Harold Jarche

Student resources

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For some, public school is already back in session, while others have a couple of weeks left. Both of our boys go back to high school after the labour day weekend. We’ve already purchased our school supplies, which were  fewer than required in previous years.

Over the years I’ve picked up online resources that I think might be useful for our boys and have tagged these as student_resources in Delicious. They are a mix of how-to’s and learning aids for students ranging from elementary school to university. Here are some examples:

Stephen Downes’ post on How to write articles and essays

Understanding logic via The Fallacy Files

The Animated Periodic Table of Elements

How to do research from the Kentucky Virtual Library

So far, there are about 50 resources and I keep adding to the pile whenever I find something of interest. I try not to add too many or they won’t look through them. If you use the same tag, we can share resources. Our guys have the link to these bookmarks in their browsers. It’s a home-made EPSS for students.

Classtell

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Via StartUpNorth is news of a bootstrapped website creation/hosting service for teachers. Classtell reminds me of edublogs but it has some differences. Firstly, it’s Canadian and secondly it is not free. The cost is only $20 per year and that should ensure some cashflow so that the system doesn’t collapse as it grows. It also means no advertising.

You can create an unlimited number of pages on your Classtell website. These pages can used for assignments, calendars, blogs, and more.

You also have 500MB of storage space on your Classtell account to upload and share files, handouts and photos with your class.

Oh, and the most interesting part of this new company? The founder is only 15 years old!

The peerless cloud

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The Accidental Tourist voices his concerns with cloud computing, the web mot du jour (thanks Karyn):

… there is a Gartner report endorsing cloud computing. Then the very next paragraph states that the same organisation published a report warning of the dangers of cloud computing.

The stability of cloud computing was examined by Read/Write Web last week in light of recent GMail service outages. R/WW thinks that peer to peer may eventually subvert the cloud model.

You need $ gazillions to be a Cloud Computing Platform. Those server farms cost a lot. Skimping, or misjudging demand, leads to outages, slow response and other confidence-killers. This is a game for the big boys – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, AT&T, Sun.

R/WW describes four P2P platforms, of which I only know Skype, an application that I have been using and liking for several years. Another application they describe is Wuala, which offers P2P online storage. I checked it out but I’m not sure if I want my files stored on other people’s computers. You get 1GB for free and then can purchase more or share some of your space in return for some online storage. Personally, I prefer to use a cheap external hard drive or flash drive.

There is no single way that is best and I like to see new models being tested to usurp the big guys. It keeps everyone on their toes. However, if your data are important, you should know where they reside, as I said in Own Your Data. All of this has implications for training and education, especially as more organisations use Web 2.0 tools for learning.

Unmeeting

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I attended a learning conversation on Unmeetings with Jay Cross and several other very interesting people today.  This will be the first of a series of dialogs on Learnscape Architecture. Jay said initially that, “The conversation will go where it wants to, but we’ll begin by considering how unmeetings can facilitate learning.”

My reflections and notes from the hour-long conversation follow. Unstructured conferences allow people who wouldn’t normally speak up an opportunity to do so. There was a reference to the book Why Work Sucks and the notion that all meetings should be optional. A point was made that the core question around unmeetings was how much structure does it take to create value. More discussion led to the observation that set agendas may not be necessary and may even impinge on learning. An example is the World Cafe, a model where everyone has a voice, not just the official speakers.

A key to good meetings, including unmeetings, is more so in the facilitation, not any set agenda.  A facilitator is someone who can watch the flow. The idea of  flow from one type of tool to another came out. Perhaps we need some paths to enable better work flow, starting with unmeetings/openspace, which can produce artefacts such as visualisations/mind maps. These can then lead to participative structures like blogs/wikis and finally, once the path is clearer, to project management.

You do not own me

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Last year I went through a very long process applying for a job that had the potential to be interesting and challenging. It entailed no move on my part, mostly work from home, some international travel, and the opening of new lines of business, both geographically and in terms of industry sectors. The salary was OK and the benefits reasonable, so I seriously considered the offer.

Then I received the written offer of employment and was shocked by the non-compete clause. I would not be able to work for any company that was deemed by my employer to be a competitor, for two years. Nor could I go back to my own consulting practice and do work for any of these companies. My employer would have the right to determine who these companies were, after the fact. Needless to say, I turned down the job offer.

Charles Green at The Trusted Advisor reports on a recent decision by the California Supreme Court that strikes a major blow against non-compete agreements for employees, basically stating that no employer can deny future employment to a worker. As Green states:

This is simple human dignity; employers do and should have many rights, including various forms of intellectual property protection (trademarks, patents, copyrights)—but those rights have their own distinct protections and can stand on their own. Using employees as chattel to further a former employer’s competitive adventures is unnecessary—and thoroughly out of sync with a modern global business world.

