WordCamp San Francisco is a conference organized by the creators of WordPress for users and developers. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.
I am really looking forward to attending WordCamp this Saturday. With speakers like Philip Greenspun, Tara Hunt, Dave Gray, Chris Pirillo, and John Lilly, the tough part is going to be deciding which sessions to attend. Thank heavens there are only two tracks.
It is simply amazing that WordPress is only six years old. (Today is its birthday.) The continuous progress in power and ease of use testify to the power of open source software development.
Introduction to the keynotes: “It’s a tough time out there and we are glad you’re with us to talk about the web.”
“Our sponsors, _____, ______, _______. Give them love.”
“Recycle your programs. We didn’t print enough for everyone attending. If you’re not going to be here tomorrow, leave your program for someone who will be.”
Tim O’Reilly: “2.0 was never a version number. It’s what comes after the dot-com bust. Survivors are harnessing collective intelligence. What’s next?”
The web is like a baby. It’s trying to make sense of the world. It puts things in its mouth to try them out. Is the web baby getting smarter? Tim showed a ‘94 search engine: 250 pages chosen from among a web of 5,000 pages. Then Google four years later: 25 million pages. Google now indexes a trillion pages. And search is getting smarter. The baby is growing up quickly.
“Meaning doesn’t have to be formalized.” Tim, crediting John Batelle, says Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared.
This “less” business. C’mon, now. The electric power grid is 100 years old. A sensor can sniff out what sort of fridge is running in your kitchen, but the grid remains dumb. Also, look at something like USASpending.gov. It’s lightweight; the technology is borrowed from a stand-alone site. Finally, an app like Patients Like Me creates value in and of itself.
Organizations need to create more value than they capture.
John Maeda gave an advertisement for Rhode Island School of Design. I didn’t like his book on Simplicity. I don’t like him using an event like this for outright business development. Boring.
That said, I enjoyed a few parts of his talk: taxi receipts being sold alongside candy bars in the vending machines at LaGuardia in NYC. Also, I clock that tells you “It’s about a quarter til five.”
My togetherLearn mate Clark Quinn and I prowled the Expo floor, stopping here to learn more about Blue Kiwi, a social media platform that’s taking Europe by storm.
I’ll post more reflections after getting some sleep. After the reception, hours of schmooze, and a great supper with geek pals, I am exhausted.
Wouldn’t it be cool to let the wisdom of your crowd suggest things on the net that merit your attention? It beats threshing a barrage of chaff to locate the kernels of information you want. It’s a time-saver, time is money, and most of us could use more of it.
searches that land on us and that occur on the site,
and various other kinds of behaviors.
Together these social signals indicate that the content is likely of higher quality (or at least of higher interest). Thus it belongs in both a best of list and a hot list.
As Tony says, “I’m not always sure I can explain why certain things are going to be in the hot list for the week. The social signals seem obvious in some cases, but not always clear to me in other cases. Still I would claim that most of those posts are pretty good ones – certainly I’m happy seeing that list. Similarly, it’s interesting to see what keywords are getting to the top each week.”
You can harness the same technology to focus searches for information. Increasingly, I find myself turning to searches of known sources like these in lieu of open-ended Google searches.
Six-minute video on how networks form and why this inevitably leads to flatter organizations, faster cycle times, information glut, and unpredictability.
Corporations are flocking to eLearning for all the wrong reasons. It’s cheaper: no travel, no facilities cost, no instructor salaries. This sort of fanciful thinking tripped up eLearning ten years ago.
In that first wave of eLearning, venture capitalists and the learning industry saw fortunes to be made by replacing instructors with computers. It didn’t work. Clive Shepard wrote about this a few months back. Here’s what I was blogging five years ago:
When I began writing about eLearning in 1998, some of us felt the training industry had struck gold! We were going to change the world and pick up some dot-com riches while we did it. Irrational exuberance? We didn’t think so at the time. eLearning was going to make email look like a rounding error. It reminded me of the spirit of Woodstock. People in the business exchanged knowing smiles. “We must be in heaven, man!”
