Internet Time Blog » Miscellaneous

Dropbox

Jay Cross — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 05:55:38 +0000

I am moving the My Documents folders from all of my computers to one Dropbox.

Dropbox is the equivalent of a hard drive in the cloud. I’ve been using the free version (2 GB) for months without any hassles.

Dropbox lets me work on files offline; it syncs when I’m back on the net. It provides a shareable folder to make files available to others. You can share folders selectively (Internet Time Alliance has a shared DropBox repository.) Dropbox backs everything up, including 30 days of un-do history. Upload and download are drag-and-drop. Transmission is encrypted. Dropbox works with my iPad, essentially giving me a My Documents folder there, too. Dropbox can be reached by iPhones and Android devices, too. And I can search all my files from one place.

I just upgraded to 50 GB of storage for $99/year.

Here’s something I’ve never seen before on a Pro account of anything:

This is like having a private, omniscient wiki.

Book Pirates

Jay Cross — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:51:48 +0000

Wow. If these guys’ stats are accurate, they’ve downloaded more copies of my book on Informal Learning for free than Pfeiffer has sold!

I have asked my editor for Wiley’s take on this. If someone is giving my books away, I’d rather it be me.

Personal Knowledge Management

Jay Cross — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 07:40:37 +0000

Teach a man to fish…

PKM: Figuring out what’s important to you, how to find it, how to keep up with it, how to make sense of it, how to recall it when you need it anew, and how to share it with others — this is ground zero for mining the riches of the web. Bookstore shelves overflow with books on blogging, but I’ve yet to see one on PKM.

Harold Jarche has written some great posts about PKM. But for those of you have a tough time seeing the trees for the forest, I decided to clean up my PKM framework and show you what I do rather than talk about it.

My links page is my launch pad. I’ve maintained a page like this for a dozen years. It may be my ADD; I need some semblance of structure. The launch page begins with frequent destinations. The little lobster signals my restaurant page; the plane, my travel numbers and suppliers. (These are screen shots; go to the links page if you want to play with the real thing. You’ll find some pages that are private.)

To the right of the clocks are a Google search of all my sites and an Amazon search box; I use these incessantly.

Mind you, I”m forever tweaking the launch page as my interests (and the web) change. Below the frequent destinations, I keep URLs of online services I tap into. To the right, blogs… although the list is a little flaky. I read a dozen blogs in the mail and many more in Google Reader.

To the right of that section are feeds I like and local organizations & events.

I use the bottom of the page to store frequently used graphics. No more searching all over for a common icon.

That’s the top layer of my Personal Knowledge Management set-up.

If you visit the links page, you’ll see subsidiary pages such as the Research page and my Delicious tags.

I stash the social connections on my home page:

The home page is also the entry into my articles, groups, books, and so on:

One page I recommend visiting is this page of other people’s work. I plan to expand it soon.

Seminal Documents

How do you organize your PKM?

I set the foundations of my approach before we had tags, billions of choices, and responsive search engines. There’s bound to be an easier way.

The book stops here…

Jay Cross — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:42:43 +0000

Here: February 15-19, 2010

Tony O’Driscoll and Karl Kapp have a book coming out next month — Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Collaboration and Learning. Amazon’s blurb:

Understanding the impact that 3D environments, virtual worlds, and immersive learning spaces will have on society, business, and learning is a challenge. Corporations, academic institutions, and government agencies must develop a clear understanding of how virtual immersive environments will impact global interactions, knowledge transfer, work transactions, and existing learning paradigms.

Learning in 3D empowers forward-thinking executives, managers, faculty members, and training professionals to design, develop, and collaborate in the rapidly emerging field of 3D immersive environments.

I haven’t read the book yet (maybe this weekend), but I’m intrigued by the way Tony and Karl are publicizing it. Among other things, there’s a virtual book tour that floats from one popular blog to another. Tony’s tweeting daily at #lrn3d. Each week, they’ll give a copy of the book to a random tweeter. The book’s site has four video examples. There’s a Facebook Fan Page.

Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collabora

Promote Your Page Too

It’s really smart to publicize a book like this on the web.

Drop by Internet Time Blog the week of February 15-19 when the book stops here.

