The Jay-Blog: September 2002 Archives

Public speaking

Lance Dublin and I have written a book entitled Implementing eLearning and are hitting the conference circuit to promote it. We’ve spoken at ASTD International, Training Directors Forum, and Online Learning. We’re going to speak at TechLearn, eLearning Guild, and TechKnowledge.

Those of you who attend conferences but have not been a speaker might appreciate a view from the front of the room.

The Inevitable AV SNAFU
AV support is subject to Murphy’s Law. Something always goes wrong. A speaker before lunch tried to give a demo-laden presentation in a room with no electricity. Another had to shout for twenty minutes to his large audience before a working microphone arrived. For our session, I was at fault. When I packed my laptop, I had thrown the wrong adaptor cable. I had no way to hook up to the video projector!

Two years ago, I would have been out of luck. This time, the AV tech called in reinforcements. A second PC showed up. They downloaded my presentation to Zip disks and transferred it to the new PC. Five minutes before show time, everything was working fine. Thank you, AV people!!

The presentation went smoothly, particularly given our lack of practice.

At the end of a session, fans come forward to say what they liked but nay-sayers head immediately for the exit. Which brings us to smile sheets.

Smile sheets
VNU uses smile sheets to assess whom to invite back the following year. Participants rate each presentation on a five-point scale where:

1 = Strongly disagree 2 = Disagree 3 = Neutral 4 = Agree 5 = Strongly Agree

The last two questions are open-ended. The smile sheet asks the participant to rate the speakers and the utility of the content:

45 of the 60 people in the room completed response forms. 3 were negative; 42 positive. There’s a strong halo effect – If a person rates one item “1”, it’s likely they’ll score all 1’s or 2’s on subsequent items – so I look at the negative and positive responses separately.

Negative responses (n=3)

· Less change model diagrams, a little slow · Unfortunately this session was too broad & elementary, i.e. their advice was to “promote” & “deliver great experiences” · This session was base marketing 101 and left 20 minutes for an attempt at implementing marketing & eLearning. · Controversial material on some of Jay’s slides.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Lance wonders who sits through a poorly designed, low-impact, poorly-presented, and not useful presentation for the full 90 minutes. I figure we are all watching our own internal movie and it’s a pity theirs is so gloomy. Nonetheless, I don’t discount the barbs entirely. I take no pleasure in wasting anyone’s time. Next time we’ll be more explicit about what we’re going to present and tell people three times (instead of twice) that it’s okay to leave if the session isn’t meeting their needs.

Positive responses (n=42)

9. What constructive changes would you suggest?

When writing your “constructive criticism,” the more detail, the better. I thought I had deleted my controversial material after ASTD. I have no idea what the current complaint is referring to.

Whew!
Lance has been a top-rated speaker at conferences for years. He’s had LOTS of practice. He’s good. It’s rewarding to present with Lance and find that I didn’t drag down his ratings. (At Training five years ago, a friend told me I was a mediocre speaker and I’ve been working to improve.)

When you’re filling out a smile sheet at one of the shows, keep in mind that the speaker is human, too. He or she flew here for no pay to share information with you. Be sure you really mean it when you ding the speaker in every category when only one or two are off. Also, speak your own mind, not someone else’s. The three negative responses to Lance’s and my presentation were next to one another in the stack of responses, suggesting that probably one person’s bad movie was picked up and echoed by others at the same table.

Many of the dings are valid and I won’t make excuses for them. We’ll do better next time.

One thing I don’t buy is “Don’t correct another facilitator.” Lance’s and my needling one another was good-natured. My saying “Lance, you’re wrong. The learning’s not the important thing…” may be startling, but I bet it enabled more people to remember the point we were making.

Regarding handouts, be aware that this is generally not under the speaker's control. We submitted handouts a month before the conference. They all ended up on a CD. As a result, almost no one had handouts during the conference.

Should you become a speaker? I recommend it. The first few times can be a little scary but after you get it down, it becomes fun. Vendors who see your speaker ribbon treat you a little nicer. You’ve got a conversation-starter any time you sit down with a bunch of strangers at meals or during discussions.

