Kevin Kelly is a force of nature. He spoke at the West Coast Wiki Conference yesterday.

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.

I find silent PowerPoint presentations (except for those that only use words) about as useful as a Rorschach ink blot. Heaven only knows how many silent PowerPoints decks have screwed things up because people read their own meaning into them to fill the void.

For example, that’s a real psych-test blog above. See any weird stuff? It’s all in your head. The blot’s neutral.

Some people think mute PowerPoints constitute training. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hence, this deck includes sound.

This is practice for a presentation I’ll be delivering in Sao Paolo next month. I’m sick as a dog, sicker, actually, so don’t listen if sniffling and heavy breathing offend you. A healthy version will come out later.

How to embed sound in a SlideShare deck: Record your words as you run through your deck. I used Garage Band and saved the spiel as an mp3. Upload your presentation to SlideShare. Click Edit. Syncing sound to slides is intuitive.

Any feedback? My audience includes business training managers and teachers; they don’t understand how people can be expected to learn without a teacher.

Peter Casebow in Edinburgh and Jay Cross in Berkeley chat for four minutes on how Internet Time Alliance collaborates and how Good Practice supports management development.

YouTube. 4 minute intro.

How Managers Learn. 8 minutes

Good Practice
Internet Time Alliance

There’s more to come.

Four members of Internet Time Alliance submitted their thoughts to eLearn Magazine’s 2010 Predictions.

Wave Crests
Google Wave is already set to become a very popular tool this year, and I think it represents the way that tools are going to evolve in the near future, that is that the social functionality found in standalone tools is going to merge and become amalgamated into more integrated “learning” tools. Also I think (and hope) we will see learning systems moving away from managing or controlling users and instead providing open learning environments that enable both formal and informal personal and group learning to take place.
—Jane Hart, social learning consultant at Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies

Move It or Lose It
This is the decade of time. Time-to-performance will become the dominant metric for learning. Businesses in 2010 will become faster-paced and more unpredictable. Quick and agile companies will overtake hide-bound traditional organizations. Speedy change requires rapid learning; workers will increasingly set the pace. Mobile, geo-aware, smart phones will provide performance support. We’ll focus more on nurturing learning ecosystems (“learnscapes”) than on finger-in-the-dike point solutions. As Elbert Hubbard warned, “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.”
—Jay Cross, chairman of Internet Time Alliance

Break Out!
I’m hoping this will be the “year of the breakthrough.” Several technologies are poised to cross the chasm: social tools, mobile technologies, and virtual worlds. Each has reached critical mass in being realistically deployable and offers real benefits. And each complements a desired organizational breakthrough, recognizing the broader role of learning not just in execution, but in problem-solving, innovation, and more. I expect to see more inspired uses of technology to break out of the “course” mentality and start facilitating performance more broadly, as organizational structures move learning from “nice to have” to core infrastructure.
—Clark Quinn, executive director of Quinnovation

New Mode for ‘Learning’
The increasing awareness that learning is the result of experiences, practice, conversations, and reflection rather than a demonstration of acquisition of information will mean focus and effort moves away from the development of structured learning content and towards the implementation of new approaches for facilitating interaction and experiences through the workplace. This will challenge training and L&D departments to the limit, who will realize they need to change their modus operandi, get closer to their stakeholders and become more responsive or cease to be relevant. Speed-to-competence will become the key driver.
—Charles Jennings, director of the Internet Time Alliance and Duntroon Associates

Internet Time Alliance Learnstream

Sage Road‘s Ellen Wagner describes the future of learning technology in this interview at DevLearn 09.

Ellen was recently named Executive Director of WCET.

The Big Question

# What are your biggest challenges for this upcoming year?

• Take advantage of  convergence of informal learning and social networks
• Make the case for learnscapes in HBR, CIO, other management arenas
• Become a tip-top webinar leader and public speaker

# What are your major plans for the year?

• Joint projects with Internet Time Alliance
• Five keynote presentations, twelve in-house webinars
• More time in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland

# What predictions do you have for the year?

• Faster, faster, faster, real time. Time-to-performance becomes the new metric
• Smart phones overtake PCs
• Corporate learning continues to migrate from in-house IT to the open web

I always do my best work while asleep and now that I’ve slept two nights since DevLearn, here’s what I’m thinking.

