e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Welcome to e-Clippings: The Prologue

This blog is me thinking out loud about a whole bunch of stuff. Anthropology. Large organization dynamics. How communities function and grow. How technology and culture come together. How 'social' informs everything. How we can learn and perform better. I'm loving Kickstarter. I also have an About.me page. 

Really? This is what we do now? Gmail in your glasses?

I'm probably going to come off sounding sanctimonious or worse but what the heck...it's just the Internet and nobody reads blogs anymore...

I saw this story about the first features available on Google Glass and yes, you'll be able to take pictures and respond to things with your voice and golly gee, you'll also be able to see your incoming email messages and read headlines from the NYT!! This reminded me of a talk that Raph Koster gave at GDC a few years back about how if games were such a powerful medium, then why weren't they addressing pressing social and humanitarian issues with that power? I actually think games are doing some of that - from Games For Change to Games for Health  - I think games are being deployed to positive effect. I don't think that Google Glass is headed along the same path. 

I find my self wishing that the story above was about how the first apps to be built and groups to get the devices would be efforts focused on collecting data for humanitarian relief or for scientific purposes or for First Responders to have access to critical information at the point of need. Seems like we used to start tech off at the "big purpose" level and then it trickled down to the consumer level. Now we start with the most retail of applications and hope that someone with vision can find a way to re-purpose that tech for loftier goals. I understand the dynamic...Google is an ad delivery platform and the Glasses will greatly help target that delivery. Just like Facebook Home will greatly aid Facebook (although I really don't see how Home will help Facebook users). 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of capitalism - think the free market is terrific (w/ some limits) but I do think our present First World society gives pretty short shrift to the idea of service. I'm also as guilty as anyone else in engaging in that behavior. As a small step...maybe today....take a minute and Think Big...let's see what happens. 

Start with a blank slate...

I heard a general one time start a conference with the admonition to consider all the presentations as if you had a blank slate. I thought that was pretty powerful. It moved people out of their entrneched positions and got them to stop thinking about legacy systems and so on. More recently, I saw another note talking about drawing inspiration from a blank slate and I started thinking about setting up a training system rom scratch in a organization.

So let's say you are in an org of a couple hundred people, the org is a couple years old, its grown to the point where you need to get a little bit more structured in terms of systems - not formal from a content perspective but maybe move away from the ad hoc nature of systems that people have been using until now. What's your first move? Buy an LMS? Hire someone to build curriculum? Start listing content to be produced and deciding on the media? I don't think so. 

I think blank slates are cool...like white pages of paper, their emptiness is full of potential. You never really get one though do you? Not completly anyway so let's think about our blank slate in this case from the standpoint of systems. We have no legacy systems. No existing LMS. No authoring tool pumping out content in some weird format. What do we have though? We have employees - folks that are doing their jobs. Folks that are already learning. So let's start there. 

If you wanted to build cars and you found a factory of people already doing half of what you wanted, would you just chuck all that to install your own deal? You might and if that is you then I hope you enjoy your time on the trash heap of industry because that's a stupid and wasteful thing to do.  So let's not start installing training systems without first finding out if we can just leverage what people are already doing to learn. Yes! That's right! Much like Christmas came for the Who's without box or bows, learning comes without storyboards and job aids. Now we're back to our original question - how do you start?

I think if you start from a place that says "people are already learning  - I need to help that" - then that is a very different place than "we need to create content and build courses." The system that suggests to me as the foundational piece is one that allows discovery, exploration and sharing. You want people in your organization to be able to discover each other's talents and strengths - and you want them to be able to discover relevant content and material. 

You want them, your employees that are already learning, to explore new ways of working together (anyone else hear strains of Star Trek whenever you use the phrase 'to explore'?), and new ways of forming teams and so on. 

Finally, you want them to be able to share  - to share their knowledge, their experiences, their capabilities, their encyclopedic recall of the bast places to eat near the office. Oh, yeah and you want to make all that happen with very little friction, integrated with other systems and include it in the workflow.

That sounds awfully social doesn't it? Now that we have that stood up, now we can start using that system to really identify holes in the knowledge base, communities that need management, and relationships and lines of communication that need to become visible (hello email!). Then we can add in as appropriate, some more formal content, some analytics, etc. Those things should be capabilities of the system but they are not the foundation of the system so don't favor them over other systems - expand on the pre-existing learning that is going on right now inside your organization, use a social layer to allow your own employees increase their performance. 

Now, look at your slate. 

How lucky am I?

We're almost up on St Patrick's day and so I'm getting visually flooded with four-leaf clovers...that jolly, green symbol for luck. So I started thinking about luck and I've concluded that I'm, 'wicked lucky.' (I can say that with a Boston accent in my head since I was born there). 

I'm lucky for a bunch of reasons. I think I'm alive at a great time. I'm psyched about my job and my company (@socialetxt ;-)). I'm healthy. I have an amazing 13 year old son who deals with some tough cards he's been dealt with a grace and strength that I admire. He's a great kid. 

What I'm really lucky about though is that I have someone in my life who I've known for so long that I can't remember what it was like before I met her. She is smart, tough, funny, beautiful, is a mom whose son adores her - and I don't want to forget creative and talented. Understand this, I am not an easy person to live with. I have a trunk full of flaws and if they could be fixed by surgery, I don't want to think how many operations it would take. She knows all these flaws - knows them in a way that no one else ever can - and here she is. I don't know what I'd do without her. I do know that she's my rock, my base, the part that lets me do creative stuff or thoughtful stuff or fun stuff - she is that necessary ingredient. We've been married 23 years and I still love when we're were walking down the street and takes my hand or kisses me goodbye in the morning. 

So I'm a Protestant with a German heritage - not so very Irish (been there a couple of times and love it and the people) - but on St Patrick's Day with all the clovers and every other day - I'll wake up and count myself lucky that @sassysbgal is in it. 

Pattern Recognition, Neoterics and moving on....

Like a lot of people, I read Anil Dash's "The Web We Lost" and I read Hugh MacLeod's corollary piece. I'm split on how I feel here. The essence of both pieces, if I may be so bold as to try and boil down thoughts by folks like Dash and MacLeod, both of whom I respect greatly, is that the Web used to be cool and open and edgy and egalitarian and now, now its not. Or not as much. But its still cool and it can still be cooler. Or cool again. And edgy. And egalitarian. Again. 

I don't want to play Devil's Advocate but I kinda feel like someone should. We may have indeed lost some things but we have gained many as well. Everyone I know now is online somehow. Back in the good ole days, it was no mean feat to actually meet people who didn't live online like I did. I like that. I like that more and more people are experiencing a networked world. I think the more minds the better. 

So what if Technorati isn't exactly what it used to be? We have analytics out the YinYang for Twitter, Facebook and every other network we're on. Why don't the Walled Garden nuance of these new networks bother me? Because simply the barriers to replacing them have never been lower. 

Anil laments what it will take for us to teach a new generation what it was like for us when the Web was cooler. You ever hear of Neoterics? Probably not. They're in this amazing story by Theodore Sturgeon called "Microcosmic God." (copy of it here on Scribd [a new network we've gained]). The idea is that this scientist invents a race of beings that cycle through a generation in something like 8 days. That means that problems that take us multiple generations to find answers to (meaning decades and decades) - the Neoterics could find in the same number of generations but that would mean something like a month. We are the Neoterics.