What happened? We fumbled the implementation. We naively expected workers to flock to the glowing screens. We thought we could take the instructors out of the learning process and let workers gobble up self-paced (i.e., “don’t expect help from us”) lessons on their own. We were wrong. First-generation eLearning was a flop. Companies licensed “libraries” of content no one paid attention to. PowerPoint became the authoring language of choice. (Personally, I get more content from a Jackson Pollock drip painting than from someone else’s PowerPoint slides.) Dropout rates were horrendous. After-the-fact finger pointing is not productive. I don’t use the term eLearning much these days.
If you want outcomes that are comparable or better than what you were getting from instructor-led workshops, you have to do more than just throw things online. You have to support electronic offerings with mentors, guides, help desks, FAQs, reinforcement, and organizational support. eLearning is not a free lunch.
Poorly implemented eLearning is a more expensive alternative to doing nothing at all, and often the results would be the same.
Well-executed eLearning makes learning more accessible but it’s rarely going to double or triple one’s return on investment. eLearning is an incremental improvement, not a game-changer.
Natural (”pull”) learning has the real profit potential
Corporations can make the learning function many times more effective by shifting their orientation from push learning to pull learning.
Concepts at work in pull learning include:
Learning on demand, immediate reinforcement
Learning while working, not separate from working
Self-service, flexible delivery, convenience
Peer learning, communities of practice, collaboration
Small chunks, links for further discovery
Holistic, process orientation
Facilitating pull learning requires building learning ecosystems that bind workers together instead of developing courses and events. Replacing instructor-led events with living networks yields astounding gains in productivity.
Pull learning is not always appropriate; its application calls for judgment. For example regulations specify push learning for compliance training. Highly structured learning is appropriate for learning some technical skills. Face-to-face is unparalleled for changing behavior and rallying emotions. Simulations fall into a space somewhere between push and pull. Virtual Princeton will never be the same as being there in person. Nonetheless, most corporate learning is informal; improving the channels for pull learning makes it more effective.
Depicting one’s Twitter Mosaic appears to be the Twitter flavor of the month. For Twitterati, this could be a handy way to message a follower. Point-and-shoot for direct messaging. I wish I could ask GoogleReader to generate a map like this for the RSS feeds I follow.
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.
Sometimes things go so far off the rails that all you can do is chuckle at life’s absurdity. Today at Learn Trends, I demonstrated my ability to screw up everything technical within reach.
Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Jane Hart, and I had planned to lead a session at noon today to explain the thinking we’ve gone through to develop a lightweight, turn-key social learning platform.
Reading the enthusiasm around the more experimental presentations this week, I decided it would be cool to have a four-way conversation, sort of an online fishbowl. Instead of a presentation, we’d have lots of pieces of content on my desktop ready to call up in response to specific questions and topics. That was the theory.
What happened? First off, the computer with all the assets died right before the session. Not a problem; I have other computers hereabouts. Then we got a report that Jane was stuck in terrible traffic on the way to Oxford. The moderator I had hoped to have running the software was trapped in a low-bandwidth environment and couldn’t join us. Screen-sharing didn’t work for rapidly changing slides. Voices sounded like we were gulping helium. The screen exhibited Op-Art designs. People who wanted to ask questions found they couldn’t.
Harold managed to app-share my wiki, which contained some of the day’s presentation graphics. I encouraged him to speed up the pace. Bad idea. Comment from our backchannel: “guys, playing around so much is really hammering app bandwidth: audio suffers, typing suffers, settle down!” and “I’m finding audio is WAY behind the slides/chat.” Toward the end, “going to go get bandages, pain killers.” Then “what do you want?” Reply: “A drink.”
In the post-session discussion, I wrote “Asking Elluminate to do what we wanted was akin to inviting 70 people into a classroom for 30, gagging the teacher, using spray paint instead of chalk on the board.” I also wrote, “No regrets. Joni: ‘Life is for learning.’ Some of us won’t forget this un-session for a while.”
Years ago, I learned to face trying situations by asking myself, “What am I supposed to learn from this?” Harold, Clark, and I jotted down some lessons learned:
1. Pre-load the slides
2. Don’t trust the stuff that works at night to work the next morning.
3. That app sharing and slamming through big graphics can break the system.
4. Know what the system does and doesn’t do well.
5. (Maybe) stick to asynch and only go live with small groups; large groups get one-to-man presentations.
