This takes a couple of minutes to load but I think you will find it worthwhile.  It’s a nifty way to thank someone for a favor. Watch it!

Naturally, you can make your own.

I’m reading Diane Ravitch’s The Life and Death of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch is America’s foremost education historian. She has been a champion of testing, choice, charter schools, and letting the market forces of the Invisible Hand direct educational policy.

Seeing the lack of results of No Child Left Behind, Ravitch summoned the courage to admit that she was wrong. Big foundations, accountable to no one, have pushed one failure after another. An opinion piece by the New York Sun’s Andrew Wolf writes:

It is not only the foundations that Ms. Ravitch blames for the current crisis: government has also failed in the attempt to reform the schools from above, lacking a clear perspective of how schools work on a day-to-day basis. Thus, the major federal initiative, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), well intentioned as it may have been, ended up damaging the quality of education, not improving it….

Ravitch writes that “Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

Ravitch says:

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

America’s corporations are suffering because many high-school graduates are uneducated. Cramming for standardized tests in math and writing have crowded out subjects like history and art. Business needs well-rounded generalists, not people who only study to ace the test.

Here’s a weekend diversion: this site analyzes your Tweets to come up with a profile of how interesting you are.

I thought I was nerdier but I guess I bring it up much in my Tweets. Thanks to Louis Gray for the pointer. He rated a 1 nerd score, too, so I don’t feel so bad. Louis is on top of things.

Best of Informal Learning Flow

February 1, 2010 to February 27, 2010

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals.

1. Rethinking Open Data- OReilly Radar, February 1, 2010
2. 10 Ways to Build Social Media Expertise Using Personal Web Projects- HarvardBusiness.org, February 2, 2010
3. “The Class” – parody of The Office- Digital Ethnography, February 7, 2010
4. Secure Websites in Plain English- Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English -, February 9, 2010
5. The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps- TechCrunch, February 5, 2010
6. Google Buzz re-invents Gmail- OReilly Radar, February 9, 2010
7. The Great to Good Manifesto- HarvardBusiness.org, February 3, 2010
8. The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul- ReadWriteWeb, February 8, 2010
9. Shifting Identities – From Consumer to Networked Creator- Edge Perspectives with John Hagel, February 12, 2010
10. If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present- TechCrunch, February 9, 2010
11. International Amateur Scanning League- OReilly Radar, February 10, 2010
12. Wikimedia Strategy: Ideas for Strengthening Online Communities- HarvardBusiness.org, February 9, 2010
13. Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login- ReadWriteWeb, February 10, 2010
14. Brain surgery boosts spirituality- Scientific American, February 10, 2010
15. How To Make Money In Online Video- TechCrunch, February 7, 2010
16. Data not drugs- OReilly Radar, February 11, 2010
17. Intel’s Social Media Training- HarvardBusiness.org, February 3, 2010
18. Blog – Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy- Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories, February 2, 2010
19. Kevin Rose’s 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs- ReadWriteWeb, February 19, 2010
20. How To Make Money In Online Video- TechCrunch, February 7, 2010
21. Four Steps to Gov 2.0: A Guide for Agencies- OReilly Radar, February 8, 2010
22. In Asia, Marketing 101 Doesn’t Work- HarvardBusiness.org, February 5, 2010
23. Exploring Why Social Business Will Drive 21st Century Enterprises- Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog, February 1, 2010
24. Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph - ReadWriteWeb, February 10, 2010
25. Facebook’s Project Titan: A Full Featured Webmail Product- TechCrunch, February 5, 2010
26. Cyber warfare: don’t inflate it, don’t underestimate it- OReilly Radar, February 11, 2010
27. Sometimes, It’s Better to Brainstorm Alone- HarvardBusiness.org, February 4, 2010
28. The internet, depression and drinking a glass of water- Mind Hacks, February 3, 2010
29. 5 Simple Twitter Listening Tips Every Marketer Should Know- ReadWriteWeb, February 2, 2010
30. Israel’s Time To Know Aims To Revolutionize The Classroom- TechCrunch, February 2, 2010
31. Extreme Scale Computing- Irving Wladawsky-Berger, February 11, 2010
32. 30 seconds to creativity- Adaptive Path, February 2, 2010
33. Become a Gmail Master Redux [Hack Attack]- Lifehacker, February 4, 2010
34. Work Smart: Mastering Your Social Media Life- Fast Company, February 8, 2010
35. The evolution of Cynefin over a decade- Cognitive Edge, February 7, 2010
36. Pranksters Attach GPS Device To Google Street View Car- Forbes.com: News , February 7, 2010
37. Informal learning from the horse’s mouth- Informal Learning, February 3, 2010
38. Excellent Technical Resource for Mobile Learning- Workplace Learning Today, February 9, 2010
39. SharePoint Social Learning Experience- eLearning Technology, February 1, 2010
40. EdTechTalk Episode #5: Promoting Learning Through Asynch Discussions- Learning Visions, February 5, 2010
41. [2b2] Long-form, wide-form- Joho the Blog, February 3, 2010
42. Rhizomatic Translations 1 – Buying tech for learning- Dave’s Educational Blog, February 2, 2010
43. Pew Report Interview- Half an Hour, February 20, 2010
44. CopyTrans 4- Lockergnome Blog Network, February 19, 2010
45. A modest revenue proposal to the BBC- Doc Searls Weblog, February 19, 2010
46. Formalizing informal learning?- Learnlets, February 16, 2010
47. Vegetable sheep- Purse Lip Square Jaw, February 10, 2010
48. The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus – a joint JISC, SURF, EDUCAUSE, and CAUDIT report - Fortnightly Mailing, February 7, 2010
49. Get More Done with Less Effort: A Systems Story- You Learn Something New Every Day, February 6, 2010
50. iPAD: a baby boomer, narrative device- Donald Clark Plan B, February 4, 2010
51. Rosetta and Long Now on Life After People- The Long Now Blog, February 4, 2010
52. The pad will blow away the clamshell- Skys Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation, February 4, 2010
53. Spotify for Desert Island Discs- edublogs, February 2, 2010
54. Does Apple Think Multitasking Is A Bug Not A Feature? And Other Questions….- stevenberlinjohnson.com, February 2, 2010
55. Reading Joyce’s Dubliners With Imaginary Friends- Full Circle, January 31, 2010
56. Jay’s latest book focuses on social & informal learning in the cloud- Internet Time, January 31, 2010

