e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

"Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers" (The McKinsey Quarterly)

(link)

Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it's imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries.

 

"We're in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of "combinatorial innovation." So if you look historically, you'll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. In the 1800s, it was interchangeable parts. In 1920, it was electronics. In the 1970s, it was integrated circuits.

 

Now what we see is a period where you have Internet components, where you have software, protocols, languages, and capabilities to combine these component parts in ways that create totally new innovations. The great thing about the current period is that component parts are all bits. That means you never run out of them. You can reproduce them, you can duplicate them, you can spread them around the world, and you can have thousands and tens of thousands of innovators combining or recombining the same component parts to create new innovation. So there's no shortage. There are no inventory delays. It's a situation where the components are available for everyone, and so we get this tremendous burst of innovation that we're seeing."

CEO of Ning Keynoting at Defense Information Systems Agency

I LOVE this. Turns out DISA (at the most simplistic, understated level - this ISP for   DOD) is having a little conference this spring and they've asked Gina Bianchini, the CEO of ning.com to give the keynote.

So I love that now as people ask me about accessing things like social networking sites like ning from within DOD, I can say things like "well we may not be 100% of the way there but DISA had so-and-so for a keynote speaker, that must indicate something." ...and yes, you can get to ning.com from within DISA - from what little birds tell me.

Keep in mind too that DISA is the agency behind Forge.mil, the DOD's version of SourceForge.

So thanks to Bob Brewin and nextgov for the catch...great news.

"Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software" (Amy Jo Kim)

Changing the Genetic Code of Conferences

So there is a wonderful conversation getting underway at Spaces of Interaction: An Online Conversation about Improving Traditional Conferences. As someone who goes to a lot of conferences, this really interests me. As part of looking around on that topic, I found this article about Webstock 2009, a conference that just wrapped up in Wellington, NZ.

The post that caught my eye was one in which people were putting together the business case for attending the conference. I thought they had some nice ideas like (Oh, and keep in mind that my comments aren't directed at Webstock, which I assume is awesome but rather at us in the learning/training field and our conferences):

• Webstock is an unparalleled training opportunity: that's a great claim - what do we think it would take to change it to a metric?
• You’ll be better at your job: again - that's awesome - what's the best way to achieve that?
• The speakers are some of the best in the world - but they should bring relevant messages as well or else they're just marketing fodder. I'll never forget being at one conference where Rudy Giuliani was a speaker - before he was a candidate - not only was he one of the most wooden and dreadful speakers I've ever seen but he also failed to adjust his pitch one whit to map to the audience in front of him.
• You’ll come back better networked - this is awesome but is the conference actually deploying tools. technologies, opportunities to achieve this? Here is a crazy idea - offer a couple of stations set up using something like a CardScan business card scanner - now offer to let people use this station to scan in all the biz cards they collect and email themselves electronic copies of them before they even leave the conference. That is facilitating networking. 
• Webstock is run by people who care: Again, that's great and might sound superficial but there could be something deeper here as well. What if instead of having companies who's biz model is driving attendance to shows and selling booth space - we actually had conferences run by people who may have those elements as part of their model but who at base, care about the industry?

So what do you think? Any hope of changing conferences at a genetic level? What would it take?

How To Kill A Community

So I found this piece of work from the North Carolina Office of State Personnel's Grapevine;  which ostensibly has the goal of providing "a vehicle to build community among personnel and to foster a professional environment of sharing and learning." It is a moderated forum and evidently a HEAVILY moderated forum  - I mean Judas H. Priest - put a foot on my neck and squeeze why don't you? Read these rules and then guess at the level of participation in this 'forum.'

Don'ts

Don’t use any speech that is inaccurate, unlawful, harmful, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, personal attacks,antagonistic, threatening, abusive or harassing to other users or the general public.  **So, you're going to outlaw inaccuracies?

Don’t post advertisements, solicitations, chain letters, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other unsolicited commercial communication.  **OK..that's fine...

Don’t spam.  **Ooops. I think you guys just violated your own rule

Don’t use UPPERCASE – This is the same as shouting.  **REALLY?! WHO KNEW?!

Don’t repeat information already provided.  **Glass houses.....

Don’t dole out truism (You get what you pay for.). **That is a favorite. I would've gone with "Don't parse homilies" but this one is still good.

Don’t overwhelm with information.  **Seriously? Really? You have the gall to publish a list of Do's and Don'ts with 32 rules on it and then include this? Really?