Speaking and practice

Jay Cross — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:48:38 +0000

The November 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review contains an article by Nick Morgan entitled How to Become an Authentic Speaker. In brief:

Instead of rehearsing gestures to make a speech feel authentic, you should tap into four fundamental aims, or “intents,” of a good presentation: to be open with your listeners, to connect with them, to be passionate about your topic, and to listen to messages from your audience, whether spoken or unspoken.

In practicing a speech, work to get into the mind-set of each of these aims and you’ll achieve the perceived and actual authenticity that creates a powerful bond with audiences

“Note the paradox here. This method is designed to achieve authenticity through the mastery of a calculated process. But authenticity arises from the four aims, or what I call ‘intents,’ that I have mentioned. If you can physically and emotionally embody all four, you’ll achieve the perceived and real authenticity that creates a powerful bond with listeners.”

This is the same paradox that arises when people talk about “formalizing informal learning.”

Related

To be rather than to seem

Killer web events

eLearn’s crystal ball

Jay Cross — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:55:05 +0000

Wow! Lisa Neal Gualtieri managed to get thirty important thinkers to share what they see in the crystal ball for 2009. This is the first must-read piece of 2009.

In short: It’s the economy, stupid. But there’s more. Lots more. I won’t spoil it for you. Go read this. And leave a comment.

Hacker jerks

Jay Cross — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:07:30 +0000

Hackers broke into the Internet TIme Blog and Informal Learning Blog sites, leaving a trail of filth and nonsense. It took me about six hours to figure out what was going on. Apparently, WordPress had left a door open that enabled bad guys to inject nasty invisible messages into footers. I usually upgrade the day a new version comes out but I was a few days tardy due to travels, and I guess that’s when the baddies made their move.

My ISP offered worthless advice on what to do. Ironically, a Google search led me to a guy who lives about eight blocks down the street from me. In the end, I simply exported my posts from WordPress, wiped the directory clean, and reinstalled WordPress from scratch. If something acts up, please let me know. This is a totally new blog, and I’m sure it will need some tweaks to return to normal.

Revisiting Tom Gilbert

Jay Cross — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:26:48 +0000

My research into meaning of competence led me to a dusty bookshelf downstairs to take a fresh look at a b00k I first read thirty years ago.

In 1978, Tom Gilbert wrote Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. From the cover flap: “Not just another run-of-the-mill book on human performance, this provocative volume offers you a new system for getting the most out of people.” Ah, manipulation! When I first read Gilbert, I naively hoped he was going to show me how to make human things work.

“Behavior is a necessary and integral part of performance, but we must not confuse the two. To equate behavior and performance is like confusing a sale with the seller. The sale is a unitary transaction, with properties all of its own; and we can knw a great deal about it even though we know little–perhaps nothing at all–about the seller.”

“Roughly speaking, competent people are those who can create valuable results without using excessively costly behavior.”

“Human competence is a function of worthy performance (W), which is a function of the ratio of valuable accomplishments (A) to costly behavior (B).

A
W = B

My shorthand for Gilbert’s theorem is “Competence = personal ROI.”

“The sociologist wants to describe the world as it is; the performance engineer wants to turn it into something else.”

“All instrumental human behavior–all behavioral components of performance–have two aspects of equal importance: a person with a repertory of behavior (P) and a supporting environment (E). The saw and the hand, the light and the perceiving eye are merely two sides of the same coin. We can therefore define behavior (B) as the product of repertory and environment:

B = E x P

Gilbert studied under B.F. Skinner, so the terminology of rat psych sneaks into his narrative. He looks at behavior as stimulus-response-feedback. This overview creates a framework for analyzing behavior:

	Stimulus	Response	Feedback
Repertoire
Environment

Gilbert reformulates these as The Behavior Engineering Model:

	Information	Instrumentation	Motivation
Repertoire	Knowledge	Capacity	Motives
Environment	Data	Instruments	Incentives

While I dislike Gilbert’s faux-algebraic formulations, his framework does provide a way to look at both learning (the repertoire line) and performance support (the environment line).

“I have found repeatedly that a culture that does not work well–in which people are unhappy, insecure, unproductive, and uncreative–was designed by a manager who did not begin with careful analysis of its goals and values.”