The last item begs explanation. In the past, we’ve focused on individuals but work is performed by groups. Hence, I expect us to start helping groups learn to perform instead of individuals.

From:

to…

Related posts:

What is informal learning?

Excerpt from Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance

My thanks to Mark Oelhert (our counselor at Social Learning Camp) for helping me sharpen my focus.

Three out of four chief learning officers say their people are not growing fast enough to keep up with the needs of their business. Another way to state this would be “Our people are falling behind.” That’s but one of the findings of the togetherLearn/CLO Survey on Meta-Learning.

Clark Quinn and I will present the results of the survey of hundreds of chief learning officers at the CLO Fall 2009 Symposium in Colorado Springs next week.

We plan to post the results of the Survey — and the session in Colorado — at togetherLearn.

More Human Than Human

CLO magazine, June 2009
Column on Effectiveness, by Jay Cross

The future is people, not technology

My last column in CLO 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.

Companies should embrace network-supported informal learning because it works better, not because it reduces labor costs. People learn more efficiently at the time of need, in the context of work, from people in the know and through virtual conversation.

When my colleagues and I advocate cutting back on workshops and classes in favor of building “learnscapes,” we aren’t suggesting firing the instructors. Rather, we recommend redeploying them in new capacities, serving as connectors, wiki gardeners, internal publicists, news anchors and performance consultants.

There’s no cookie-cutter formula for assigning these new roles and responsibilities. An active community of practice is a different animal from a bottom-up knowledge management network or a corporate news channel. New communities have different requirements than old.

In their book Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith describe different community orientations in terms of meetings, open-ended conversation, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community cultivation and service context.

Digital Habitats posits the role of the community technology steward. Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs.

A steward’s initial task is to shape a vision consistent with the community’s orientations. The steward then selects the simplest technology to advance the community as both the technology and the organization progress.

Digital Habitats also assigns these duties to the technology steward:

• Bringing new members up to speed with the community’s technology.
• Identifying and spreading good technology practices.
• Supporting community experimentation.
• Assuring continuity across technology disruptions.
• “Keeping the lights on” (including backups, permissions, vendor payments and domain registrations).

Internet Alliance’ss Clark Quinn sees the need for a learnscape architect who nurtures the health of the learning network for collaboration, communication and learning opportunities. More a leader than a technician, the learnscape architect is the network champion who carries the vision, monitors metrics, promotes network participation and encourages continuous experimentation.

Mzinga’s Dave Wilkins describes several production roles. Producers manage the contributions of others, drawing out the best in them while also opting not to include contributions that aren’t as good. Moderators help ensure an environment of high trust by ensuring that people play by the rules. Expert moderators may vet the accuracy and clarity of information in their domains. Yet other moderators seed discussions to channel conversations in ways that might provide insight to the organization. Reporters and bloggers unearth what is newsworthy and document it for the community.

These tasks won’t happen by themselves. Furthermore, people throughout the organization will need to share the burden of helping everyone learn. Distributing learning throughout the social fabric of an organization requires storytellers, mentors, bloggers, community elders, schedulers and editors. We’re all in this together.

Some instructors will continue to instruct, but they will increasingly do so with network support and in smaller bursts. It’s a better use of their time. Face-to-face instruction packs a punch but is difficult to scale. Economics dictate that traditional instruction will play a diminishing role in corporate learning.

Traditional instructors and instructional designers are ideally suited to excel in these roles. They understand how adults learn and how to transform information into learning. It’s important for corporations to benefit from their learning people, not give them pink slips

SF: Future of the Enterprise on Tuesday 5-May-09 6:30 PM

I’ll be there. Ross and Verna are the most astute people I know when it comes to extracting value from networks. Way, way ahead of their time.