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. 

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. 

Wounded Warriors Need Your Help!

We have been at war for over a decade. Afghanistan. Iraq. Multiple deployments. PTSD. IEDs. mTBI. Our men and women of the armed forces have been stressed to greater degrees than any other generation of American fighting forces. Greater OPTEMPO..battles with no front lines...enemies with no uniforms...all of these things have combined to stress not only our warriors but our ability to serve them when they come home. 

The Wounded Warrior Project is one of the many efforts that has stepped into that gap:

"To foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation's history."

The WWP can always use your help and now you have an easy way to do it. 

I'm running in an event in September called the "Tough Mudder." You can go here to see the course description of the one I'm running in. Its about 12 miles long and features everything from balance beam crossings to ice-cold pits of water to a flame-lined, smoke-filled path and even the potential of electro shock! Yeah, its a bit crazy - it should be - it was designed by British Special Forces. Hopefully I make it through! Now Tough Mudder has already raised almost $3 million for WWP and I want to help add to that. If you go to this link, you'll be able to make a donation to the Wounded Warrior Project...you'll be helping a great program that serves people who have fought for our freedom and safety. Thanks everybody...even if you don't make a donation...please spread the word. That helps too....and if you feel so inclined, there are still slots available for the event! 

Let me explain the Conference Wish List a bit....

 

(photo by Virpi Oinonen) 

Check out the post just below this one...pretty cool...embedded the Conference Wish List stickie board on this blog...and it works...you can add notes to the board right from this blog AND guess what!? ...You can grab the embed code too (see that semi-transparent box in the upper right-hand corner w the blank notes? Click on the lower case "i" and you should get a drop down box with them embed code available)!!

 

That means that this Conference Wish List really isn't mine...kinda is, I started it but we can all use it...

I have certain interests...learning, mobile, training, anthropology, history, technology, government, enterprise 2.0, game design and development, serious games, social business, etc...but we don't need to limit the Wish List to those topics - in fact, I'd rather we didn't - I think while each of these areas have tremendous conferences focused on those domains - I also think its incredibly valuable to spread our conference wings a bit and travel outside our domains (I even think that the things we see at other conferences can come back to and benefit our 'home' conferences, e.g. new ideas for speakers, sessions, activities). 

So this isn't a plea for self-promotion on my part - I want to know where the best face-2-face experiences are to be had in the respective domains and I happen to think this is pretty cool format to do that in or through...so jump in and add your favs. Thanks! (from everyone)

Conference Wish List (embed test)

Couple of months in with the Asus Transformer Prime...thoughts

So that's my Asus tablet over there. Had it now a couple of months. First tablet I've had and first device I've had running any flavor of Android. Just a couple of thoughts: 

-Its got freaking amazing battery life

-I use it so much for note-taking that I've almost quit writing in my Moleskine (lil sad about that. Actually like the act of writing/drawing and tablets don't even get close to that yet)

-Funny that I immediately strapped a keyboard to it. Makes text entry a breeze but also kills the ability to treat it like a tablet. Humans are weird. 

-The Android market REALLY needs to step up the number of apps optimized for the tablet. Apple is killing them here. 

-The price point is spot on. Judas that iPad is expensive. Might as well get a laptop. After my experience with this tablet I keep wondering if I could justify the cost of the iPad and an iPhone.

-I love the form factor...thin...light...but I do miss the full-featured nature of a laptop running a full-on OS.

-This is awesome for reading...better Kindle than the Kindle

-I'm still figuring out my way around the OS

-I do not have 3G on this model so at my office, w/ no WiFi, this feels really disconnected in a way that a laptop never really did. This really is a creature of the 'net.

-I am feeling the pains of leaving Apple's Walled Garden...looking at apps that run on both and thinking "I already paid for this once.." ....my music is still 'over there'.....

Anyway I think the idea is - have a firm idea in mind for what you want to use a tablet for...I think I've used a laptop for so long, I'm going through some kind of transition (first joker to start the "laptop natives" and "tablet immigrants" meme is gonna get it!) ....I think browsers and tablet/phone OSs still have a way to go before they replace a full OS of any flavor. 

 

The Hacker: The Game

via itunes.apple.com

So this is interesting..gotta say I'm impressed with the look and feel and game play so far..let's design one of these to teach people how to change their default password settings :-)

What Amazing Thing The Facebook IPO Did!!!!

YOU HEARD ABOUT FACEBOOK RIGHT???? $5BILLION IPO!!!!!

You know what changed?

Nothing.

Darfur? Peace in Middle East? Clean drinking water to anybody else in Africa? Any fewer people in this country denied basic civil rights like being able to marry who they want to? Any fewer abused kids today? Nope.

