e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

Welcome to e-Clippings: The Prologue

This blog is primarily about how culture and technology come together over the space we call 'learning.' It covers a lot of ground but the overarching theme (at least in my mind if not always evident) is how these new technologies, methodologies and ideas can be used to create a richer world of learning. (for more, check the About page)

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From A Loyal Customer to AT&T: Suck It. No, srsly, suck it.

All I've done is be a loyal customer Cingular and then you. I've actually DEFENDED you to people who ragged on your coverage (honestly your coverage isn't that great at my house but I'm willing to live with that). I was pretty happy when the iPhone came out and it was on your service because it meant I didn't have to switch. Now though, you can suck it.

Honest to pete. I hope you die like the dinsaurs. I have been paying bills to freaking idiots for over 12 years. TWELVE YEARS YOU DOLTS. Did you think I didn't have another service I could switch to? Of course I could you dolts but now when the iPhone 3GS comes out, you treat me like I've only been a customer for like a year. So instead of selling me the iPhone 3GS (32GB BTW) for $299 - you want to bang me like a rented goalie for $499!! And the galling part is the condescending douchebag language you use when you propose this royal screwing:

"As a valued AT&T customer, AT&T can offer you an early iPhone upgrade with a new 2-yr commitment and an $18 upgrade fee. You may qualify for a standard iPhone upgrade on 02/06/2010."

Ooh really? Be still my beating heart. You know what's really awesome? The $18 addtl. screwing. Did you guys laugh when you thought that one up? Lovely. Corporate douchebags. Money-grubbing ass monkeys. Hard-headed, non-customer understanding, grab every dollar while you can pig bangers. (sorry pigs). So my reward for being a loyal customer for over a decade is to only get SCREWED for $200 extra over some new schmuck who could walk in and sign up today?! Is that how you read it?

Well guess what ass-hats? Guess how much of my money you're getting? Zero. Zip. Nada. Nil. Nothing. Gonna spend that money on something else. So instead of you making $200 more off me, you make nothing. How's that for some fancy math you knuckle-dragging shitheads? Oh, let me tell you what else doesn't bother me one freakin' bit - don't write in and start telling me about subsidizing hardware costs or anything like it - you know how much I care? That's right - NOT AT FREAKIN' ALL. Guess who picked your business/revenue model? That's right - your dumbass, 20th century thinking cavemen of an executive corps. So I really don't care how much you subsidize a phone for - guess what it looks like to me? It looks to me like someone who has never ben a customer to AT&T can get a better deal than me. Why don't you just include a note in my next bill that says "thx for all your business Mark, suck it."

I hope you go the way of Sprint even the way of the 'real' AT&T. Or AOL. Or the Rocky Mountain News. I hope you get the feeling that you're a dinosaur and you're looking up into the sky one night and you see this big meteor streaking down and you're all like "I wonder if that meteor will change my life?" Yeah, I hope it does. Hey! AT&T marketing/PR hacks - did you hear the audience when they mentioned AT&T from the stage at WWDC 2009? Groans, moans and boos. Awesome job fellas. No really. In light of that, way to treat loyal customers. I CANNOT WAIT until Apple dumps you or opens the iPhone up to other carriers like Verizon. Guess what will happen then you turd-munching idiots? I'll be gone. Then you won't just be out my $200 but every other payment for the rest of my life. Rest assured too that I'll spend part of the rest of my life telling everybody about how bad you suck.

Have a nice day douchebags.

Reputation - Its More Important Than Ever But What Exactly Is it?

Do you know what whuffie is? Do you have any? Can you spare some? Did you know that it came from a book and that there is a whole book about it? The whole idea is reputation-based currency. Instead of money, your ability to move through society is based on an aggregate score of how people regard you and your actions - the other catch is that this score - essentially your community-determined worth - is instantly and always visible to others.

So when we are talking about implementing social media for learning within organizations, we can see the value of having something like whuffie right? I mean it would help us determine at a glance, how much we initially trust sources or data. It could also help re-structure entire organizations' hierarchies of expertise by making the basis of your 'organizational wealth'  - how much you are helping the organization.

