Entries Tagged 'informl2' ↓

Informal Learning was the theme of Tony Bingham’s keynote presentation at ASTD’s International Conference and Exhibition in Washington this month.

To my surprise, he brought up a recent article I wrote for CLO magazine on the importance of making connections.

Here’s a recording of Tony’s presentation.

Informal Learning 2.0 is for foxes, not hedgehogs?

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs (like Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust), who know one big thing and tend to view the world through the lens of a single organizing principle, and foxes (like Herodotus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Balzac and Joyce), who know many things and who pursue various unrelated, even contradictory ends.

According to Joshua Cooper Ramo’s provocative new book, “The Age of the Unthinkable,” one study – in which hundreds of experts in subjects like economics, foreign policy and politics were asked to make predictions about
the short-term future and whose predictions were evaluated five years later – showed that foxes, with their wide-ranging curiosity and willingness to embrace change, tended to be far more accurate in their forecasts than
hedgehogs, eager for closure and keen on applying a few big ideas to an array of situations.

THE AGE OF THE UNTHINKABLE
Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us
and What We Can Do About It
By Joshua Cooper Ramo

Today’s world, he suggests, requires resilient pragmatists who, like the most talented Silicon Valley venture capitalists on the one hand or the survival-minded leadership of Hezbollah on the other, possess both an intuitive ability to see problems in a larger context and a willingness to rejigger their organizations continually to grapple with ever-shifting challenges and circumstances.

Hedgehogs

I’m not so sure.

After all, we are in the midst of a total re-set of capitalism, business models, and democratization. When I look at Informal Learning Flow, an aggregator that works over the sites I visit to keep informed, it’s a totally hedgehogian experience. These are all pieces of the puzzle. The issue becomes “what’s the puzzle?”

You’re tracking all that, right? The article stream continues for another 2,000 pages.

Uta and I have an extensive collection of stuffed hedgehogs. Our collecting pre-dates this fox/hedgehog stuff. The hedgehog is a symbol of good luck in Germany. And they are cute as can be.

Last night several dozen of us convened at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley to discuss the future of the book.

Everyone came armed with passion, questions, and issues about books. More than half the group were published authors, so we were personally invested in the future of publishing. The opening self-introductions became so engrossing that I was tempted to declare the session an un-meeting and throw away Clark’s and my loose script for the evening.

I gave the briefest of introductions the DNA of printed books. I credit Aldus Manutius with inspiring the democratization of books. In 1499, Aldus printed the first paperback, sized to fit in a traveler’s saddlebag. Here’s a page from the paperback, alongside a page from The Social Life of Information.

You would think that five hundred years would have inspired a bit of innovation, but of course you would be wrong. By and large, books still come with one size and one color of type, unbroken lines filling the page, no emphasis or underlines or highlights or diagrams.

This photo from the front page of last Sunday’s New York Times evokes many of the themes we talked about. The net has changed everything. Young people read screens, not paper. Plus, we’re all potential publishers now.

Publishing traditionally provided editorial, production, and marketing services. Today I can buy very rapid, very good, very low-priced editing from India. On-demand publishers will print as many (or as few) copies as you like. And publishers’ traditionally shoddy marketing is even more worthless in the days of online reputation and long-tail distribution.

Our group brainstormed a list of what’s good about books and what’s not so good…

…and then we talked about editorial control, the experience of reading, cherry-picking the good stuff, mixing and matching content, and creating learning experiences. I retold Clay Shirky’s anecdote of the little girl eyeing the television and then asking “Where’s the mouse?” Is there any excuse for things that are not interactive?

The Amazon Kindle I passed around the room was so forgettable that no one mentioned it during the next 90 minutes.

As the evening was coming to a close, people offered their thoughts on the issues. Here they are:

Please add your thoughts in the comment section.