I absolutely mean to be a party pooper. Someone tell me what product got created here. How many sustainable jobs were created today? Did some already rich people get richer? Yep.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-FB although I will say, no other product on the web makes me feel as creeped out at times as FB. I also don't begrudge anyone at FB from the Zuckster on down for pulling down some big cash. I just want us to keep some perspective.

We live in a world full of tremendous joys but also tremendous sadness. The Japanese tsunami. The earthquake in Haiti. The FB IPO impacted none of this. So as all the news feeds and tweets explode with the news of this momentous non-event, maybe we can spare some cycles to think about the Wounded Warrior program. The plight of those fighting for freedom in Syria. You know, the little things that never garner the same attention or interest as a 5 billion dollar IPO. ....and now, back to FarmVille <click click click>

New Years Resolution? How about feeding someone?

So let's just skip the part where I haven't blogged for months ok?

I've been seeing innumerable and inevitable Top Ten Lists, Year-End reviews, Predictions, etc and I thought I wanted to do something different but I couldn't decide what. Yesterday though, I heard a prayer that put things in perspective for me. The line in the prayer that struck me was:

"Ask much of us, expect much from us, enable much by us and encourage many through us..."

I started thinking that I have seen some projects and some people this past year that have really done that and I wanted to talk about some of them here. I also want to make clear - these people are my heroes - they humble me - they put my problems in perspective - they remind me that we live in a larger world than the one we normally let ourselves see - they remind me that the problems we are dealing with (and by default, if you are reading this on a computer you own, in your own house or apartment where you enjoy reliable electricity and clean drinking water every time you turn on the tap, then you are living in the most privileged societies in the world) are largely of our making and that we have a ridiculous amount of power and agency in dealing with them. These folks are amazing (and they are in no particular order). 

•  Kids Are Heroes: Don't think kids can make a difference? Don't think you can? Check out the actions these kids have taken to help everything from other kids, to NGOs to pets to the environment. Its just amazing what a little organization and giving people the tools they need can do to help them really reach out to others in need. When is the last time you or I raised $2300 in six weeks and sponsored 7 children in Uganda? No, really...when was it? For me, never. That's humbling. I also love this project because it makes me hopeful what the world will or could be like when the kids involved with this project grow up and take this experience with them. 
• Greyt Expectations: Racing Greyhounds can be retired from racing from 18 months to 5 years old and they can live to be 15 years old. These are dogs born and bred to be athletes, to perform for our entertainment and this group of fine people work incredibly hard to find good homes for these amazing animals. The kicker is that these animals are bred to not only be fast and fit, without a lot of the hereditary health problems that other breeds have, but also to be well-behaved, quiet, calm and are used to being handled by a lot of different people. They make ideal pets. You should see the set-up at Greyt Expectations - they get dogs who have come off the track sometimes the night before - and they work tirelessly to find these amazing creatures good homes. 
• The USO: I really don't know what needs to be said here. Not trying to be US-centric here (but that's where I live so that usually happens) but if you do live in the US, then while you may not support all of the political policies that involve the use of military force, you should support the men and women who go in harm's way on a daily basis for us and for our country's sake. True, there are a number of wonderful organizations that support our troops but this one is the grand-daddy...I remember walking through airports when I was a kid and seeing the USO clubs there. Look through some of the programs on their site, they include care packages, language training and even MEGS (Mobile Entertainment Gaming System) - yep, they provide fully-contained systems of XBoxs, PS3, Wiis to our troops to give them a break. So while I like the yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbon - how about a donation to the USO to actually do that?
• Charity: Water: Thirsty? Turn on your tap. Grab your BPA-free water bottle. Take a sip. Good right? What if that took three hours for you to do, if you could? Imagine that in Africa, people spend about 40 BILLION HOURS A YEAR just walking for water. BILLION. About 30,000 people die EVERY WEEK from unsafe drinking water. EVERY WEEK. Not month. Not year. Guess what? 90% of those deaths each week are kids under 5. $20 can provide one person with clean drinking water. $5000 can provide a village with water. How much was my last laptop? Yours? How much did we spend on 'stocking stuffers' or coffee or magazines? How much would it mean to you if you had no clean water and someone did something that provided it to you? If you are human and live on this planet - this impacts you. Don't like kids? Hate dogs? Opposed to all things military (including the brave men and women protecting you?)? Fine. How about a little love for humans? Read the founder's story and keep a dry eye. I dare you. 
• free rice: OK....so times are tight. I hear that. You still want to help though? Awesome. How about improving your vocabulary while feeding people? What? Yep. Head to free rice and start playing. Every right answer donates 10 grains of rice. Every wrong answer does nothing but makes you smarter. No cost. You get smarter. You help feed people. Why are you NOT playing on this site? Organize a team. How much time have you spent doing fantasy football this season? How about let's carve 1/10 of that time off to play this game and help feed people. I think that every conference should set aside one keynote session during the conference where everyone will just play Free Rice for an hour. Imagine the food that could be donated!
• Nothing But Nets: Can I borrow $10? Of course, thanks. Can you take that $10 and donate it so that a kid can go to sleep tonight without worrying about getting malaria from an insect bite? Can you think of anything as scary as wondering every night that when you go to sleep, you make wake up with a disease that is one of the leading killers of children in Africa? $10. That's it. How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many $10s is that? How many nets? How many kids sleeping safely?