Dan Gillmor had a recent article on this and about how we could maybe begin to create an aggregate model by pulling in your eBay rating and maybe your ratings from other social network sites that you may be involved in. Got me thinking about how we could think about creating this kind of currency within organizations to help spur the use of social media...could we create a universal standard for this as a currency and those standards could just be applied to groups at an organization's discretion...and the REALLY important question...what could you spend your whuffie on?

Academic Earth...Awesome and question-raising....

This site just amazes me. Both the quality of the content and the quality of the UX design are exceptional. From the ability build playlists of courses to providing a citation for the video with 1-click to the "dim the lights" feature...this is so well done.

I am working my way through the course on Game Theory. I watch the lectures, can grab the syllabus and do the reading if I choose and I can even look at past exams and solutions to past exams. The class video also includes the questions from the students and the professor's answers.


So I am just wondering; does this raise deeper questions about the value of a university education? Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE universities, I love campuses and student unions and libraries and so on...some of my fav places in the world really - BUT - do we need to be a bit more honest about why students are paying to go there when all of this content/interaction is available? I mean if we extrapolate and see a day when all of a college's content is online like this...what the are you paying for with tuition? Student-to-student interaction? Teacher-to-student interaction? That's a shift isn't it? Then we're selling interactions and not content...and we can now engineer interactions in a whole myriad of ways...

The Innovations in e-Learning Conference - Smashing!

 So when have you ever paid a couple hundred dollar registration fee to hang out in a fairly intimate setting with the likes of Will Wright, Brenda Brathwaite, and Vint Cerf not to EVEN mention hanging with the likes of @rasebastian, @mrch0mp3ers, @oxala75, @busynessgirll, @quinnovator, @peterasmith, @mkfrie, @koreenolbrish, @smartinx, @RVAfoodie, @spydeesense and @wwickha1? (sorry if I am missing people - and I know I am)

Well the Innovations in e-Learning conference really delivered. Super awesome shout out to @chrisstjohn  for his UNBELIEVABLE work in getting truly world-class speakers. The Twitter back channel was also in full effect and be sure to check out #iel09 for the archive of tweets.

There are a number of really good blog posts already summarizing the conference and I'll link to those below, I did want to pass along some of my general impressions though:

• Wow, what an engaged audience. Really. Even if this conference didn't have the largest percentage of people Tweeting (that award probably goes to 3DTLC), it was an incredibly engaged and interested audience.
• Great speakers. Seriously, when Vint Cerf got to the part in his talk when he mentioned that in his  free time he was working on re-building TCP/IP so that it would work at interplanetary distances or when Will Wright blew threw his keynote, explaining his game design process, at an insane pace-shattering the Twitter API along the way-this was classic stuff.
• Great logistics - Kelley Shillingburg and the George Mason Team had it all working from WiFi access to food/drink to parking...never underestimate the power of those details to wreck an otherwise great time.
• No selling. Now I'm not talking about an expo floor, I actually like those..I'm talking about the fact that I can't remember seeing one speaker that I came away from their talk thinking "well at least I know what their company sells" as the main point. 
•   At least one pre-con workshop that actually produced something. Mine didn't but that's my fault not my attendees.Brenda Brathwaite's workshop actually produced game design storyboards that were then put out for a popular vote but also a "critic's choice" judged by Brenda, Alicia Sanchez and Will Wright. I love this idea of actually producing something. I made the mistake of not making sure that everyone coming to my workshop knew to bring their computers so we could actually walk people thru some Social Media exercises - my bad, will re-configure that for next year.
• An informal talk at the GMU coffee shop also resulted in the creation of the Black Swan Society (stop by and join!)  - dedicated to the sharing of ideas around Black Swans that can impact our learning world. Thanks truckloads to my brother from another mother Aaron Silvers (@mrch0mp3ers) for setting this up.
• Also kudos to the attendees like @koreenolbrish who weren't afraid to go up to Robert Scoble  after his session and say thanks but maybe you missed the mark a bit with that one...he knew it and was gracious about getting less than positive feedback (the guy is some kind of bizarre carbon-based information processing machine)...and yes, hi Peter (@peterasmith)!