Posted by Jay Cross at 09:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Too close to home

I chopped the items I couldn't identify with from this list but it's still eerily close to the way I live:

YOU KNOW YOU’RE LIVING IN THE YEAR 2002 WHEN:
1. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is because they do not have e-mail addresses.
2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
3. You call your son! ‘s beeper to let him know it’s time to eat. He e-mails you back from his bedroom, “What’s for dinner?”
5. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven’t spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.
6. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.
7. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
12. Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and takes planning.
15. You consider second day air delivery painfully slow.
18. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
19. You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.
20. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.
21. You get up in morning and go on-line before getting your coffee.
22. You wake up at 2 AM to go to the bathroom and check your E-mail on your way back to bed.

Posted by Jay Cross at 12:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Spamming Fools

My emailbox receives a couple of hundred Spams a day. After all, my email address has been on the net for a dozen years, thousands of people visit my site every week, email regarding eLearning Forum comes to me personally, and I've never tried to hide behind jay_no_spam_@well.com.

The thing I find difficult to comprehend is the number of stupid, clueless jerks sending Spam. Do these people really think that getting someone to open an email through trickery and deception is going to get them a sale? I mean ridiculous email subject lines like:

Answer 2 questions. Win $500!
Problem Solved...
fwd: your order# 14031
Your Security Authorization Code is enclosed
Re: your Questions
Hello,your password
Your commission check
Did You Get It yet 12611
Eureka! Make Money checking your Email - $1000 Guaranteed!

If my scripting talents were a bit sharper, I'd write a little program to email each of these dorks several thousand times that I don't do business with people whose first move is to try to dupe me.

What are they thinking?

In a couple of days, I'll be headed down to Anaheim for Online Learning 2002. A number of vendors will have a fishbowl out, soliciting business cards for a drawing for a PDA. Imagine the quality of those leads! Cards from everyone who's looking for a freebie. Maybe the exhibitors should simply Spam the attendees with an email that starts with "You won the PDA!"

Posted by Jay Cross at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Walking

Jan Visser just pointed me to his webpage on walking.

I walk a lot -- it's the only exercise I enjoy -- but Jan's in another class. He has logged enough miles to have gone around the world several times!

Walking used to be part of any human being's daily life until, during the last half century, it became an excepted pattern, at least in Western society, for everyone to have a car. I also have a car. I have owned one since 1964. Ownership of a car can very well be combined with a healthy walking practice. It merely requires some conscious decision making at the start, a very minor investment (which is, of course, more than compensated for by the savings resulting from reduced car use), after which walking becomes as natural and automatic as using your car. If you get over that initial hurdle of giving up something you have grown used to, you will soon see how it changes your life and gives you an entirely new perspective of yourself and the world you live in. More importantly, perhaps, and despite your spending more time while moving between places, you are likely to experience that less of that time is wasted (compared to time spent using your car or public transport) and that overall you are a much more productive and creative person.

I'm sending Jan my copy of Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. It's an interesting book, but not one I would ever re-read. Notable quotes:

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued--that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced. ...I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles per hour.

The most perverse of all the devices in the gym is the treadmill (and its steeper cousin, the Stairmaster). Perverse, because I can understand simulating farm labor, since the activities of rural life are not often available--but simulating walking suggests that space itself has disappeared.

Posted by Jay Cross at 10:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Human biological clocks

Times of our lives by Karen Wright, in the current Scientific American

If this article intrigues you, the time you spend reading it will pass quickly. It'll drag if you get bored. That's a quirk of a "stopwatch" in the brain--the so-called interval timer--that marks time spans of secondds to hours. The interval timer helps you figure out how fast ou ahve to run to catch a baseball. It tells you when to clap to your favorite song. it lets you sense how long you can lounge in bed after the alarm goes off.

Adrenaline and other stress hormones make the clock speed up, as do cocaine and meth. Parkinson's patients and dope-smokers have less available dopamine and experience slower time. States of deep concentration or extreme emotion may flood the system or bypass it altogether; in such cases, time may seem to stand still or not exist at all. Because an attentional spike initates the timing process, people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder might also have problems gauging the true length of intervals.

Circadian rhythms are something else again. "Confined to a petri dish under contassnt lighting, human cells still follow 24-hour cycles of gene activity, hormone secretion and energy procution. The cycles are hardwired and vary by only a few minutes a day!