I want to say also that I love the work that LINGOs is doing and I applaud them for it and urge you to support them as well...I think its awesome to leverage the training industry's expertise to help the world. I'm not trying to start a competition either - except maybe for us to compete with ourselves - let's gamify our lives and see how many "Good Human" points we can ring up or how many "I provided clean water/food/nets/homes/support" badges that we can ring up. I know we have made some strides but these efforts and these people humble me. People are living and drinking water and eating because of their efforts - that is amazing, awesome and humbling. 

 So today, I'll play Free Rice and I'll help my son set up a team there for his middle school. I'll show him the Kids Are Heroes site too. I'll pet our greyhound. I'll look at the USO programs and charity:water and Nothing But Nets and see how I can leverage my social network to support those and other efforts. Those are my New Year's Resolutions. What are yours? I hope that a year from now, I can look back on 2012 and see how many malaria-fighting nets I've helped to donate or how many grains of rice I've won or much water I've helped to provide to people who are dying of thirst or how many of our brave, fighting men and women I've helped pass the time with MEGS (love the acronym :-)) - that would be an awesome - and humbling - 2012. 

This is gonna get me in trouble but...have you ever thought about underground homes?

So I heard this story on NPR this morning about how Joplin was dealing with the horrific toll from the tornado that destroyed 1/3 of the town and killed 162 people. I can't imagine what that must be like. The closest I get is 9/11. Horrible. Tragic.

The story talked about all the increases in alcohol abuse, sexual trauma to children, increase in gambling, and so on. It also mentioned how kids will ask if the tornado is coming back when something innocent like the wind blowing storngly happens. The answer to the little girl's question is of course yes, the tornado is coming back. Every year. Count on it. Roll of the dice if it hits the town again. This is what gets me - if you live in the Southeast (where I grew up) or Tornado Alley - the tornados are coming. If you live on a beach, erosion will eventually take your land if a hurricane doesn't get to you first. Oh, also, if you live on a hill, you shold probabaly be aware of earthquakes, mud slides and for pete's sake, watch out for wildfires. I'm not an ad for anti-depressants - I'm just saying let's be realistic.

I'm fascinated by the way we anthropomorphize storms and nature in general. The cruel truth is that nature doesn't care about us. There are no "viscious" storms, or "cruel" winds...those are human judgements that we put on a non-human entity. (another pet peeve: reporting that someone lost their battle against cancer - they didn't lose - the cancer wasn't playing, it was just doing what it does - I hate the way that saying makes it seem like some people just didn't fight hard enough)

So what's my point? My point is that nature won't change...fires will burn, tornados will come, floods will happen...the key is that WE, the humans in the picture, CAN adapt...what's fascinating is when we don't. I rant about putting wires back on poles so they can be knocked down again instead of burying them...people rant back telling me about the cost but I ask (and never get an answer) how many times can you pay to put them back on poles before the cost levels out? ...but back to the tornados...

Humans have this remarkable ability to adapt. We walk upright. Have opposable thumbs. Binocular vision. We adapt. We change. We also have an amazing capacity to face tragedy and come back and I think what's happened is maybe the wires got crossed...did we confuse adapting with a lack of courage? So here's what I think...if you live in tornado alley, have you thought about an underground home? They can be beautiful, energy efficient and they could give a crap about high winds. If you live at the beach, poles. Hills prone to mudslides, earthquakes and/or wildfires? Get used to no insurance. 

I'm sorry but I'm just amazed that we who have descended from Australopithecus afarensis, have refused our heritage. have refused to adapt. So yes, to those folks in Joplin, to my families living in Kansas and Georgia, to dear friends living in California and Oregon and Washington, to more family lving in Florida - those tornados are coming back - they can't adapt - can we?

$70 for a book published after the author dies. WTF?

I found some great images on Flickr in the "Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Social Theory" group and one of them referenced the book "Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory" by Alfred Gell. 