So that's it, a great conference for not a lot of money, great conversations (still ongoing) and some amazing interactions with people you never think you're going to meet (did you know Will Wright and I are both from Atlanta?).  Well done DAU and well done GMU.

Blog posts (please help me and add others in the comments):

IEL09: 12 take-aways
In the Middle of the Curve: Wendy did AMAZING work live blogging much of the conference!
My Conference Recap: Innovations in e-Learning

Meeting your Idols
Conferencing Reflections

Eric Foner on Understanding Our History

Ray Kurzweil Explores the Next Phase of Virtual Reality

Wolfram/Alpha Computational Engine: Impact on Learning/Training?

So, last week I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the TTI/Vanguard conference "re:Learning" in Washington, DC. Sure, I got to give my talk on virtual worlds and take questions from people like John Perry Barlow and Alan Kay (search Twitter for #ttiv for relevant Tweets) but we also got to see a demo from the forthcoming "Wolfram/Alpha Computational Search Engine" from Stephen Wolfram.

This article is a nice write-up and actually has a couple links to other write-ups but in the interest of redundancy, I'll add my own. This is not a Google killer. They are different. Ask Google "coastline of England"and it'll return web pages that talk about the coastline of England. Ask W/A (sorry, just not going to type out 'Wolfram/Alpha' every time) that question and it will actually try to compute the distance of that coastline. Easy right? Its the difference between search and computation.

The demos are fairly amazing in terms of the reults returned in terms of data display but there are some issues. The biggest one is that it currently runs on "Curated Data" - that is data sets that have been scrubbed specifically for the system. As I understand it, this process is partially automated and partially human-powered - that can present scaling issues. That doesn't bother me so much though because I really see this as an enterprise tool.

So I work in Defense Acquisition - as you can imagine - our projects can generate HUGE amounts of data. Having access to a computational engine that would be able to troll that data and deliver answers not just search results could be ridiculously powerful. The bigger your data sets, the more powerful W/A becomes. 

My question(s) then is - what impact(s) do you see this having on or field?

We all know how Google has impacted our learners (its their main tool for learning), what kind of impact will W/A have?

Will wee need to teach different skills for dealing with an engine that computes versus searches?

What kind of uses will be able to put this capability to inside our enterprise in support of our users?

So, where the hell have I been? (+ wallwisher demo)

Wow. At least it hasn't been a whole month. In my defense, I have been a wee bit busy since I last posted. Saw some great stuff at the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds conference, the TTI/Vanguard re:Learning conference, trying to squeeze in time to co-write a book, see my family, do my day job oh and sleep every now and then.

So, sheesh, I don't even know where to start. I will say this - my short take on virtual worlds and social media based on the interactions I've had over the past month is that #1 SoMe is well on its way to enterprise mainstream and #2 there is sufficient heat around virtual worlds for the enterprise that I believe we'll see a big uptick in exploration and adoption over the next 12-24 months.

I will also bang this old drum on both these items - that if we FAIL to think differently about the learning opportunities that we can dedsign using SoMe and virtual worlds then we would be outright stupid to expect any kind of enhanced ROI from those activities.

OK...just so you know, while I've been quiet on the bloggin front, I have been pinging away on the Twitter front. You can always catch me here.

I also wanted to try out Wallwisher, which I think is pretty cool so check it out below:

3DTLC Virtual World Conference

Mailana's Awesome Visual Twitter Explorer

This is so cool. Check out my network via Mailana.
So you can put in your Twitter handle, your location or a search term like say "e-learning" and you get this awesome visual map back.

Now according to this page, this network is using something like 210 million messages from almost 400,000 people. So what's cool about all this? Well, I'm still playing around with this but I find it very interesting that when you search on a term like "e-learning" - you get a map of the active conversations on Twitter on that topic. So you get to see who is talking to who, who is most active and you can even turn and go into those conversations. That's just tremendous. What's also tremendous is that this is just a demo of what Mailana is actually supposed to do. Evidently this tool was designed to extract meaning from corporate email systems. Now I want to get it installed at work!