Anil doesn't need to worry about explaining the way the Web used to be to a new generation - we've already cycled through multiple Web generations since say 1995. Web generations are not lived in human years, they're lived in Internet Time (hi Jay Cross et al) and in Internet Time, its been multiple multiple generations since The WELL, AOL, Web rings, the primacy of blogs, and Web 1.0. 

Now I'm thinking about my fav passage from William Gibson, @GreatDismal, and his book Pattern Recognition:

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition” 

This is where we are. Between Neoterics and Pattern Recognition...we go forward...we don't look back so much...we rapidly iterate and we do so in a world of ever-shrinking barriers of entry. Ever seen this great collage of businesses and the garages they were started in? We don't need garages any more. We don't need office space. We need a power outlet and WiFi and we'll start the next network that will suplant Facebook. Or Twitter. and when we tire of them, we'll tear them down, chew them up and grow something new. We haven't "lost" anything...we've moved on. 

(embed attempt) This Exquisite Forest: Looking Up / Looking Down

What I was going to say to @zephoria at Hackers tonight..

So went down to the awesome E Street Cinema with @sassysbgal and The Boy Who Is Not On Twitter to a showing of the classic cyber-film "Hackers" starring a young Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller (dude, that laptop is SCREAMING with a 28.8 BPS modem!!). 

It was cool and nostalgic and I love it when Miller and Jolie were tossing out "PCI Bus" and "RISC" like they were deeply meaningful. 

@FutureTenseNow was ther organizer and @zephoria was kinda like the special guest star - danah was also nice enough to take some questions afterward and one was from someone who asked if she thouht that the term "hacker" could ever be reclaimed and reconditioned to have some meaning, if not benign then at least a little more nuanced than what we have now. I didn't get a chance to answer that question but here is what I was thinking.....

No. Not happening. Not anytime soon and here is why...the denigration of the term hacker has to be placed along a spectrum that I'd argue, started with Pearl Harbor, was amplified by the atomic bomb, was cooked into our national psyche by Vietnam and which was granted horrific status by 9/11. All these points have been hammer blows to the collective American ideal that no matter how hard you hit us, we'll get back up. (Read: Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture)

Taken together, Pearl Harbor and the US's two atomic attacks, showed that America could be surprised and that if an opponent had atomic weapons...that surprise might not be something we could recover from. Vietnam showed we could be horribly wrong about how to prosecute a war and that we could actually "lose." 9/11 showed that our enemies didn't even need to have atomic weapons any more to do us serious damage. 

These have been hammer blows to the American psyche and I think, have permanently done away with our capability to allow room to consider something like hacking to have any kind of innocent, rebellious youth quality. I don't think our considerations of national security have room for that anymore. Its sad. Its a loss. The consequences have just been shown to be too high to have room for much forgiveness. I think 'hacking' is now permanently equated to criminal or terrorist activity. The RIAA and MPAA also bear blame here for making real-life criminals out of 13-year-old girls who have downloaded some songs or a movie. 

So I'll keep thinking well of Defcon and Black Hat and wearing my "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt (thx Jon Lech Johansen)...but I don't see a slew of future heroes emerging from the ranks of the l337 haxx0r. I'll hope though and remember, Hack The Planet! ;-)

Senge, Learning Organizations and asking a question...

A few days ago I tweeted a question about why Peter Senge never seemed to be mentioned in learning circles along with folks like Bloom, Gagne, and Kirkpatrick. : #crowdbooster told me that I was RT'd 7 times on that tweet and reached a potential audience of about 18,000 people. Exactly zero replies though. I mean I can attribute part of that to people saw the tweet and just didn't know what to say or that I am generally very easy to ignore. Either way, it was a point of interest for me. 

I don't work squarely in the learning and training field anymore and am quite happy being in the social media for the enterprise space and working for an awesome company like Socialtext. I still think though about L&D from the standpoint of social being the glue that brings together vectors like HCM, L&D and more. I also have 10+ years of experience in L&D and can't quit looking at some things through that lens. 

So I have to ask - why no Senge? I have been to conference after conference in the L&D world and I don't think I have ever come across a single session on Senge, the Fifth Discipline or his ideas of a "learning organization." I am confused by that. I have seen session after session on how to think about adult learning, cognitive overload, game-based learning - full disclaimer - I've done quite a few of those presentations myself. 

Here is what I'm confused by - why haven't we been talking more about "learning organizations"? Have we and I've just been missing it? (entirely possible) Its just seems to be that approaching this discussion from a holistic standpoint make so much sense. It puts L&D in a strategic role across the organization - places L&D in a central role of generating a competitive advantage - this seems to be a much stronger organizational position that fighting for some loosely defined and poorly appreciated ROI. 

 While we're at it - where is Chris Argyris and Overcoming Organizational Defenses - the subtitle of which is Facilitating Organizational Learning - I mean am I just being a rube here? Did I miss some big discussion that went on before I got here in which we all agreed that these people wouldn't be brought up? Because honestly, I almost want to believe that happened as opposed to the other idea which is that we've just ignored this stuff. 

So this is a little plea to go along with my tweet - wassup y'all? 

The Most Wrong Argument about Video Games and Art

I've seen some other arguments about why video games are not "art" but this column from Jonathan Jones is just stupid. There have been lots of comments on the Guardian's own site and on Kotaku and I'm sure, in countless other places and I might not add anything ground-breaking to the discussion but I just had to get a few ideas down here. 

I'll get to Jones' contention that video games aren't art but let's not let his first assertion slip by unnoticed - that there is some combination of age and intellectual development past which, people should not praise video games nor should they be playing them.  I don't really have a crtique of this argument past the fact that given that, one could quite reading Jones' article there since his bias is so clear we know which way this article is going to go. You know what? That's OK - it's his column and he is entitled to his opinion and he is certainly entitled to not play any games - it's just that I feel sad for him. I don't think everyone should play games all the time but I do agree with people like Jane McGonigal about the positive impact of games, and with other studies that detail both the positive cognitive and motor skill improvements that acrue from game-playing (not to mention the social benefits as well).  So I'll hope that perhaps someone will get Jones' a couple games for the holidays and that maybe he'll take some time and play a little - it's a brighter world on the other side. 

An interesting note is that Jones' disagrees with MoMA's decision to display video games as art. The interesting part is that his column in no way talks about the process that MoMA went through to arrive at that decision. Nor does he address in any way, how whatever collection of what I can only assume are suprememly qualified judges of art at MoMA have arrived at a decision that someone like Jones' can so clearly see is wrong. 

Finally we come to the heart of Jones' argument - I think it goes that because games are a collective product, they can not reflect a personal vision  - no one "owns the games" so there is no artist.

"A work of art is one person's reaction to life." -Jonathan Jones

This argument confuses me to such an extent that I have to shake my head a bit at first. I want to ask Jones what he considers art? Clearly paintings - he references those. Sculpture? Music? Film? Photography? (I won't EVEN bring up comic books - I can only imagine how Jones feels about those!) How many people can be involved in the production process before it becomes non-art? 

Jones also argues that even the greatest chess player in the world wasn't an artist. Again, this argument much like his cognitive/age cutoff for playing games - just makes me sad. To be able to watch Bobby Fisher play chess without recognizing that as art, well it just makes me think that Jones' world is a dim place indeed. 