Alltop. Just click it.

It’s easy to roll your own.

Is Happiness Catching?

By CLIVE THOMPSON
New York Times magazine

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

The blue-dot people above are the unhappy ones; the yellows are happy.

The New York Times reports that more than happiness is passed along through friendship networks: so is the likelihood of gaining weight or giving up smoking!

A public health program to reduce obesity would be more efficient if it began by targeting well-connected people (because they’ll influence more friends.)

The research found that it’s friends who are influential. Colleagues at work, not so much.

The dictionary defines competence as the ability to do something well. In business-speak, Bloomberg defines competence as “Sufficient ability or fitness for one’s needs. The necessary abilities to be qualified to achieve a certain goal or complete a project.”

These definitions describe being able to do something. None of them address having the motivation to actually do something. Business progress is measured in accomplishment, not potential. Being able doesn’t mean anything is going to get done.

Struggling to find a term to describe learning that leads to action, I turned to one of my favorite resources on words, the Online Etymology Dictionary. There I discovered that competent descends from Latin competens, which meant to strive together. Interestingly, working together remains the primary means of developing competence.

Competens is a participle of competere, which means compete. Competere once meant “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com- “together” + petere “to strive, seek”. Somewhere at least 400 years back in time, compete took on its current meaning of “strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others.” Rivalry replaced cooperation.

Synonyms for compete: contend, vie with, vie for, enter into competition, take part, strive, struggle, cope with, be in the running, become a competitor, enter the rolls, enter the lists, run for, participate in, contend for a prize, race, race with, engage in a contest, oppose, wrestle, be rivals, contest, fight, tussle, joust, battle, seek the same prize, bandy with, spar, fence, collide, tilt, bid, face, clash, encounter, match wits with, match strength with, play, grapple, jockey, rival, emulate, keep up with the Joneses, take on, take on all comers, go in for, lock horns with, go out for, throw one’s hat into the ring, give a run for one’s money.

Individuals (plural)

I explored this individual vs. group meme in a column entitled Trios Trump Singletons in the August issue of CLO.

While the individual is the old unit of human production, continued emphasis on the individual instead of the group chokes off today’s opportunities with yesterday’s limitations.

Groups of people, not individuals, are the key to producing value in the knowledge era; yet, corporations hire individuals, performance reviews assess a single person and career paths are solo.

Whenever we catch ourselves thinking of individual workers, let’s take a moment to consider whether we should be thinking of teams instead, as conversation is the wellspring of innovation, and innovation results from the creative friction of people with differing perspectives.