References:

Announcement

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, New York Times, July 27, 2008
The New Readers, NYT
Further Reading on Reading, NYT

Flat World Knowledge, Jay’s observations of Flat World Knowledge

Dawn of the Un-book

Jay’s experiences with Kindle, part 1 and part 2

In January, Donald Clark, Nigel Paine, and I led discussions on informal learning and web 2.0 at Learning Technologies 2008 in London.

This is my first mash-up of conference presentations. I encourage you to steal the concept: life’s too short for  linear video. Boil it down to essence. It’s not that tough to do.

What do you think?

My wife broke her wrist playing tennis this morning. Friends who drove her to the hospital called me to come to her side and to rescue her car from the parking garage. I decided to take the bus. It was my first local bus ride in years.

I went on line to check the bus schedule. The transit agency pointed me to a site called Google Transit that combined a local street map, bus routes, and a bus schedule. This was a mash-up: a consolidation of data from several sources.

Upon entering my home address and the name of the hospital, I received a personalized itinerary that suggested what bus to catch and when, where to transfer to another bus and how long the wait would be, a map of the route, and instructions for the 3-minute walk to the hospital emergency room.

Until recently, it would not have been possible to pull this information together on the fly. Now even non-programmers can assemble a mash-up because APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, enable the data sets to speak a common language.

My automated bus itinerary saved me time and hassle. It saved me an unnecessary taxi ride.

Whenever I see workers trying to coordinate information from different sources, I wonder how much wasted effort a mash-up might eliminate.

The message from the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo: We are at an inflection point in human history. Doug Engelbart’s vision of harnessing our collective intelligence is unfolding. We’ve only just begun. The turning tide is frightening or wonderful; that’s a matter of perspective.

Tim O’Reilly told us Web 2.0 is becoming the platform for everything. It’s an amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It is turning the enterprise inside out. It is the platform beneath a new way of living. We are at a turning point — a huge change in the way the world works.

Tim retold a great story from Clay Shirky. IBM’s Thomas Watson predicted the world would need about five computers. Clay points out Watson was wrong. Not in the direction you think. Watson overstated the number of computers by four. It’s all one cloud. Web 2.0 is evolving into cloud computing and the internet operating system. Ambient computing is on the way but it rides on mobile phones and sensors, not computers. It converging into one platform for the world.

Participatory is too uninspiring a word to describe what’s going on. Since the middle of the last century, we’ve received a gift: discretionary time. Confused, we didn’t make good use of it. When we weren’t taking instructions (at what we call “work”), we became accustomed to doing nothing: sitting back and letting the world go by. Watching the idiot box. From now on, we have to make better use of this gift of time. We must build and share; we must co-create the world we live in. This is a mind-blower on the order of the Industrial Revolution.

In that revolution, abandoning country life to live in cities and working in factories instead of farms put people into a state of perpetual disorientation. One thing enabled them to cope with the crisis: gin. People escaped mental chaos by becoming blotto. Gin pushcarts rolled down the streets. Swilling gin by the tankard blocks out everything.

Clay Shirky told us about one about a four-year old girl searching for something around and behind the family television. Her father asked what she was doing. She asked, “Where is the mouse?” To a four-year old, a television without a mouse is broken. If something doesn’t include you, it may not be worth sitting still for.

What are we doing collectively? Instead of drinking gin. We’re looking for the mouse.

The Blogopolis room here accommodates about a hundred people. As I write this, three or four huddles of them are recording interviews. I am sitting on the floor, beside a large screen. Three people in front of me are waving their arms in the air; they are air-bowling with Wii handhelds; the screen is their virtual bowling alley.

This is the blogging room, a freebie for people who self-identify as bloggers. You want to do something besides sit in a chair listening? This is the place. To the right, several 1′ high robotic dinosaurs are shmoozing. To my left, two people are slumped over the backs of chairs, receiving massages. Scoble’s here. Stowe Boyd is here. Dan Farber sits on the other side of the screen writing a story. A Finnish guy tells me about a web service that warns you of dangerous websites while you are on the net. I mention that for most corporate leaders, this room looks like an outtake from a science fiction flick.