Why only one person? Why can art not be a collective reaction to life? Why the solitary aspect? To be sure, there have been great artists who were so possessed by incredibly strong personal visions that they made some great art but I utterly reject the notion that art BY DEFINITION requires some hermetic-like solitary act of creation. I reject that because I reject the idea that there IS a solitary act of creation. Van Gogh's reaction to life was a deeply personal one to be sure but one intimately colored and affected by interactions with others. He did not cut an ear off because he was an island unto himself. 

Every artist is part of a collective. A collective of experiences. I collective of the production process. Art is by my definition, a social product in that it is mediated through one's own experiences with others. To deny that is to deny that humans are social creatures. To call out video games as non-art because their collective nature is more transparent than some other art forms is just plain wrong. 

Social Media is (pls add)......

Conversations, Networks, Less Transmission Loss, Community, Community of Purpose, People Not Resisting Change, Advocacy, Mobile, Expertise, Culture, Value, Collaboration, attacking Hierarchies, Subject-matter networks, Emotions (Fear, Control, Trust), Performance,
Authenticity

You Do Not Have a 1:1 Relationship with Social Media

Look, social media likes you a lot. Really. I know you have feelings for social media too. The harsh truth though is that social media is not just going to see you exclusively and you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking you'd  be able to handle SoMe on your own anyway, they're too much for you. 

I mean think about it, you can't even handle your email. There's no way you can stand up to Twitter. So stop thinking its you against the world. Get some Zen. Go with the flow...feel the Force...be the ball....focus on building your network. 

You don't have a 1:1 relationship with social media - what you should be building is a many to many relationship. Social media is a network and you need to respond to the output of that network with your own network. I've got a strong network that kinda looks like a patchwork quilt. 

Part of it looks for #socbiz. Part of it watches #swchat and #lrnchat. (shhh part of it even looks for mentions of my name). Pat of it looks for UX and part looks for jokes that are, frankly, NSFW and so on. It's my responsibility to architect the right network. The cool thing? Me and my network are also part of other people's networks - at absolutely zero incremental cost to any of us. 

This is what can move us past the Tragedy of the Commons. So stop thinking like a subject-matter expert and start thinking like a Subject-Matter Network. 

How Geek is Geek?

I'm re-reading Starship Troopers. I just love this book. This book talked about an army of Iron Men years before Stan and Jack introduced us to Tony Stark. It covers everything from racism to gender equality to how society establishes the voting franchise for its citizens. Oh, and then there are the armored suits with shoulder-launched atomic weapons, drop capsules and bug hunts. Those are all analogies too but they're also wicked cool. Anyway, this got me thinking that re-reading something like Starship Troopers (having never watched more than 10 minutes of that disgraceful movie) might be some sort of cultural marker of being a geek. That got me wondering, what other markers might I have lurking in my background that might indicate a certain geekiness. Let's see what I found. 

I am a second generation member of the Science Fiction Book Club. I cut my teeth on Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Anderson, Sturgeon - HARD science fiction as it was called, FTL drives and event horizons (then those new guys Vinge, Gibson and Stephenson got into the act). None of this vampire love story crap. Hari Seldon is a hero. I know Asimov's pen name that he used to write the Lucky Starr series. 

I started out usually as an Elf (got a thing for bows), Lawful Neutral. When PC games hit, the ones I bought came in ziplock bags with mimeographed instructions and 5.25 disks. My first programming experience was BASIC on an Apple IIe. Wrote a whole branching text game using that. That was after my dad had showed me how to use his  FORTRAN flow chart template.  

I've built crystal radio sets on Christmas morning, put together desktop computers from the chassis out, while debating which power source was better than another. I remember when modem speeds jumped from 14.4 and dreamed heady dreams of 28.8 days to come. Remember when the first 1GB hard drive came out and we all thought - what the hell would you ever need that kind of storage for?

I date most things in my childhood development as either happening before or after 1977 because that's when Star Wars came out. I subscribed to Star Wars monthly and use the posters as wallpaper. I watched every episode of Space 1999 and to me, Battlestar Galactica stars Lorne Green. I know what all the buttons on the steering wheel of the Mach 5 do and my favorite was always the robot bird. I knew what every round in Logan's gun did (there were 6 different ones). I dreamed of becoming a Ninja Hacker Overlord or maybe the Kwisatz Haderach or maybe just a Stranger in a Strange Land. I devoured every issue of OMNI magazine and wish I still had them - it'd be cool if WIRED featured sci-fi writing like OMNI did. 

There is a first edition of Seduction of the Innocent sitting on my bookshelf and I can say things like Excelsior! and Wonder Twin Powers Activate! with complete confidence. There is a table in my office that is actually just boxes of comic books with a table cloth on top of them. I used to mark major changes in the economy by increases in the cover price of my comics. When I went on a tour of the FBI building (when they still used to do that), I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the group that recognized Jack Kirby's artwork on the wall. I have a Flaming Carrot action figure, love the Tick, Arthur and the Man-Eating Cow. I think Demon in a Bottle is possibly one of the best story arcs ever and yes, I still have my pull list at local comic book store. 

Wizardry was a constant companion from Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord to the Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I remember being in a open field to the west of a white house. I finally found the Coconut of Quendor while upstairs in my fraternity house's computer room while there was party going on downstairs. I'll never forget that when I typed "get Coconut"  - my inventory was too full.

I've had pets named Jason (of the Argonauts not Friday the 13th), Romulus, Remus and Loki. I have a dog named Gambit and used to have a dog named Remy LeBeau.  Saw Videodrome, in the theater. Could watch Scanners right now. I love Peter Jackson because he made the movies we all saw in our heads when we read Lord of the Rings. I got my hands on a bootleg VHS copy of Highlander from Japan because it had like an extra 3 minutes on it (the part about where he got his secretary). 

Winsock, Telnet and Pine - that's how you got to email. Mosaic? That was one sexy beast. I remeber when most of the places I went online started with alt.binaries. I've owned a C-64 and a TRS-80. Atari console? Sure. Activision? No doubt. Dreamcast? Yeppers (worst controller ever). PS1, 2 and 3? Done, done and done. 

There for a while, I never used to have to spend quarters in the arcade because I had the high monthly scores on Tempest and Red Baron. I also rocked Robotron 2084 and Galaga, was pretty good at Joust but some kid was better. I was also in the KISS Army and yes, had all their solo albums. 

My first credit as a published author is a chapter in The Cyborg Handbook entitled "From Captain America to Wolverine: Images of Cyborgs in Comic Books." I had another piece published in grad school that talked about the cultural meaning inscribed on PEZ and have about 300 of those sitting around (the ones without the feet are the older ones). 

While I was in the Pentagon, I delivered briefings with images of Johnny Mnemonic and DOOM. I have this tendency to decorate my office with blown up maps from XKCD, like the one of IPv4 and one of my favorite things that sits on my desk is a little solid metal statue of Gort. Whenever I shop, I shop smart at S Mart and I will leave Jack Burton out of this. I have a son who is using Netflix to work his way through all the Dr Who that's available and earlier this year I got him the complete set of Ultraman episodes. 

Now things change to be sure. They always do. But as I sit here typing this post in a hoodie from 2012's DragonCon, I reckon that I can still hang with some geeks...On the Bounce and By The Numbers!