Most animals have extreme changes throughout the year, for hibernation, molting, and the all-important procreation. We humans get seasonable affective disorder. Big deal.

Posted by Jay Cross at 12:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

How to Build a Time Machine

Another article by Paul Davies in the current issue of Scientific American.

Traveling forward in time is easy enough. If hyou move chlose to the speed of light of site in a strong gravitational field,, you experience time mroe slowly than other peopel do--another way of saying that you travel into their future.

Traveling into the past is rather trickier. Relativity theory allows it in certain spacetime configurations: a rotating universe, a rotating cylinder and, most famously, a wormhole -- a tunnel through space and time.

Time dillation occurs when two observers move relative to each other. Hence the twins paradox: the space-traveler twin returns to find a much older twin back on earth. This happens on airplanes, too, but a few nanoseconds here and there are easily overlooked.

Gravity also slows time. A clock in the attic runs faster than one on the ground. The amount is trivial close to Earth but must be factored in by the GPS system.

Davies proposes a time machine constructed of a couple of wormholes. Place one next to a neutron star -- that will slow down time a bit. Go in one place, come out somewhere else in space and in time. How are we going to do this? Quantum mechanics pops up. Sounds like voodoo to me.

From Instanteous to Eternal describes measures of time from one attosecond (a billlionth of a billionth of a second) to a billion years (how long it took the surface of the earth to cool.) The smallest unit of time is the Planck time, 10 to the -43 power.

Posted by Jay Cross at 12:08 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

Scientific American 9/2002

I've begun reading the Scientific American special issue on Time.

"From the fixed past to the tahgible present to the undecided future, it feels as though time flows inexorably on. But that is an illusion." So writes Paul Davies in That Mysterious Flow.

Our senses tell us what time flows: namely, that the past is fixed, the futre undetermined, and reality lived in the present. Yet various physical and philosophical arguments suggest otherwise. The passage of time is probably an illusion. Consciousness may involve thermodynamic or quantum processes that lend the impression of living moment by moment.

Nothing in known physics corresponds to the passage of time. Indeed physicists insist that time doesn't flow at all; it merely is.

Einstein famously wrote... "The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubbon ones." Einstein's startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. According to the theory, simultaneity is relative.

As to why our brains think time exists, Davies suggests that maybe it's due to the irreversible process of entropy. Things get messier over time; they never un-mess. New memories add to the brain's entropy. Maybe we experience this as the passage of time?

Posted by Jay Cross at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What Management Is

What Mangement Is

by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone

In 220 pages, What Management Is explains what's important: creating value, strategy, organization, the real bottom line, innovation, and managing people. Don't bother if you have a recent MBA. Otherwise, read this book.

Amazon's review nails it:

What Management Is, by former Harvard Business Review editors Joan Magretta and Nan Stone, identifies management as the driving force behind key innovations of the past century and presents a jargon-free look at the way its core principles work. Designed to promote "managerial literacy" up and down the business food chain, as well as among those who simply "want better communities and a better world for our children," the book uses concrete examples to explain fundamental concepts and practices like value creation, the 80-20 rule, and decision analysis in a way that sheds light on them for the uninitiated while providing needed perspective for the more experienced. "Think of this book as everything you wanted to know about management but were afraid to ask," Magretta and Stone write. A comprehensive exploration of the overall process rather than a traditional how-to, in its first section What Management Is examines why and how people work together; the second section shows how ideas are translated into action. With case studies ranging from Old Economy stalwarts like Ford to New Economy upstarts like Dell, along with pioneering nonprofits such as the Nature Conservancy and India's Aravind Eye Hospital, the authors explicitly lay out the basics along with a framework for employing them in a wide variety of situations.

I read this one cover to cover. Value comes from the outside. "Determining who the relevant outsiders are may be management's single most critical decision." When GE went through this exercise, it found that its customers wanted short-haul, easily-maintained locomotives, not the behemoths GE had been selling them. "...the shift in mindset from inputs to results, from product to solution, was like flipping a light switch."

Posted by Jay Cross at 07:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Web Services

Tomorrow I'm conducting a panel session on the business aspects of learning objects at the Learning Object Symposium in Menlo Park. We're trying to bring together the culture of design and the geek orientation of reusable objects. It will probably be like trying to reunite Yugoslavia without a replacement for Marshal Tito. Nonetheless, I'm trying to do my homework.

