But other parts of those institutions will be threatened too — vital parts that support local communities and legitimate scholarship, that make the world a more enlightened, richer place to live. Just as the world needs the foreign bureaus that newspapers are rapidly shutting down, it needs quirky small university presses, Mughal textile historians, and people who are paid to think deep, economically unproductive thoughts … There is an unstable, treacherous future ahead for institutions that have been comfortable for a long time. Like it or not, that’s the higher education world to come.

Do you agree?

Invisible History,  Afghanistan’s Untold Story

It’s not what you think. The media’s version of what’s going on in Afghanistan is fiction. The U.S. Government’s take on things is totally wrong-headed — and little changed from the days of Bush’s bungling. Charlie Wilson’s War is total bullshit. Zbigniew Brzezinski is a liar.

It sounds like a grand conspiracy theory, doesn’t it? The story includes Cold War politics, Hamas, massive dope deals, the Shah of Iran, underhanded politics, cover ups galore, extreme naivete, the legacy of British colonialism, women’s rights, mullahs, made-up enemies, and self-serving propaganda — such a heady mix that Oliver Stone wanted to make a movie out of it all.

eLearning before the dot-com meltdown:

Today I read Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.  Formerly an award-winning school teacher, Gatto now spews more vitriol at schooling than anyone else I have ever encountered. If you are unfamiliar with his work, you must visit his site. Years ago, Heidi Fisk turned me on to Gatto; I began reading his The Underground History of American Education on the web and simply couldn’t stop until I got to the last page; it’s on my short list of seminal documents.

A few gems from Weapons of Mass Instruction:

Quoting H.L. Mencken on the aim of American education: “The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

Schools intend “to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.”

Quoting Ellwood Cubberly: “Our schools are… factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned… And that is the business of the school, to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Professional interest is served by making what is easy to do seem hard; by subordinating the laity to the priesthood. School is too vital a jobs project, contract giver, and protector of the social order to allow itself to be “re-formed.”

School is a religion.

Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within; school disconnects its clientele from other primary sources of learning. It must do that to achieve administrative efficiency; education sets out to provide a set of bountiful connections which are random, willful, promiscuous, even disharmonious with one another — understanding that the learning of resourcefulness, self sufficiency, and invention will inevitably involve surprising blends of things, things impossible to predict or anticipate in advance.

Sad to say, Weapons of Mass Instruction, like the title itself, is stronger on flashy, firebrand rhetoric than inner logic. Gatto refers to important shifts in the direction of Horace Mann without telling the reader who Mann was. Gatto’s stories sometimes ramble off to nowhere. To savor the best of Gatto, read Dumbing Us Down or The Underground History of American Education.

I love intellectual counterpoint, so it was delightful to read John Taylor Gatto on a train to and from a temple devoted to pioneering railroads, the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. Railroads fueled the need for the by-products of the schools that Weapons of Mass Instruction rails against.

As this plaque points out,

“By 1800, the United States had a progressive political systems and an idealistic vision for the future. But the country was small, rural, agrarian, and culturally backward. Transportation was slow and America produced few manufactured goods. The Ancient Romans enjoyed a higher standard of living and comfort than did most Americans.”

Enter trains.

“A hundred years later the United States was a large and powerful nation. It was highly urban, thoroughly industrialized, culturally sophisticated, and enjoyed some of the higher living standards anywhere. At no time in human history has a country transformed itself so quickly or on such a scale.”

Small wonder we revere the things that got us here.

It takes a lot of conformity to run a railroad. You don’t want workers re-interpreting the rules for the sake of innovation. Assembly-line schooling spit out ideal workers for the time, workers who respect authority and do what they’re told. Those workers kept the railroads and factories humming efficiently.

The perennial problem is that the times have changed but the way we do things have not. We need knowledge workers who can think for themselves but maintain schools that are structured to produce drones for the long-gone railroads and factories.

Related posts:

Against School

Schooling

Informal Schooling

On April Fool’s Day of this year, I wrote the following page in the Learnscaping un-book. I meant to be serious.

Coincidence happens. Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) invented calculus at the same time but independently of one another! (wikipedia)

When Newton and Leibniz first published their results, there was great controversy over which mathematician (and therefore which country) deserved credit. Newton derived his results first, but Leibniz published first. Newton claimed Leibniz stole ideas from his unpublished notes, which Newton had shared with a few members of the Royal Society. This controversy divided English-speaking mathematicians from continental mathematicians for many years, to the detriment of English mathematics. A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton shows that they arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting first with integration and Newton with differentiation.

To be sure, both inventors were standing on the shoulders of mathematicians who had been piecing calculus together since 1800 BCE, but the primary factor in calculus coming about when it did was that the time was right.

The term eLearning also enjoyed simultaneous discovery. In the late nineties two trends converged to make that timing right.

• e was in the air. In 1997, Pierre Omidyar had founded eBay; he chose the name because his first choice, Echo Bay, had already been taken. eCommerce, which was mainly about buying things online, was morphing into eBusiness, which involved doing things online. E-mail was becoming email. E-loan announced e-track. People read e-zines and e-books. Before the web, we had EDI (electronic data interchange) and EFT (electronic funds transfer).
• The meme of learning was replacing training. Training is something trainers push to trainees. Learning is whatever gets past their personal firewalls (AKA skulls) and lodges in the brain. I can learn something; you can’t learn me something. A big part of the sales pitch for early versions of web-supported learning was the elimination of costly trainers. You couldn’t very well call this training.

e + learning. No wonder eLearning sprouted up in many places. I awoke one morning in 1998 with the term in my head. I was not the only one.

Elliott Masie’s bio says he is “acknowledged as the first analyst to use the term e-Learning.” Elliott told me he first heard it at IBM. I have been credited with the first use of eLearning on the web. Six months after CBT Systems announced its transformation into SmartForce, the eLearning company, in late 1999, every training company with a dial-up connection and a web page claimed to have eLearning. The term was misappropriated at warp speed and was soon FUBAR.

2002

Update: I just came upon an article on the web that talks of eLearning in 1997. That pre-dates my earliest eLearning articles. From now on, when asked if I invented the term eLearning, I’m going to point the questioner here and say, no, it wasn’t me, it was that guy.

Frankly, I prefer to be known as the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning than for naming something, in the company of others, more than ten years ago.