Reading Gilbert now, thirty years after my first reading, I’m re-discovering some thrilling viewpoints. “Scientists tell other scientists whether they are using a microscope, a telescope, a magnifying glass, or the naked eye. But when we talk to others about human performance, we usually leave it to them to discover which scope we use. And even when we make it understood which level of outlook we stand in, we are still likely to confuse our listeners unless we also communicate how we calibrate our scope.”

Gilbert proposes these levels of vantage point: philosophical, cultural, policy, strategic, tactical, and logistic, and suggests that you’ve got to start at the top. Put these levels against a model of analysis to yield a…

Performance Matrix

	Models of accomplishment	Measures of deficiency	Methods of improvement
Philosophical level	Ideals	Integrity	Commitment
Cultural	Goals	Conformity	Policy
Policy	Missions	Worth	Programs
Strategic	Responsibilities	Value	Strategies
Tactical	Duties	Cost	Tools
Logistical	Schedules	Material needs	Supplies.

Drat. I was eating out of Gilbert’s hand when I came upon a page that reminded me why he turned me off thirty years ago:

But we aren’t rats, are we?

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning–in other words, of absurdity–the more energetically meaning is sought. Vaclav Havel

It hit me why Gilbert’s equations weren’t working for me in spite of my agreement with large portions of what he said: rats don’t talk with one another. Gilbert is leading us a path where individuals learn new ways or find new ways to carry on. On their own. Teamwork isn’t on the matrix. Human interaction, the greatest driver of innovation, is social, but it’s not there either, from my vantage point.

My search for the term for getting people doing stuff that makes a difference was hitting a wall because people are enmeshed in complex, adaptive networks. We’re all in this together. We are connected to others emotionally and informationally. Our very beliefs are inexorably drawn into a collective intelligence, shaped and shared by groups of us. It’s you and me, and we and he, and we are all together. If your network connections broke down, you would lose your identity at all levels. You are as others see you, and without them you are nothing.

Honor-roll grades or nearly flunking out of school makes no difference to your likely wealth, power, or happiness after school. How can this be? I think it’s because individuals are graded, not groups. Making money and attaining what you want rely on your success in relating to and interacting with others.

That old school paradigm lulled me into thinking that the best way to approach natural learning and encourage open conversation was one-by-one. Thinking about individuals seeking competence overlooks what for business is the Big Deal: organizational competence. What togetherLearn has been talking about is just this: Dump the top-down manipulation in favor of peers learning while working. Introduce more self-organization into the system. Provide “performance support” for sharing know-how, making conversation flow, encouraging experimentation… Forget about the rats.

Zen Nature Coast

Jay Cross — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 07:33:48 +0000

My workshop in Bodega Bay this weekend converted me into a Visual Journalist.

Left: Bodega Bay, from our meeting room
Right: Tomales Bay, freshest oysters in the world

Ch-ch-changes

Jay Cross — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 05:46:10 +0000

The McKinsey Quarterly‘s free articles are a good read. The current issue’s Ten Trends to Watch has some intriguing observations.

Technology is not as important as the behavior it provokes.

We work not just globally but also instantaneously. We are forming communities and relationships in new ways (indeed, 12 percent of US newlyweds last year met online). More than two billion people now use cell phones. We send nine trillion e-mails a year. We do a billion Google searches a day, more than half in languages other than English.

The places value is created will shift both globally and regionally.

Today, Asia (excluding Japan) accounts for 13 percent of world GDP, while Western Europe accounts for more than 30 percent. Within the next 20 years the two will nearly converge.

(Whew! I thought it would be sooner.)

Good trainers won’t go hungry, for we’re facing massive talent shortages among knowledge workers.

Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones.

Here’s McKinsey’s take on knowledge creation. I agree that companies must master the new knowledge universe, but I’m not ready to discount the role of the individual in making that happen.

New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations. Knowledge production itself is growing: worldwide patent applications, for example, rose from 1990 to 2004 at a rate of 20 percent annually. Companies will need to learn how to leverage this new knowledge universe�or risk drowning in a flood of too much information.