Seems like an awesome book...the reviews all regard it well...so looking at Amazon...there it is for...WHOA! $70!? Are you kidding? Oh wait, its been used as a textbook - so that makes it ok. Now get this...this book was written in 1998 and was published posthumously...that's right...the author is dead so that means copyright will only apply to this work for like another 120 years. Reasonable right?

Judas, I mean really. We are so messed up as a society. I did find the book on Questia...great..except its also locked behind a paywall. So I hope Alfred Gell never wrote anything useful to a lot of people because they will never see it. Ever. Seriously you dopes, brokers from banks that had to use government money to bail themselves out are getting bonuses. BP has only disperesed about $4 billion of the $20 billion its dedicated to help the people in the Gulf. On and on. And we're gonna lock this work up behind some paywalls and here is the thing...if you charged ONE DOLLAR for this book, the publisher would make more money than the current price. Its just so damn stupid all the way around. No one is making money and nothing is getting read. Beautiful. 

More awards bullsh@%t!

So I wrote this little blog post last year about an email I got concerning an awards program. My problem was the cost associated with entering the contest and the utter lack of transparency and the fact that empty contests like this demean our industry and our efforts. Small problems right?

I was actually alerted to this contest by someone in my network but I also just got the email announcing it myself. 

Last year the cost to be in this fine "contest" (pls use airquotes when reading aloud), was over $800 - I guess the economic downturn has hit everyone  and the cost is now down to $575. 

Let me say again - this is the "Brandon Hall Excellence Awards". Now I should say, like I did last year, that I admire not only the some of the work that BHR does but a lot of the people that are analysts there. Really do....BUT....

...awards like these just cheapen and demean our industry. Any awards program that is administered and run by a for-profit company is suspect by nature. Why can't we forge some non-commercial group that will ajudicate an awards program - that would be cool and helpful. One that is not associated with any one conference, publication or company - what about an awards program that is associated with our industry?

Here is one truth - that won't happen on one level because awards programs like this are money makers. Pure and simple. I think another truth is that our industry is just too fractured. We have designers, developers, consultants, academics, 'legends', edupunks and more - how do we bring that group together?

So I'm sorry BHR, I won't be paying the $575 to "get the recognition I deserve"....I hope that will come from my peers, my clients and my stakeholders. 

"FOUO" ...Now this is interesting.

So "FOUO"  = "For Official Use Only". Here is a link to detailed explanation of the term, turns out its a document classification, not a security level. That link in part defines it as:

"This designation is used by Department of Defense and a number of other federal agencies to identify information or material which, although unclassified, may not be appropriate for public release."

The interesting part is the one where I see a story come across Twitter about something that is not only in my professional area but a personal one as well. I click on the link (no, I'm not providing it here) and I go to a story on the Website of a widely-known tech magazine. There on the story page is an image that clearly has "FOUO" stamped on it. 

I think that policy is pretty clear here. I don't think I can link to or use that image. We found out when Wikileaks hit, that just because something is now publically available, doesn't mean that its classification has changed - so this image is public but still FOUO. As a govt. employee, I think my options are clear - don't link to it or use it. I just find this really interesting - kinda doing some mental disection on what this feels like. 

What would you do if you saw come across Twitter that was really juicy but contained proprietary information about or from your company? Would you RT it?  

Read "Designing Social Interfaces" if you are involved with humans at all.

Do you work with humans? OK...then read this book. Clear? Awesome. 

You want people to use your systems? Your courses? Your learning experiences? Then read this book. This book won't do it all for you but it goes a long way. I think it also addresses user interaction in a way that we don't usually think of when designing courses. I'm just sitting here looking at the cover of this book and seeing that humans are pretty apparent in the title (hint: social means human)...then I think about something like "Instructional Systems Design" and it's a little less easy to see where humans fit in. 

When is the last time you thought about the flow that you create for students when they sign up for a course? Did you even think about it at all? These folks did. They worked for companies like Yahoo! where people would vote with their mouse button if the flow of an experience on a site wasn't compelling or welcoming. 

The authors talk about social user experience patterns and describe a pattern here as:

"A pattern describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context. A pattern is not a finished piece of code or design. Rather, it reflects the sum total of a community's knowledge and experience or expertise in a given domain."

Now social media and or social learning is all the rage but unless we want to turn this powerful moment into something approaching our grand e-learning design concepts like which corner do we put the Next button in, then we need to get smarter on design. Design that's like Soylent Green - about people. So read the book. Visit the Wiki. Let's figure out how to design systems for humans, not just systems that include humans. 