Help the Wounded Warrior Project....

OK kids...The Wounded Warrior Project...understand that we are living in a time during which the U.S. is home to the greatest number of combat veterans in our country's history. The WWP is doing some amazing work helping those veterans adjust both mentally and physically and they've got some amazing results.

Now as it turns out, I'm running in this little race called the Tough Mudder that so far has donated about $3.5 million to the WWP. I'm trying to help them kick in a little more.

If you go here you can easily (and anonymously if you want) donate to the WWP. I'd appreciate it and we all know these folks who have given so much, deserve it.

If you can't give, that's cool too, please feel free to share this and pass it along. Thanks and now back to our regular programming.

Not unique....just prophetic....(and a Fletch quote)

Why are sites/services like Coursera, edX, Udacity, Academic Earth, TED-Ed and Khan Academy (feel free to comment and add all the ones that I've left out) really important?

World-changing content? Maybe.

Stunning new technology? Um, no.

Then what is it?

They are cracks in the dam. They are canaries in the mine. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, wrote in part, "...We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic." Spot on Clay. Higher education, take note, its your turn. Oh, to all the folks in corporate learning and training who just breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't their turn...you need to keep reading.

Ever hear of  Common Craft? Lynda.com or Stormwind? How about Bloomfire? Code Academy? Quora? Snapguide? Instructables? Open Sesame? No? Look 'em up. Why? Well, I talk a lot about how we can look to the consumer market for features that will be included in our enterprise systems in the future....well look to the consumer market for new business models and production models too.

Do you remember Fletch? Of course you do. Everyone loves that movie. Remember the scene in the doctor's office? No, not that part, the part where the dialog goes like this:

Dr. Joseph Dolan: You know, it's a shame about Ed.
Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.
Dr. Joseph Dolan: Ahh, he was dying for years.
Fletch: Sure, but... the end was really... very sudden.
Dr. Joseph Dolan: He was in intensive care for eight weeks!
Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he actually died. That was extremely sudden.

That's what where we are headed. Everyone keeps cranking out instructional content based on seat time and levels of interactivity EXCEPT anyone not already in the industry. Those folks are the ones finding alternative models. Why? I believe its because the logic that once held that system together is breaking down. 

Waaaaay back in 2005, Bill Gates gave a speech to the National Governor's Association. Part of what he said was:

America’s high schools are obsolete.   

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.   
By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. 
Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.      
Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

I believe he was spot on. Summers off? Built for an agricultural society. Desks in rows and columns? A factory model of control and surveilance not education. You can't fix it though because it's not broken. Its an outdated design. 

Wonder why all the companies I mentioned above are popping up? Why institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so on are even experimenting? They feel the problems in the model. Do we? We keep pushing ADDIE like its some kind of magic charm. What happens though when we deploy a social media system first - that would make the "I" first...and we do that before any analysis because you can't analyze something that you have no data for...and then we tweak the design...whoa...now we're all out of order. I don't know if ADDIE is right or wrong but I know its too rigid. We don't operate in linear fashion we operate in a realm of simultaneity. Now what's your design concept look like? 30, 60 90, days to develop an hour of instruction? Really? 

I'm sure the folks at the Rocky Mountain News, which started in 1859, thought they would continue on forever too. I'm not here with all the answers, just trying to remind people that we need to be asking these questions now. 

 

New Job Alert: Mark is now at Socialtext.....w00t!!

So hi everyone. OK, not going to try and hide it - I'm totally jacked. Psyched. Pumped. Whatever. <Insert favorite "I'm very excited" superlative here.>

Today is my first day at Socialtext. If you want, I'll tell you all about them but if you've known me for a while, you've probably already heard me talk about them. If you want the 'human speak' version, they we make an outstanding platform that allows you to find the people you need to work with and then get your work done faster and better so you can get out when you need to and get home in front of traffic. I could throw in a lot of words like collaboration, enterprise, customer-facing, intranet, and so on but really - they we help you work better.

My job is going to be working with the customers of Socialtext to help make sure that their visions are realized and that they get the benefits they are looking for. I may even help point out some ways that our platform can help them that they may not have even thought of yet. I'm sneaky like that.

I'll still blog occassionally, tweet prolifically, post photos to flickr and keep trying to figure out the best way to use G+. I still have an about.me page and am still loving my Scoop.it site called It's All Social. Honestly, I also feel like I'm doing what I should be doing, helping people and organizations figure out the best way to use an outstanding piece of software to perform better.As always, thanks for reading!

 

 

Tabs I need to to get to...

So I've spoken openly before about my Tab Problem. Not the 70's-80's diet drink, the fact that I have 58 tabs that open up when I start Chrome...the number is a little troubling but more so is the age of some of these tabs...I need a Chrome extension that re-arranges my tabs every day like a 30/60/90 accounts payable system...I need to know how long I've had some of this tab inventory. Anybody wanna go ahead and code that, just lemme know when you're done. Until then, I'm going to put some of that tab info right here so I can maybe free up a couple of cycles on the CPU...

 CryptoCat: instant, web-based, secure chat

Pledge Music: kickstarter but for music

Find this book: Marshall McLuhan: G.K. Chesterton: a practical mystic By Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Barrington Nevitt, Harold Adams Innis

PlaySay: "An iPhone game that connects language learners so they can have real conversation with pronunciation feedback."

WorkFlowy: need to try

The Anatomy of an Experience Map: should be part of ISD training

Videos from Adaptive Path's 2012 Managing Experience (MX): Watch all these

AirCover: mobile security

The Future of Apps and Web: Pew Report

DIY USB Battery Charger: Build with son

DIY Solar Charger: Build with son

New lecture series by Ted Nelson (updated): Watch all these

The Future of Gamification: read Pew Report

Pearltrees: an organizer

The 3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform: read

Language People! Let's Watch It!

File this under Tip of the Iceberg Dept:

I saw an email this morning about "measuring Learning 2.0." I've also seen a Learning 3.0 conference and is it me or does it seem that the semantic train is getting a bit far out of the station.

Keep in mind, when Tim O'Reilly coined the term "web 2.0" he was describing not a technical leap so much but a break in way we had done business...that is, we were entering a new mode of doing things. So from that standpoint, I'm not really sure what all the 2.0/3.0 talk is about.

I have more of a glimmer what all the web 2.0, 3.0 talk is about since those leaps are at least tangentially tied to technical leaps like social media, semantic web and so on.

What is all the Learning iteration tied to?

How is learning 2.0 different from 3.0?

Are people learning differently?

If not, then are we doing business differently?

If not, then are the iterations tied to technical leaps?

If not, then what the hell are we talking about?

As they tell the kids in elementary school, words are important and are using ours badly....again

I love Jay Cross dearly and love what he's done in terms of informal learning but I think he'd admit that the term "e-learning" has proved to be an inelegant beast at best. We categorically underestimate the "e" and don't change our design to incorporate or even acknolwedge it and its not actually "learning" - its training or education or content but learning is a personal construct. I'll stop saying that as soon as someone can sell me some learning. 

So could we just stop the hype please. That's what it really is. Everyone wants to be appear edgy and cool and if we did 2.0 last year we MUST do 3.0 this year. Shut up about it for a year, how about that? How about realize that a term like "2.0" is a literary tesseract - it is capable of holding so much content and change and by racing by it on our way to 3 and 4 and 5...we are once again missing the power and potential as we chase after the shiny. 