So now we get to the arrogant portion of the post - the part where I offer suggestions to someone as smart as Pete Warden about how to make this tool better - I want this as an AIR app...I want to see a drop down menu feature like the little gem in TweetDeck, I want that menu to allow me to follow people - maybe see their most recent tweets and so on...I want the "info" link to pop up the conversation in a side panel...

Seriously, Mr. Warden, you've got like a mild form of attention-heroin here, with a little tweaking - it could become insanely addictive.

"March 4, 2009: CNBC Gives Financial Advice" (Daily Show)

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

e-Learning Guild Annual Gathering 2009 Coverage

Um....did you say you had a negative assessment of my last session?

  (The Hero Factory)

Looking for ways to advertise U.S. government jobs teaching contracting

 So, the Chief of Staff at my little Defense Acquisition University came into my office late last week. This got my attention. He told me that he was aware that there were going to be some hiring needed to fill some new slots in our acquisition teaching corps.

Then he said that he wanted to explore some of the more "2.0" ways that we could look for people to fill these slots. Part of reasoning is that these slots are kinda mid-career slots so the people looking at them might be early 30's maybe not long in terms of federal service or so on and they might be better tuned to those channels. I think he also just wants to try this stuff out that I've been talking about and see if it can actually do anything.

Immediately, I put this call out to Twitter to see what I was missing or what ideas we could come up with. Here is what I got:
1. Twitter the jobs. Duh but thanks.
2. LinkedIn. Good. That one could actually be productive.
3. Listservs (Web Managers Listserv,) was the only one I could find - so if you have others and know the URL, lemme know
4. Acquisition Community Connection: another easy one...

So the meeting is tomorrow morning to review how we will do this...any last minute suggestions? Sen ;em in!

Thx @govloop, @coelacanthro @adrielhampton @Quinnovator ...for the suggestions....

"Why Boys Need Alternatives with Reading and Writing" (Eide Neurolearning Blog)

(link)

This is a really interesting article about differences in the ways that young boys and girls learn and process language.

"Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom."

Take a read for yourself - I need to dig deeper into some to the other resources mentioned in the piece - but am I alone or does this give anyone else pause about how we think about instructional design? Does anyone else wonder what else we may be missing? Anyone? Anyone?

"Appcelerator Updates Open Source Alternative To Adobe Air" (Information Week)

(story link)

"Open source software vendor Appcelerator has delivered the second preview release (PR2) of its rich Internet application platform for developers, called Titanium. As a way to help groups of developers collaborate more efficiently, the company has also thrown into PR2 Titanium Developer, social media and communications tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and a chat capability."

So I didn't check while I was in Vegas on what the odds were on something that goes against AIR has but what do you all think? I know that its gonna be hard enough for me to get AIR past my IT people and it comes from Adobe. 

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Dusan Writer's)

I just bought this book and have started working through it - and the purchase was largely based on this interview.

"Boellstorff makes the case that the counterpoint to virtual worlds is not the real world, but the actual. And that this virtuality includes two important things: it is virtual (of course, but he explores this with incredible insight and finesse) meaning that you are never QUITE there, and that this is incredibly important; and two, it is grounded in craft, in techne, and that virtual worlds may be a harbinger of a shift from a knowledge or information culture, into a craft-based one….or perhaps a mash-up of the two, what’s now coming to be known as “crafty knowledge”."

I'm also happy to note that I said I was "working through this book" and just reading it. I like reading carefully researched work with footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies...I love work that pushes me down other avenues and I look forward to getting thru this book.

**I should also include the link to Dusan Writer's Top 5 Virtual World Books.

"Six ways to make Web 2.0 work" (McKinsey Quarterly)

So I am actually generally impressed by the McKinsey Quarterly and particularly their Web site. I noticed them integrating feeds, widgets and now Twitter responses to their articles from early on.

The other thing that is nice about McK Q is that it is one of those publications that goes over well with the folks upstairs. MCKQ focuses on corporate issues and they have a certain cachet when I can walk into the boss and say "see. I told you this would be important." HBR works too. I also love the fact that they footnote their stories.