They co-create the concepts that bring them into harmony with their environment. They reinforce one another. That’s “they,” not “he” and not “she.”

Ah ha! My real interest is in organizational competence, and that’s the product of internal competition in the old sense of the word. It’s what happens when people strive together. It’s called collaboration.

My columns for CLO are limited to 750 words. (Form over function?) The August piece ended with a learning example.

In the past, organizations often sent a single individual to an outside meeting, believing that he or she would bring the message home to share. This rarely happens because the individual is the wrong unit of production for taking advantage of learning innovation.

Organizations that send teams are more likely to put things into practice. Colleagues reinforce one another; an individual is but a lone voice. A small team cannot only plant the seeds of innovation but also nurture them, so the optimal unit for an innovation-building session is a trio, not a single person.

I plan to devote more energy in 2009 to exploring social learning. I’m going to substitute organization for one in Bloomberg’s definition of competence. “Sufficient ability or fitness for the organization’s needs. The necessary abilities to be qualified to achieve a certain goal….” If the workers aren’t motivated, the organization is not qualified to achieve its goals.

A concise video interview with me on Informal Learning at Online Educa Berlin. This was the first of three interviews that afternoon so I’m a bit fresher here than on the others.

An unworkshop is composed of small pieces, loosely joined. I always reserve the right to hop around based on my reading of the participants. (Every unworkshop is unique unto itself.) Sometimes I get so worked up that I feel that I am channeling the material rather than presenting it. Unlike traditional workshops, nothing in one of these sessions is for sure. That’s the “un” part. And it’s there because uncertainty engages the mind.

Earlier this month, at Online Educa in Berlin, I conducted my final unworkshop of 2008. Here was the schedule:

And here’s a more detailed agenda from the Berlin session. The supporting presentation slides are all available on SlideShare. Asked if I weren’t afraid of being ripped off, since I do charge for these events, I replied “Not in the slightest.” It’s not the jokes so much as how you tell them. My goal is to rattle people’s cages, to make things memorable, and to invite bold change. Copycats don’t have the energy.

Solo presentations are deadly dull, so I’ve taken to inviting friends to take a role in my unworkshops. Nigel Paine came to my mid-year session in Melbourne to share some stories from BBC, and Ross Dawson visited the unworkshop in Sydney to describe his compelling Web 2.0 overview. In Berlin, we continued this theme with half a dozen “mountain guides” who chimed in with examples and wisdom, and made themselves available for networking throughout the event. Here’s one guide’s take on the Berlin unworkshop.

I love doing these events. It lets my inner performer loose. However, what with the advance planning, travel, prep, and follow-up, a one-day event can consume a week. I think I’ll shoot for a dozen unworkshops in 2009. Given the economy, I expect some of these will be working sessions where we identify how to slash costs while boosting performance.

To get over the here-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon, I often precede an unworkshop with preparatory readings or a video. (Here’s an example from 2007.) Afterward, I’ll leave a structure for follow-up or an artifact of the session, such as this video.

How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist, by: Ellen McGirt

Fast Company describes how Cisco is implementing an “unprecedented forward-looking strategy to unleash what it’s calling a ‘human network effect’ both on and off the Cisco campus.” It’s the model I’ve been preaching, although unlike Cisco, it hasn’t enabled me to bank $26 billion in cash.

John Chambers has seen the light: command-and-control is slow and inefficient compared to free-flowing networks. Collaboration trumps cowboy individualism.

Chambers: “Fifteen minutes and one week to get a business plan that used to take six months!”

Mike Mitchell: “We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know…. Everybody is an author now.”

A Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or a preecisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference — in any language, anywhere around the globe.

To my way of thinking, this is the convergence of knowledge work and informal learning that I’ve been trying to promote.

Can Cisco-style collaboration really work outside of Cisco? Its supporters inside the company argue that the global marketplace and the ubiquity of Web 2.0 tools demand a workforce empowered to generate ideas, solve problems, and contribute to the great good without micromanagement. “It’s the number one item on the list of most CEOs–to break down the barriers, between me and my customers, and me and my partners.”

Well, yes. In fact, I think companies that don’t figure this out won’t be with us that much longer.

Guidance from John Chambers:

• Focus on what we can influence, and not over- or under-react to things we cannot. It’s a question of living in the world as it is, not the way we want it to be.
• Make a determination of how long this will last and how deep it is going to be. ‘Prepare yourself for it to be longer and deeper than you think. And then build flexibility to adjust quickly if you need to.”
• Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, he says is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”