An Amplification of the power of Game-Based Learning in the Corporate World

I read Julie Brink's recent article  on Game-based Learning for the Corporate World, and I just wanted to add to what I think Julie was trying to do - which is promote game0based learning as a viable and powerful option. This post is in no way intended to be snarky or derisive and I'm actually thankful to Julie for getting me off my butt and actually spitting out something on a topic I really believe in.

I'm perfectly in line with what I think the goal of this article is..to convince people that games represent a powerful medium for learning in a range of environments, including the corporate sphere. You bet. Spot on. Couldn't agree more. The article however falls into some predictable traps that even supporters trigger and that actually end up weakening the very case they seek to make. 

The very first listing of games, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Scrabble...immediately goes to a popular sort of game but what about Chess? Go? Games that have been around for centuries; or even making the point with games like poker and lacrosse and bowling - that games are games and that people need to get past this bias of the "gamer" name only referring to computer/console games. 

 The stats on the growth of the gaming market and the changing demographic of gamers is also interesting but I think of more interest to folks in the corporate space would be some admittedly dated stats now from Beck & Wade's 2004 book, Got Game? How the Gamer Generation is reshaping business forever:

• The gaming generation makes up 90 million individuals from the US alone.
• Approximately 56 million of these individuals are already saturating the workforce, from employees to upper management positions.
• About 12% are said to be managers already.
• In 2003, around 92% of kids age 2 through 17 in the United States access games on a daily basis.Of this 92%, only 80% are know to have home computers or some form of Internet access.

Beck and Wade also make some really interesting points about this "gamer generation;" for example that gamers believe that winning matters (counter to the stereotypical slacker image), that they place a high value on competence-on the being the expert, that they are risk takers and believers in open communication and creative problem solving. These kind of points I think loom very large (or should) in the minds of corporate trainers who think they will just be able to provide the same old training to a generation raised on games - but I know we were talking about games as learning vehicles and not as bifurcators of generations. So let's get into comparing "gaming" to e-learning.

First, comparing "gaming" to "traditional e-learning" is at best an apples to oranges comparison. Games require absolutely no technology. The dynamics that are inherent in games, including learning (see Raph Koster in Theory of Fun, Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, or Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois for some background on the rich history of humankind and games), are in games played purely with human bodies and imagination as they are in games that require the absolute latest in computer hardware and broadband connections. e-Learning is by definition a technologically mediated delivery mechanism...its not even a stand-alone set of principles

 On the theoretical front, we really need to get Skinner out of there. As one accessible example, if you read Donald Clark's recent post on Skinner (part of Donald's amazing learning theorists marathon) if really a weak frontman for the power of game-based learning and really makes it seem as nothing much deeper than stimulus-response is at work and that games are somehow graphically enhanced Skinner boxes. There are any number of better advocates for the power of game-based learning but two that leap to mind are James Paul Gee (eg What Video Games Can teach Us About Learning and Literacy) and David Williamson Shaffer (How Computer Games Help Children Learn and his work on pedagogical praxis) leap to mind...along with Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen, and a host of others...the point being, there is an incredibly rich and growing body of work focused specifically on the power of games as mechanisms for creating incredibly rich opportunities...we should probably just leave Skinner to his mice. 

The authors about can also make the point better than I as to the differences between designing games for learning or training purposes and designing e-learning. The short answer is however that the gulf is enormous. Game design is a whole other skill set that starts from a different place theoretically and is informed by a radically different view of the user/learner/player than is e-learning design. Read Theory of Fun by Koster - very accessible and probably the single best explanation of how game design enshrines learning in a way that traditional ISD does not. 

The topic of when games are not the best tool is also a logical and valid point for discussion but hardly for the reasons mentioned in the article. Games are great at parsing out large amounts of information is contexts that actually allow people to remember it. Think back, how did you learn your alphabet? Numbers? Huge amounts of very basic data was transmitted either through games or play (which are related but are not the same)....games, I'd argue are actually much better vehicles than the NEXT BUTTON for transmitting data...it all comes down to design. As to the question of whether some content is to sensitive or personal to be played in game - depends on I think, if you really want to deal with the topic or just check the box. Let's look at some:

• Darfur is Dying: a game that teaches about the horror of genocide
• Foor Force: a game that teaches about famine relief
• Fat World: a game that teaches about nutrition and obesity

There are examples after examples of incredibly personal topics being taught with sensitivity and care via games. I'd argue again that games can provide a richer, more nuanced context to these sensitive topics than traditional learning. 

I think I've already touched on the demographics of the gaming population above and that's a great point - I'd argue again that we need to make that point relative to gaming in general and not act like all "gaming" is a video game. 

The cost front is also a moving target. The basic truth is that you can spend as little or as much as you want to build a game but by no means will price ensure quality; only good design will do that. My recommednation and its one that people have heard me make before, is head over to Kongregate. All the games there (as of 5/15/2010 there were 57,000 free games) are all built on Flash and represent an incredible array of designs and game elements that will give you a broader perspective on the possibilities - of course that means you'll have to play a lot of games. Sorry. ;-)

I also just want to ask, where is the point about the social aspect of gaming? That aspect is the one driving everything from Farmville to the new wave of 'gamification'...this is actually a key dynamic that has been granted new import due to the scale and reach afforded by technology - this aspect is one that could be particularly powerful in a globally dispersed yet integrated community like a corporation.  

In closing (finally right?), thanks to Julie for writing her article or else I wouldn't have written this one and I like being reminded of the power of games to inspire and teach and I hope this post is taken in the spirit intended; one of amplification and pushing forward and not argumentative or snarky. 

Not Convergence but Confluence...what the heck some Consilience too

I'm sensing something in the tabs. There is a shift in the flow of the infostream. Eddies of data are harboring tadpoles of nascent thoughts. I'm also listening to the Writer's Almanac every morning. Is it showing?

 This isn't feeling like a calm highway merging...this feels like a confluence...the rumbling, jumbled, hydraulic coming together of two or more rivers...there are multiple flows...multiple possible, potential directions, but which flow will dominate...which water will run on top and get featured in all those awesome Instagram pictures of rivers with artsy film noir filters and which waters will run deep, silent, unnoticed except that they will be the currents actually carving into the landscape, changing the river bed, they will be the ones creating meander scars out of entire industries...was this last great burst powered by the underutilized remains of the infrastructure of the dotcom bubble? Too many servers then, too many Aeron chairs...what is the excess capacity waiting to be used as a platform for innovation now?

 "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning," Oyl Miller

Is that what Sherry Turkle is warning us against in "The Flight from Conversation"? ..which ironically has spawned both connection and conversation...(Roth, Cormier,) ...and I must say, Dave C. , love your response. Is she warning us against these currents forming some sort of conversational fluvial delta with little or nor discernible direction except some vague 'that way'? What is Turkle's response to the great electronic saint McLuhan who said:

"If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."  Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy

Do electronic cyborgs dream  of electronic conversations?