Sigh...will someone in Learning/Training Field Just Please Rip This Off?

OK so seriously. We've stopped using Learning Objects right? Cause they're about as real as mean unicorns. Good. Now, as an industry, let's get into some serious theft.  Saw this article in TechCrunch, about Google firing up chatbots again. 

This time the Google bot is named Google Guru and is available to any chat service linking to Google Talk. So think about Paving the Cowpaths (srsly click this link). Look to where your people are already using tools, maybe as pedestrian as IM. Now think about deploying a chatbot as a PERFORMANCE SUPPORT TOOL or an EPSS or some other name that just means getting info that people need to them, when and where they need it. #DuhWinning

A corporate chatbot, chiling as that may sound at first blush, could be a natural and non-threatening way for people to interact with a ton of information. Now tie that chatbot interaction back to the employee's profile in the LMS and...do I need to draw this out? OK....you've got a built-in, human-populated engine for the things they're looking to find out. Nice huh? I know. 

So maybe Google (#irony) for "chatbots" and see what turns up...and maybe think about a tool that already is in someone's workflow/ecosystem/learnscape. ;-)

Why can't we build something like this for "Objects Used for Learning"?

First place, please don't ever call anything a "learning object" in front of me. Not unless you're prepared to tell me what it is and how its different than any other digital object. So let's go with you just don't use it. Cool. 

Second place, have you used Slide Rocket? Did you know that when you use it, when you upload a PPT presentation to Slide Rocket it strips all the images out and adds them to an Asset Library? Did I mention its automatic? Hunh. Weird. Sounds useful. 

From the exfm page: 

"Exfm turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse, exfm runs in the background indexing every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. exfm will continue to check the sites you've visited, adding new music for you to listen to every day. 
New in Version 2.0:You can now Note songs you love and they will be publicly shared on your profile page at ex.fm/YourName. You can also connect your account to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to both share songs on those sites as well as pull in shared songs from people you follow on those sites. "

  So tell me campers, if somebody can do this for MP3s (WHOA! what if MP3s could be LEARNING OBJECTS? No way Mark, you're just talking crazy!) then why can't we create some mystical authoring tool (some would call it a Chrome extension), where you create a personalized authoring tool environment that grabs objects as you cruise around the Web and builds you a library on the fly? What if we could hook that tool to your Diigo RSS feed so we teach the Machine as we use it? Wow that would be cool and useful. But Mark, where would the Next Button go!?

Think you're the first one to think like this?

"It is an extraordinary era in which we live. It is altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before. I will not pretend, no one can pretend, to discern then end; but every body knows that the age is remarkable for scientific research into the heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth; and perhaps more remarkable still for the application of this scientific research to the pursuits of life. The ancients saw nothing like it. The moderns have seen nothing like it till the present generation…

We see the ocean navigated and the solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era. What is before us, no one can say, what is upon us, no one can hardly realize. The progress of this age has almost outstripped human belief; the future is known only to Omniscisence."

Daniel Webster, 1847

A little rant on comic books.....

Believe it or not, I find that image over there to the left to be offensive, on several levels. First, as a long-time (since like I was 9) comic book reader, I'm offended because it seems like the artist just gave up and didn't even draw Emma Frost but instead drew some kind of hooker/stripper avatar. Nothing to do with the story. Nothing to do with the character. Brilliant.

Let me also tell you (entering second level of offended), I have an 11-year old son and I would love to get him reading comic books but I'm no about to hand him this issue of X-Men. So not only are they offending me, a current reader, they are losing out on a future potential reader.

So what does a good cover look like? How about the one over here to the right? I like this one. Tension.
Drama. Actually has something to do with the story. So please don't pander. It's not what got me reading comic books - its not what will bring the next generation to comic books. 

And another thing, adopt tighter story arcs. You know when you never end a story, you don't prevent people from jumping off; you keep people from jumping on. 

Oh and geez...enough with the one-shots - meaningless to the storyline. 

And Holy Title Confusion...wanna know a real problem? These are the X-Men related titles shipping in MARCH: X-Men Origins, X-Men Legacy, X-Men, X-Factor, Wolverine, Uncanny X-Men, Uncanny X-Force....and I'm skipping around here. But you see what I mean? I mean which one do I get? Which ones are in the same continuity? 

So yeah, Marvel & DC (w a little Dark Horse thrown in) you can continue to make Spider-Man 8 or Iron Man 5 - but don't forget where these characters came from  - they came from the pages of comic books and that audience that lines up to see those films? A lot of those people came from reading the books. So do something that shows you can actually remove your head from you collective publishing ass and do something to make this a vibrant publishing medium. 

Thanks. Excelsior!