As the keynotes conclude, the Blogopolis is shoulder to shoulder. Soon, people will be fanning out to continue the Expo 2.0 Expo conversation in bars and restaurants. A mash-up of Twitter, Upcoming, and an interactive map will enable them to locate friends via cell phone. They can also get a map — and a report on how big a crowd is at the bar. That’s part of the message: the formal event closes down for the day but the conversation continues on. Care for a pint of gin?

Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini
Two at the very most
After three I’m under the table
After four I’m under the host.

Gin is not my drink of choice. I wandered through the one-time wasteland that is now Yerba Buena Gardens reflecting on the day. Serendipity kicked in. Two guys were walking along Mission Street, next to Yerba Buena. Clay and Tim. I re-introduced myself and told them their presentations were awesome. I wasn’t buttering them up: jointly, they had delivered a wake-up call.

Today I’ll be heading across the Bay to attend Web 2.0 Expo. I don’t have a ticket. I don’t attend to buy one. It’s not that I’m cheap (although I generally am) so much as I don’t have three days for this. My plan is to suck as much knowledge from the event as I can in six hours.
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Today I got locked out of one of my online credit card accounts. My fault: I’ve got too many usernames to cover my split personalities. A box popped up asking me if I wanted live help. You betcha. This saved me time and strengthened my relationship with the bank. Thanks, Edward.

I’ve long advocated treating workers/learners as customers. If a stingy bank can justify providing a service to its customers, it’s probably inexpensive enough to provide to our internal customers. Why shouldn’t live help boxes be available on, for instance, new-hire on-ramps? Or in-house knowledge repositories? Or anywhere people in search of critical information may get lost?

Thinking you can’t afford it? I’ll suggest you can’t not afford it.

What’s a knowledge worker cost these days? For the sake of argument, let’s say $60,000 salary plus benefits, equipment, expenses, and so forth, a total of $80,000. If our worker is making sales or helping customers, what you pay them is the tip of the iceberg; the value of their lost time should be measured in sales not made or service not provided. If our average front-line performer does not have an opportunity cost of at least $200,000 /year, you need to find more productive workers.

If average, knowledge workers spend a third of her time looking for answers. Every case is different. Maybe your organization is so together that your number is 10%. You do the math. The cost/benefit ratio is so compelling that were I a CLO, I’d be asking for justification for not providing realtime help.

I went to Live Person, one of the first online live help software providers. Long ago, I had a Live Person chat box at Internet Time, but that’s another story. Today, they have a case study featuring National City Bank.

It’s not hard to imagine adding this sort of thing at the crossroads of your learning and knowledge management systems, is it? This is a no-brainer. Well, maybe not always. National City has been in the news this week.

Here are some lessons learned from my interviews last week with a company that lives and breathes community.

Few people willingly change the basic way they send and receive information. Email messaging is more likely to take hold than a portal.

Internet software travels with an invisible companion, the memes and processes I call internet culture. The net is an environment for sharing, optimism, and friendliness.

In email and on blogs, people speak conversationally, absent the officiousness of a traditional business memo.

Behind the firewall, behavior is casual but professional. People don’t foul their nest.

Live on the web inside your organization to learn lessons to share with your customers.

People who don’t visibly take part in virtual communities are not lurkers; they are silent partners. Thank goodness, for otherwise everyone would be talking at once.

Group membership should be selective. A couple of hundred people is a common group limit to growth.

Filter out the noise of mediocre and erroneous elements of raw knowledge to increase the fidelity of the knowledge flow.

People will read ten messages embedded in a weekly email. They will not read thirty.

Don’t think learning; this is raising collective intelligence.

The Story of Stuff is a twenty-minute animated movie about the sources of pollution and what to do about them.

This won’t have the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace, or Silent Spring. On the other hand, those eat up a couple of hours to a couple of years of your time.

Most people will never invest the time to listen to Al Gore or Rachel Carson.

The message per minute of The Story of Stuff is tough to beat.