 In Alexis Madrigal's piece "The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future" ....he asks "now what?" are we just doing more of the same..more Facebooks..more FourSquares...more but not different....I sang the same lament when I was still in grad school studying history..the history of the last 5 years of the French literary underground..a movement built on writing but studied with at least a limited view toward context in Hatfield-McCoy level conflict with my anthropology where everything is connected, everything contextualized. Back to history.....now Commager-Steele, Tonybee, the Durants, Braudel...their works all had their faults but they were BIG. HUGE. Eleven, twleve volume histories of the World, or Civilization. Breathtakingly large. Remember the game manual for F-117a Stealth Fighter? 200 page monster that started with Bernoulli's Principle and ended with how to evade Russian-made SAM sites. We used to read The Stand...in paperback this beast was over 1300 pages. Now we're telling stories 140 characters at a time. There's nothing inherently wrong with that but does it lead us to the punchline of telling the story of an elephant one part at a time? I think this more when I see an article for  One sentence pitch winners.......the idea that we now have contests to reduce the essence of a new startup into one sentence...and celebrate those who have thought small enough to be able to reduce their idea to a phrase. Or are we enagaging that principle whereby constraints make for great creativity (see one of my fav stories, The Microcosmic God)? Paul Graham hands out "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" ...like replace email (ok)...replace universities (there we go)...couple that with the Atlantic's special report on "The Broken Promise of American Education" ....and a little ditty I just wrote and I start to think that maybe education really is in for it. 

 I remember that the kind of unspoken defintion of history is the record of change over time....are we possibly moving into a time, the singularity if you will, when things are moving too fast for huge leaps forward...we're into pattern recognition phase now...wonder if there isn't some corllary to when Man first made the shift from Hunter/Gatherer to Agriculure....are we waiting for our inherent human capabilities to catch up to this new environment? do we have to reconfigure our socio-economic systems to allow some in our tribe to stay home from the subsistence-level infohunts and work on flint-napping some knowledge out of all these stones?

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition” ― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

"When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns." Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!by Douglas Coupland

With Men spending less time together on the hunt because some were now back at this new thing called the village...did they lament the weakening of social ties or did they view it as simply the new status quo and invent new social forms, mores and rituals to shore it back up?

"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 294 (that's what is known as "citing" someone...not just "quoting" them...see the difference?) 

 Are synthesizers the new flint napping shaman....are they the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group? Do they get to stay at home while the tribe hunts across the plains of Google and Twitter and Facebook? Is that where we start building the cognitive and cultural infrastructure for the next big leap?

 Wow...I didn't even get to the "New Aesthetic" ....next time people.....

Reading the tea Leaves in my tabs: Our ecosystem is Commodified

I read my browser tabs like tea leaves I think. I look across the top row there and I try to discern what the tabs are telling me. Is there something bubbling up? What's gaining heat or buzz? I'm not saying my tabs are richer than others or more aromatic, its just one way I try to make sense of some of this stuff (I would also read actual tea leaves but they're so hard to find these days). 

 commodify; specifically : to render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company

The latest group of tabs to catch my eye include the following:

Training Sites

Lynda.com: 

CodeAcademy: 

Udacity: 

Treehouse: 

Udemy: 

Stand-alone marketplace

Open Sesame: 

Web-based tools

Bloomfire: 

Udutu: 

Higher Ed

MITx:

Academic Earth: 

OCW: 

Mobile App production

Appmkr:

BuildanApp:

SWebApps:

iBuildApp:

iGenApps: build the app right on your own phone

Now this list isn't mean to be exhaustive, there are other tech triggers that I have listed in my little Watch List. The list above is just what's open in my tabs right now and it has me thinking. 

The first five sites commoditize training on a range of technical topics. Why in the world do I need to buy a library of training from SkillSoft (just an example) when I can just cherry pick the training I want to pay for (for me or my people) right from here?

Open Sesame provides a commodity marketplace for training courses. 

Now Bloomfire and Udutu are emblematic of a class of offerings that commoditize services that used to be huge enterprise purchases...I can literally turn on an LMS or a production platform like I turn on any other utility. 

The higher ed stuff is also really interesting. I can take a Game Theory course from Yale (actually took it - really good), download the course materials and join a live study group on Visualizing Cultures from MIT (note to self: do this), and even get a certificate for completing Circuits and Electronics from MITx. 

The last group of sites are all tools that are designed to allow users to easily create mobile apps, including one which lets you do that on a mobile device itself. So now even these tools, representing a class of functionality that even 2 years ago you'd have to go out and hire a firm to provide, are commodities - widely available, economically and functionally similar and eay to use. 

So we can move from education to training to means of production for either free or something that is so low cost as compared to what the cost would've been 5 or 10 years ago that the price appears at least to be trending to the free. 

So where does that leave us? Where does that leave you big training content company? Where does that leave you institution of higher education? Where does that leave you vendors with traditional (and by that I mean old) business models? Where does that leave the learning and training industry? Do you pray that you VP never finds out about the ability to buy compliance training like they buy coffee for the break room? Or do you do everything you can to make them understand why they should do that and use you and your talents for more meaningful work?

I'd argue that DESIGN in this environment becomes critical differentiator. No, not just instructional design although that has its place. UX. Game design. Organizational design and change management. Designing for the social or the mobile. The content is here people. The tools are here. What will make the GRAND difference is our knowledge of how to use all these commodities. I'll just ASSUME that everyone has seen a 1st season episode of Star Trek (the original) known as "the Arena." What made the difference in that epsiode (even moreso than Kirk's rugged good looks) was the fact that he knew how to build something useful out of the elements that he found (they were actually placed there by the other aliens) laying around. Look around you....there are all these elements laying about...do have the relevenat design skills to make use of them? Are we teaching the generation behind us the right design skills to make use of them? Are our professional conferences focused on these issues? Do our publications and sites echo with design discussions? 

Wanna become a commodity?

Hazing Story from Dartmouth (Disclaimer: I'm in a fraternity)

So I've had this story in my tabs for like a week now and I haven't known what to do with it. The story is about a student who went to Dartmouth and who subsequently reported on the hazing and alcohol abuse he saw there and that he participated in. 

Fair warning - the story recounts some pretty horrific practices. There's lot of drinking. Vomiting. Physical violence. Sexual harassment. Sexual assault. And on it goes. Now like ti says in the title, I'm in a fraternity. Not the one mentioned in the story but still. I've been in it for decades and am one of those people who don't see it as something you leave although I have been fairly inactive for a number of years. Before that though, I held numerous chapter offices, national offices and worked for our national headquarters for 2 years then served on our national board of directors. I wish deeply that I could tell you that the stories that the subject of the story lays out sound totally foreign to me and that I could never imagine humans doing things like that other humans voluntarily and certainly not when those humans happen to be college students. Sadly, the stories are all too familiar. 

I will say I haven't seen abuse to the extreme and at the scale that is described in the story but then I haven't been a college undergrad for a couple of years. I will say this - that if those kind of problems exist at one chapter on a campus, they probably exist to some degree in all the chapters on that campus and probably with the band and football team as well. I'm not trying to widen the blame circle, I'm just stating that in my travels, I've observed that the attitdudes that allow this type of abuse to flourish are rooted in local traditions and mores. I should also say that hazing isn't restricted to fraternities and/or sororities. If its on campus, its kinda like an STD, you never know who has it and some of the folks who do will shock you. 