One issue is where learning objects stop and the overall web services infrastructure kicks in. Here's a handy overview of UDDI, SOAP, XML, and the other acronyms of the fast-approaching interoperable, symantic web.

The big question in my mind is how corporations are going to make money in the object environment. I'm taking a jug of Duplo blocks to pose the questions.

Posted by Jay Cross at 10:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Converging nano, bio, cogno, socio...

It's much too late to be indulging in deep stuff like this, but I can't help myself. I'm reading a report on Socio-Tech, The Preditive Science of Societal Behavior, about page 57 of the pdf.

NBICS -- Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. (410 pages)

Socio-tech results from the convergence of information from the life sciences, psychology, cognition, and the social sciences. "Agent-based simulations, models incorporating algorithms, evolutionary computing techniques, and brain-machine interfaces provide new ways to gather data and analyze the results.

Currently, most of the data related to understanding human behavior has remained field-specific.

This is incredible stuff! I'm printing out pages here and there for study tomorrow. The Internet is simply Wonderful.

Posted by Jay Cross at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Information Architecture

Information Architecture, 2nd edition.

Yesterday I read this book online, my first pic from the Safari service at O'Reilly. My first month at Safari will cost $15 for 10 books. Information Architecture retails for $28 at Amazon. Such a deal. While it may not spread beyond the technical sphere, Safari fits my needs for computer books like eLearning is practical for IT skills training.

The book gave me the final nudge into accepting that the new Internet Time site will separate form and substance. I've begun defining new .class items for CSS, e.g. "highlight" and "summary" and other elements to add clarity and improve usability. I'm going to have the system put breadcrumbs atop each page for navigation. The plan is to do a lot of coding upfront and almost none as time marches on. I bet this eliminates 10,000 font tags.

Posted by Jay Cross at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Surfin' Safari

It is HOT here. My office is 86 degrees and rising. So I just came downstairs to the back deck. A fat squirrel made his way along the trellice and stared at me for a while. (I don't do this often enough.) I swept the dried leaves fro the Japanese maple that shades the back deck. The noise spooked a large buck that was lolling around in the backyard. I kid Uta that we're letting the back return to its primordial state.

I'm rebuilding my website and I decided that it's time to bite the bullet and put together a new framework with cascading style sheets, consistent look & feel, templates, and other goodies that have come out since I put the original together with NotePad and HotDog.

Reading Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash sites told me more than I wanted to know about some of the things I'd like to do and not enough about others. (I'd really like a good default site to customize but I haven't been able to find one.)

Some of the O'Reilly books have caught my eye. There's a new version of Information Architecture out; the first edition is one of the more valuable web books of the four or five dozen I've read. There's a whole book on Cascading Style Sheets. There are PHP and Perl books. All adorned with those cute drawings of polar bears, meerkats, and other animals. I want a wheelbarrow full but at $25+ a pop, that's not in the cards.

Reading a review of Information Architecture II, I came upon an ad for Safari, an online book-licensing deal from O'Reilly.

Get your first 14 days free when you subscribe to Safari Tech Books Online, with nearly 1,000 of the best technical books available from O'Reilly and other top publishers. Select up to ten books to search, bookmark, and annotate; cut and paste code examples; find your answers fast.

People kvech about reading on screen but it doesn't bother me that much, especially if it's a technical book I want to be able to search.

I'm still on the back deck,but now I'm reading chapter 1 of Information Architecture. It's good. This is simply too cool for words. I was thinking of going down to Cody's Books or the Engineering Library at U.C. Berkeley to grab this book. Instead, I've saved myself 45 minutes and I have five new O'Reilly books on my shelf!

What IS information architecture? The authors define it thus:

1. The combination of organization, labeling, and navigation schemes within an information system.

2. The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.

3. The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information.

4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

I just finished reading Cascading Style Sheets. On line. What a snooze. I will forget most of this by morning. But I learned some nifty things that I'll put to work in the new version of internettime.com.

Posted by Jay Cross at 04:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Jay-Blog

September 28, 2002

Public speaking

September 21, 2002

Too close to home

September 20, 2002

Spamming Fools

September 13, 2002

Walking

September 09, 2002

Human biological clocks

How to Build a Time Machine

September 08, 2002