The whole list is here.

"The Surprising Death of the Public Intellectual and a Manifesto for its Restoration" (Jo Guldi)

(Link)

"The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked differently, and that the present may have looked very different itself. Experts like Krugman and Nesse are, by definition and training, not participants in the humanities game of memory, comparison and synthesis: rather, they are experts. Experts, like the fox of Isaiah Berlin, track down the single series of facts towards knowledge. They come out of laboratories, where they have performed minute studies of a single experiment where terms like “promiscuous” and “chaste” are fixed as a supposition of the game. Experts judge the workings of the brain by the newest findings, not by comparison with Aristotle or Machiavelli. Hedgehog intellectuals, by contrast, agglomerate and compare: this definition of good behavior with those five more relative or strict versions that societies have enforced at different times; the perspective of gender studies with that of sociology. Their training in the humanities acquaints them with thinkers classical and modern; it teaches the keen eye for other cultures, the rapid absorption of information about pamphlet and canvases in everyday time. Hedgehogs generally are made not in laboratories but in libraries, where they have learned to compare dictators and democracies across time and space, dealing with the primary texts of alien societies – learning, that is, from the natives on their own terms. Hedgehogs are assimilators, and they’re friendly with the locals. Lately they do not come out of the libraries so much, and the forum is brimming with foxes."

This is a wonderful article and IMHO, I think we need more hedgehogs.

Forget the Technology - Is Your Organization's Environment Enterprise 2.0? (McAfee)

This is a BRILLIANT point and quite possibly the most important one in the realm of implementing Enterprise 2.0.

McAfee talks about getting requests to evaluate specific products for their 2.0-newness...he rejects that as an empty exercise and instead checks the deployment environment for how it maps to measures of "freeform, frictionless and emergent."

He is spot on target when he argues that not ALL enterprise systems have to be or should be freeform but there should be SOME system "in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them."

This also rings too true; "Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one." Oh yeah.

Why do we keep spending money on these systems, deploy them and the do absolutely NONE of the organizational design and change management  work necessary to have them work successfully in the enterprise. I tell people every time I talk about this that these systems are not culturally neutral - they attack hierarchies of information command and control and traditional ideas of 'expertise.' Its always amazing that even when we do bring IT to the table, we never think to bring HR but we'll prattle on about how this will change the way people work but we won't act like we might have to change the way they are rated and assessed. Sheesh.

Activities, Workflows and Structured Wikis (Augmented Social Cognition)

(Article Link)

"Gregorio Convertino, who recently joined ASC research area here at PARC, have been looking at how Web2.0 tools like Wikis support workflows within the enterprise. By workflow, we mean activities that are important enough to be documented in the enterprise (either because it is an important client, or that it is an activity that is often repeated.)

For this purpose, we have been doing an overall review of structured Wikis available in the marketplace (either thru open-source, hosted solution, or supported-installation). By "Structured Wiki", we mean wiki engines that are enhanced with lightweight programming features and database functionalities. The focus of our review is primarily, but on only, on the user interface and interesting new functionalities to organize content such as templating and database functions. Important criteria for us are ease of use, power of end-user-programming/organizing functionalities, and licensing"

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics (TED)

Components of Our Learning/Training Industry

So, I want to try and make sure that I have a complete picture of what is considered to be all the components of our little industry.

I'm interested for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is to see the variety of opinions that are coming in. I asked this question earlier on Twitter and some of the answers are below.

One of the other reasons is to better understand how change might flow or be stopped as it tries to ripple across our little pond. I'm still developing this thought but I'd love your help. I'll include what I already have below and I'd hope you'd add what you find to be missing. Thanks! (Oh and please feel free to suggest larger/Meta categories)

                                                                                                (photo attribution)

Components:

• Product Vendors
• Higher Ed/Degree Programs
• Gurus
• Critical Analysis
• Design Concepts
• Clients
• Designers
• Developers
• Conferences
  • Expo Stages
  • Wireless
  • Locations
  • Social Media
  • Speaker pools
  • Pre-conference input
  • Traditional lecture setups
• Consultants
• LEARNERS
• CLO's
• Physical Locations
  • Classrooms
• IT
  • Access
  • Locked down desktops
• Tensions
  • Academic vs. Corporate
  • Strategy/Vision vs. Front Line
  • Upper Mgt vs. Training Dept
• Professional Organizations
  • Certifications

I should also include Harold Jarche's excellent post on the eLearning business