I'll also say that I went through a transformative moment on this topic while in school. You go through this process and yoru first thought after it is - if I went through, so will the next people. Thank God that something my parents did, or divine intervention or something snapped inside me and that feeling lasted only about one term. I then spent the rest of my time as an undergrad, grad student house father, travelling consultant, national board member - fighting against this awful blight.

I also want to say that I have seen amazing things on the positive side. I had two fraternity brothers stabbed while I was in school. One died. I've never seen a group of young men come together and support each other like we did then. I lost my mom to an anuerism while I was in school. I had no car and was in Georgia and she was in North Carolina. It was finals week but I turned to a brother while still on the phone with the doctor and asked him to drive me the 5 hours to NC - he only asked when I wanted to leave. I'm also a historian. At one point, I was the National Historian for my fraternity and so I've seen stories both good and bad stretching back over the entire span of our existence. 

I'll also say that our ritual which does feature things like robes and candles, is no more threatening when done right, than the Masonic rituals from which it (and about 90% of all fraternities rituals) are drawn (most of our founders were Masons after all). Actually there are some quite beautiful parts in there and I wish deeply that we did not keep our ritual secret for two reasons - 1. I'd like to share it with you and 2. I'd like everyone to know what the letters that I wear stand for and to hold me to that brave and enduring motto. 

So let me close this rambling post by saying that I have a 12 year old son. When he goes off to college, I'll tell him that he should go through rush and see if there is a chapter of a fraternity at his school that he likes (if its not mine, that's ok - although that would be cool). I'll also urger him to take with him a strong sense of self and a strong conviction not to belong to any group that asks him to violate his own personal values (things I think all people should carry with them). I may also visit campus and talk to the Greek advisor. I'll also go to bed every night as I do now after reading that story and having these thoughts all come flooding back - wishing and hoping that fraternities and the young men in them, will understand that they belong to organizations founded on the highest aspirations of man and not ones that should in any way be focused instead on the basest degradations of the human spirit. 

Pinterest? Not a fan..but I'm paying attention..the Re-Rise of the Visual

I think I have a Pinterest account. I may have pinned something at some time. Oh yeah, here it is....this is what I saw when I logged into Pinterest this morning....for some reason it thinks I'm VERY into aprons. Anyway, that's not the point (BTW I do have  HUGE apron collection ;-)). The point is I'm watching Pinterest explode and wondering what's up. 

I'm also watching the birth and growth of visual resumes. I'm watching long-time visual people/expertise matchers like introNetworks provide in-depth integration with enterprise-grade social media platforms like Social Text. I'm looking at the 5 folders full of camera and photo apps on my iPhone. I follow hashtags like #INFOGRAPHIC and #INFOPORN. I already am a huge fan of Visual.ly and now thay are making infographic creation tools available. I've always thought that Dave Gray and his focus on the visual was spot on and I love his Marks and Meaning book. 

Why am I watching? Just because I remain convinced that if you want to see what enterprise software /services are going to look like in 18-24 months (w/ some its already here, just not widely distributed ;-)) ...then you watch the consumer space. How will your automated keyword searching programs for resumes (easily one of the most de-humanizing uses of search ever) deal with visual resumes-which seem to be expressly made for consumption by PEOPLE? Will companies EVER EVER EVER EVER wise up and provide actual training for their people in how to produce quality visuals? Will we ever have such a demand that we'll just have to go ahead and clone Nancy Duarte?

Remember when people thought that stuff like folksonomies and tagging and wikis and blogs and micro-blogging and activity streams and GAMES would NEVER get inside the corporate firewall? Well holy cow, even the venerable software frankenstein that is SharePoint is lurching in those directions. I dodn't want to get into it here about the bias of text over the image and how that has gone and is changing BUT, from where I sit (in the cheap seats).....All signs are pointing to the idea that the next generation of enterprise services/software will have large visual components-both on the production and consumption sides? Are you ready for your close-up?

 

Notes on: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge : Edward O. Wilson

Working through this book again and I thought I'd use this as a space to capture what I think are some of the most salient points from this really important book. Please feel free to chime in with you thoughts, comments, suggestions. 

Chapter 1: The Ionian Enchantment

•  Einstein writing to Marcel Grossman "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct obeservation appear to be quite separate things" p5
•  "The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names."p4

Chapter 2: The Great Branches of Learning

•  Science is.."driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the Universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense." p12
•  "We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges" p12
• Sherrington...the brain as "enchanted loom" ..."weaving a picture of the extrernal world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe"P13
• "while the average number of undergraduate courses per institution doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education dropped by more than half.." p.13
• "Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities and how is it important for human welfare?" p.13

Chapter 3: The Enlightenment

• p. 16 - Rousseau and the idea of "general will" used by Robespierre as justification for the Reign of Terror
• "savage coercion" p.17
• the story of  Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet
• the "dark-angelic flaw" of the Enlightenment
• describes the Enlightenment as "a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels"p.23
• "but what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality not sentiment" p.24
• Francis Bacon as the Enlightenment thinker who's spirit "most endures" p.24
• Bacon observed that "the mind, hastily and without choice, imbibes and treasures up the first notices of things, from whence all the rest proceed, errors must forever prevail, and remain uncorrected" ....thus knowledge is not well constructed but "resembles a magnificient structure that has no foundation" p.25
• the "buccinator novi temporis" ...Trumpeter of New Times p.25
• "The repeated testing of knowledge by experiment, he [Bacon] insisted, is the cutting edge of learning" p.28
• Bacon as "Father of Induction" p28
• "...Bacon advised us to use aphorisms, illustrations, stories, fables, analogies-anything that conveys truth from the discoverer to the readers as clearly as a picture." p29
• Bacon's "Idols of the Mind" (tribe, marketplace, theater) p29
• "Descartes' overarching vision was one of knowledge as a system of intercoonected truths that can be ultimately abstracted into mathematics" p31
• "Descartes insisted upon systemiatic doubt as the first principle of learning"p31
• "He allowed himself only one undeniable premise, captured in his celebrated phrase 'Cogito Ergo Sum'...." p31
• "The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind......Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution." p34
• dual sword of Enlightenment thought could free mankind or enslave it
• Romantic backlash "If the constraining universe of matter and energy cannot be denied, at least it can be ignored with splendid contempt." p38
• "Rousseau, while often listed as an Enlightenment philosophe, was really the founder and most extreme visionary of the Romantic philosophical movement....For him, learning and social order are the enemies of humanity." p38
• "His [Rousseau] utopia is a minimalist state in which people abandon books and other accoutrements of intellect in order to cultivate enjoyment of the senses and good health." p38
• "In America, German philosophical Romanticism was mirrored in New England transcendentalism...." p39

 

 

 

Hashtags and Crossbreeds and a Benign Eye of Sauron

I just finished reading the hashtag flows from the likes of #TED, #GDC, #SXSW, #LSCON, and #IAS12 - sheesh - talk about wishing to be able to have a superpower to transport from one awesome conference to the next and then instantly synthesize all the data coming out of those sessions into some insanely powerful new discipline that could sweep across multiple communities and problem sets like some benign Eye of Sauron leaving nothing but solved problems, renewed relationships and powerful new connections in its wake. 

I feel like though we all go to these conferences and lament how we hate silos and then fail to tear down those silos in terms of the scope of the domain that we operate in. Think different yes! but also think more broadly! Take a look at this ridiculously small sample of tweets from these events. 