In this article, they lay out what they consider to be "six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies." They are:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

From my experience, that's a pretty spot-on list.  #3 is especially important...particularly say if you happen to work in an organization whose age demographic skews older and need strong ties between what you are proposing and what they are already doing. I have this image in my head of leading a group of people thru a fog bank along a mountain path and they are help together by a thin line - that line connects all the crazy stuff I'm talking about to their reality - break the line and you lose their support.

A.nnotate - Love the functionality but REALLY love the thought out into pricing

I am all in favor of products that fit into existing workflow and have potential to make that workflow easier and/or faster. At first blush, A.nnotate seems to fall into that category.

So the functionality is one that allows you to add comments, notes, etc to online documents - nice but I also like the thought they put into handing the notes. It appears that when you add a note, it goes into a private, searchable note index.

All that is nice right but as I am reading their site, I'm thinking to myself, this is good but it will never fly with my organization. Really? You want us to load docs to your server AND load notes to your server as well? Not going to happen. THEN I got a great surprise when I clicked over to A.nnotate's "pricing" page and saw that one of their solutions is a "standalone" option with the service on an appliance that can be installed behind my firewall. Now I haven't even tried the free version of A.nnotate but I just want to say that it is refreshing to see a company that offers this right up front and not only that, they publish PRICES! Holy Cow A.NNOTATE, are you looking to turn things upside down?

Here si the only problem with the pricing. The most expensive option only comes to about $10K for the first year and then $2K per year in maintenance after that. How am I ever going to be able to convince people that its worthwhile when it costs so little? :-)

"Social Networks that Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope" (Huberman & Romero)

Abstract: "Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers."

"Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership" (HBR)

This (how to present while people are twittering) is going to become a CRITICAL skill

Olivia Mitchell does a great job laying out what more and more presenters are going to face - if you're not already. You get to see the tops of heads and the clack of keyboards...IF..that is..the conference organizers have figured out some way to supply WiFi to the audience. WHICH THEY SHOULD!!!!

Now here's the thing. I figure its going to hard enough for presenters to adapt to a living, breathing back channel - like that smoke monster from LOST - but what about trainers? Teachers?

Anybody up for figuring out how a vibrant backchannel figures into instructional design?

Now I'm starting to get that the whole discussion that we're having about reconfiguring conferences is converging in my mind at least, with a larger discussion about re-designing instructional design. Look at our confernces. The issues that we are bring up - how the info is presented (lecture style) - how vapid the typical assessment is (did the speaker know what they were talking about?) - is it too far of a reach to see these criticisms applied to our classes? Our training?

Pledge To End Hunger - Alright Listen up! This is important!

  This post by Scott Henderson at Media Sauce, outlines an important new effort to try and fight the problem of hunger in the United States.

Launching tomorrow, Thursday March 5, is the Pledge to End Hunger site. 

According to Scott, "By simply signing an online pledge to share the website with others, volunteer, and/or give, you will trigger a 35 lb food donation from Tyson. That means every person who joins the movement will help feed 140 children."

Now come on. Put in on your calendar. Do it. help end hunger.

"Trends in Leadership Conferences: Fewer Keynotes, More Tweeting" (Marketing Vox)

This post from Marketing Vox is a great piece for continuing the thread of how we can change conferences. They cite a survey that found that:

• Conference organizers are now planning more time for Q&A (72% more vs. three years ago), more interactive sessions between speaker and audience (70%), and more panel sessions (64%). At the same time, they plan fewer keynote sessions (30%) than three years ago.
• Business leadership conferences feature more podcasts (62%), blogging and Twittering during events (58%), as well as live videocasting (56%). Less common, though still noted, are YouTube broadcasts (34%) and "unconferences" (18%).
• Organizers are expanding or considering expanding their business into emerging markets such as China (32%), the Middle East (24%) and India (24%).

So, as you head out and plan your conference activities, look to see if you are providing the appropriate infrastructure to support these functions.