We’ve begun experimenting with more net-robust software.
Oh, and in the interest of history and full disclosure, I posted the script of the chat during our meltdown. …. I just read it. Closing down the session this afternoon, I said it reminded me of Stephen Stills at Woodstock, saying “You people have got to be the strongest people anywhere….” From the transcript, I see that the audience didn’t understand the reference. Woodstock? Some 60s thing.
Many paragraphs back, I made reference to Joni. For you youngsters, I was referring to Joni Mitchell, who sang, in the song Woodstock, “I don’t know who I am, but life is for learning.” My anthem. Give it a listen.
Yesterday in the “Blogtropolis” room at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris Heuer signaled me to take a seat in the director’s chair alongside his for a chat.
Here’s a podcast of our chat. We spent twenty minutes talking about building on-line communities, enterprise 2.0, coping with mind-blowing change, the relationship with informal learning, un-meetings, redefining the meaning of conference, and what I plan to discuss with corporate clients in the next two months.
The divide separating the old way of looking at the world and the new, networked vision is so wide that, like the issue of abortion, you’re on one side or the other; no one’s in between, and you’re not going to change the way someone else sees it.
You either believe the net changes everything or you think it’s a passing fad. You believe augmenting humankind’s collective intelligence will change the world forever or you consider this virtual stuff bunk. If you’re one of the people on the side of tradition, my advice is to skip this recording altogether. You’ll think we’re raving mad.
I was reading the collaboration section of a magazine geared to IT professionals when I came upon an article titled Cat-Herding Nightmare.
The first paragraph echoes the Web 2.0-is-good-for-you party line I’ve heard again and again this week:
Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. These apps often include productivity enhancers such as search and tagging. And not surprisingly, vendors are encouraging the trend–Microsoft and IBM have added wikis and blogging capabilities to enterprise apps including SharePoint and Lotus Quickr, while Google and upstarts like Socialtext, PBwiki, and Jive Software are luring corporate users with freebie accounts and dead-simple deployment. provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.
Warning to IT folks: Mayday! Mayday! Turf is being threatened. Put up the shields. Ready the cannon. Mayday! Mayday1
All these wonderful benefits. Too bad there’s a dark side.
Sadly, all IT gets out of the deal is a big fur ball as it struggles to organize corporate content run amok. The potential for exposure of sensitive information or theft of intellectual property runs high, as do concerns about noncompliance with corporate or third-party requirements as end users scatter sensitive information around the Internet. If the company gets tangled in litigation, data relevant to discovery requests may be lurking unknown on third-party servers, exposing the organization to financial or legal sanctions.
Implication: IT can’t trust those pesky users. Possible solution: Get the knock-off versions of web tools provided by IBM, EMC, BEA, and Microsoft. That lets IT continue its battle to maintain control, even if it means dumping all those great benefits. The article notes that the products from the big boys…
…also come with the downsides of enterprise software–longer and more costly deployment than software as a service, and longer lag between upgrades. Enterprises are unlikely to dip their toes into collaboration through a six-figure software deployment. It’s not uncommon to find companies using SharePoint and third-party SaaS products.
The article concludes that IT needs to keep ahead of technologies and provide services before users demand them. That would be great but I am skeptical. IT has rarely come down from its me-first perch. Why should we expect it to stop now? It’s easier for IT to focus on the damage workers might do rather than the benefits an open business gives its stakeholders. Should we really let IT make the tradeoff between the hair-ball messiness of web 2.0 and connecting with the world in order to stay in business? That’s not really an IT decision, is it? Nah, we won’t get fooled again.
I’ve look at this from both sides now, it’s up and down and still somehow, I don’t think we should be picking sides at all. IT should support the business, not the other way around.
Corporations are flocking to eLearning for all the wrong reasons. It’s cheaper: no travel, no facilities cost, no instructor salaries. This sort of fanciful thinking tripped up eLearning ten years ago.
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