• The best plenary #GDC keynotes have been the ones from outside the industry. Ron Moore, and even Ray Kurzweil despite the latter's insanity. (link)
• RT @tedxbraam: “Doodling is considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning.” — Sunni Brown http://t.co/t5yvlOq0 #TED (link)
• Social learning is not what you make people do (as in training) but something that happens naturally and spontaneously #lscon (link)
• Whoa! RT @theRab #sxsw tagged photos on instagram are growing at a rate of about 10-12k per day, casual observation (link) 
• “@ejaeson: Flashy polish means nothing if a user wanders in and breaks your design doing something unexpected but totally natural. #ias12” (link)

Maybe conference organizers (hey @guildmeister and @hfisktwit et al, looking at you, w much <3 of course :-)) - need to think differently about their events. Maybe instead of professional development moments we need to think of them as professional exposure opportunities (no, not like that! ;-)) ...in the sense of new ideas and new domains. Its not like the speakers aren't good (they are) or that they're not saying smart things (they are) but they're saying them to same people. Maybe what we need is to swap the job of designing the schedule for the next conference with a different conference organizer. 

Yes! What do you think it would look like if #GDC were designed by folks from #IAS12? What if #LSCON had its next program built by the folks who run #TED? And what if #SXSW organizers built the next #LSCON and #DEVLEARN programs? I swear if we just did that once - think of the absolutely SICK cross-polination that would go on and that would reverberate for years in our respective domains. 

Let's Get Our Meta On! Conversations about Conversations and a Soylent Green mention!

  

FAIR WARNING: The video embedded here is safe for work but does contain a good bit of me talking. Please proceed with caution!

 My view of technology is greatly informed by a concern for the humans at the user end of it. What does it do for you? How does it make your day better? So I tend to look at what existing human dynamics new technologies either support, extend or both. That view got a big kick in the pants (in a good way) about six years ago (Gasp! Yes, right after I got out of high school ;-))  - I had the enviable task of getting the smartest people I knew and/or could find together in a room to talk about blog/wikis (we didn't even have 2.0 back then) and how they impact the enterprise. My first call was to @jaycross who in short order, helped me to hook up with folks like @jerrymichalski , @marciamarcia , @eekim , @Ross , @cshirky , @dweinberger , and @timoreilly (although he couldn't make it...stupid calendar). Anyway, I was star-struck then by assembled brainpower and am even moreso today. What a huge gift that was.

Well much like VH1, I'm trying to get the old band back together...I think the big lesson for me that came out of those sessions was that conversations are incredibly powerful (especially for learning) and the technologies of social media grant them unheard of scale and speed. I also think that those same dynamics are still at play today and that bringing back the human might be a good way to get people to understand what I see as so powerful about social media. 

So this video is the first attempt at that. @jerrymichalski has access to a cool new G+ feature that allows us to record our Hangout and broadcast it via YouTube. We plan on producing a book out of all this and maybe some other items but what better way to start off looking at conversations than with a conversation. PLEASE feel free to comment with suggested resources, people we should talk to (already have a pretty good list working) and any comments or suggestions you have. We plan to do this a few times and I'll let you know when we do. Thanks and I look forward to talking to you all. 

Where is the study of what we do?

Let me caveat this whole thing by saying this isn't a rant (well not entirely) but really a plea for conversation (more on Conversations coming soon).....

Like many, I've traveled an odd path to get where I am today. My undergraduate degree is in business/management. Case studies, accounting, finance, the works. Then something happened and instead of going on to get my MBA, I decided that I wanted to study history and anthropology so off to grad school. I'll never forget my first grad school seminar in history. All the other follks in the room had history undergrad degrees so I felt really out of my domain depth. That class was a M,W,F and on Monday the class would be assigned a topic along with a list of potential books on that topic. Come Friday, each student was to have prepared a 5x8 card (both sides) that contained a critique of whatever work they had selected. Not of the subject of that work but of the work itself. Historians refer to this as 'historiography.'

"Furay and Salevouris (1988) define historiography as "the study of the way history has been and is written — the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."

 So you read your book, you write your card and you show up on Friday and you have to defend your critique of the work to the rest of the class. I was nervous but when other people started going something became clear to me - these people might know more about history than me at the moment but no one had ever taught them how to argue a point, at least not in front of anyone. Clio however (the muse of history) is a demanding taskmaster. Soon enough my peers raised their game and we all came out of the class sharper than we had been. 

That interaction, the discussion not just of subject matter but of how that subject matter was constructed, is I think critical to a field. It helps keep a field and its associated theorhetical base, sharp and current. What I am looking for now, is historiography's corollary in the instructional design field. 

Where are the conferences or conference sessions that examine critically the canon upon which ISD as a field, rests? Where are the contrarians of Bloom, Gagne, Kirkpatrick who go after them not in an ad hominen way but in a way so that not only their conclusions and models are laid bare but also the methodology upon which those conclusions rely? I look at post like these (Vygotsky - the Lysenko of learning, Piaget – why teach this stuff?, Learning Styles Challenge -- Three-Year Update) from Donald Clark and Will Thalheimer and I want more. I want to know where this kind of critical inquiry is part of the ISD curriculum. I want to know where the great keynote speakers are speaking on this and what rooms their sessions are in. (another great one By Donald on "Don't Lecture Me") Give me some Socratic Method please!

Why does this bother me so much? The same reason title like "The 7 Habits of so and so" bother me - are there really only 7? What was #8 and why did it get left out? When self-help speakers do that, its a problem on one level, when people do it in a field as incredibly important and potentially powerful as training, its orders of magnitude more important to be addressed. When someone puts forward a model expounding on the 9 Events then is your first reaction - why 9? That model precludes a discussion about #10 and it also precludes a discussion about why #6 is till in there when its clearly wrong (as example). 4 Levels of evaluation rules out both the 5th and 6th levels but also rules out the notion that maybe evaluation doesn''t break neatly into levels. I'm not saying oppose all models but I am saying that all models and their proponents should be called on regularly to defend themselves and not just queitly adopted

 Therein lies I think a HUGE problem facing the training industry and the academic programs that support the education of ISD professionals. These models, rightly or wrongly, soundly designed or based on Flat Earth-level thinking, have not only been adopted but entire business models have been constructed around them. This makes change at the industry level incredibly hard. Add in the fact that entire text books and courses have been written incorporating these models and now change is made difficult at the academic level. This academic portion is even more insidious in a field where there is not an incredibly strong and vibrant sub-discipline of professional self-critique. 

So now industry is locked in, academia is locked in, conferences are locked in and at best you have a small population of innovators and thinkers at the edge trying to affect change being resisted by an entire ecosystem. I mean really, look at this post by Will Thalheimer on the crap/fraud/intelelctual crime that is the marriage of Dale's Cone of Experience with percentages. This post came out in 2006 and yet I'd wager you'll find it in slide decks today being taught in conference sessions and classrooms as gospel. We must develop some sort of professional nervous system - some way to relay messages across our entire corporate body that these need to be expunged. One way to do that is to build a strong, independent model of self-inquiry and demand that the canon upon which our field rests, be sharp, current, defensible, based on sound methodloogy and research and we must not tolerate a creeping acquiescence of neatly numbered models into a field of such importance. 

If I'm wrong or even if I am right - let's have a conversation about it.