I have often referred to salaried employment as indentured servitude, and practices such as non-compete clauses are examples of this culture. Perhaps with more worker mobility, a growing body of free-agents and less dependence on corporations for work, we may see this culture changing. Let’s hope that the lawyers hear about this soon.

Representing social media

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Ross Dawson shows four representations of the social media tool landscape, with the most recent and colourful Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas:

Two of these visualizations have Conversation at the centre and this one includes, “The art of listening, learning and sharing”. Ross Dawson’s own example from last year puts social media along two axes, one being from “Sharing Content” to “Recommending/Filtering”. One the one end,  content is made and shared by everyone and anyone, such as with YouTube videos or millions of blog posts. There are many tools to facilitate this process, as shown in these charts. Now that we too much stuff to easily make sense of, and it keeps on expanding, we need to find patterns.  That is what the other tools at the other end of Dawson’s axis help us do.

These visualizations can be used as a basis for teaching about social media. The prism may be complicated for first use, so I would start with Dawson’s X axis (Sharing to Filtering).  You could begin by looking at the content that is out there and start to filter it, trying different tools. This might be a good approach for people who are not overly comfortable on the Web and are not ready to create their own content. The Prism can be used later to show the variety of tools and categories of tools and then look at content creation.

From listening to sharing, while learning on the way, may be a good first path into the web of social media. It’s something I will consider as I guide more learners and clients.

Blogs and social media for beginners

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I was asked the other day how an established company could start using blogs, but I soon found out that they meant any social media. As a start, I’m going to tie together a few threads from my Delicious bookmarks.

Dave Snowden’s pithy advice is a good place to begin, when considering blogs for sharing knowledge across the company:

  1. Install software for blogs (designed for blogs that is, not a general package with blogs tagged on).
  2. Learn from what other people have done using blogs, but under no circumstances copy what someone else has done—no matter how successful. Your context is different.
  3. Now be patient.
  4. Find out what is working and what is not.

As Jon Husband says, when discussing the government’s use of social media, “It’s about finding and using pertinent information more quickly and more easily, and letting people do what they do best when addressing an issue using curiosity, common sense and a desire to do their work well. ”

I’ve mentioned the benefits of blogging for myself and any business that wants to show leadership in its field should consider the medium, as noted by Business Blog Consulting:

As you continue to build your blog over time, creating great content in a specific niche, Google’s more likely to return your blog as a result when a journalist starts researching a column or article. I’ve never hired a PR firm, and I work out of the top right corner of the US us locals call “Maine”, but I’ve gotten quotes in Inc., BusinessWeek Small Biz, and other periodicals and the local evening news because of our Web marketing blog.

Blogs and wikis can be used to organise knowledge and facilitate communication. They can also be ways of connecting with customers and sharing amongst fellow practitioners. They aren’t a one-way medium to direct your message to your “target market”, so learning by trying is highly recommended, especially if you’re used to one-way print, radio or TV media.

The bottom line is that it’s not about the technology and all about the organisation’s culture. The last question should be, “what blog platform should we use?”.

Related posts:

The business of social media

An ecosystem of knowledge

Blogs at the core of KM and collaboration

What business are you in?

Immersed in New Brunswick

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On Tuesday the government of New Brunswick made a decision on early French immersion education, after having been forced by a court to reconsider an earlier decision. The “final” decision is one that baffles me from a research perspective but makes sense from a political one. This decision makes people feel better about being unilingual and gives a false sense that literacy in the first language will now improve.

Early French Immersion, which begins in kindergarten or Grade 1 in all Canadian provinces will now start in Grade 3 in Canada’s only officially bilingual province. It seems that New Brunswickers need to concentrate on first language skills before being saddled with a second. That is in spite of the research that shows that learning a second language actually enhances first language skills. Our politicians and bureaucrats are not ones to let data cloud their preconceived notions of what actually works.

French immersion is a program that is open to all, where the demand exists. One problem has been that not all parents want it. The other issue is that special needs children cannot get services in French, so they must opt for the English program. It creates what the Minister calls streaming. This is streaming because the Department of Education has never put adequate resources into the immersion program. And so it gets watered down.

This government and the education system have been pushing the idea that an optional second language immersion program, fought for 30 years ago, is detrimental to the education of all children because only a minority take it. Streaming is presented as the root of our educational woes, even though the immersion program received very little of the Department’s teaching support resources last year.

Now we have the only early second language immersion program in Canada that starts in Grade 3. What would you do if you were from another province and had a choice of schooling your children in New Brunswick? This is a real decision for military families or those considering a career move to this province, such as university professors. Would you move here or would you stay away from this anomaly and give your children more educational options?

I can see nothing about this new program that is attractive to anyone outside of this Province. It is not innovative in any sense. An innovative approach would have been second language immersion for ALL students beginning in kindergarten. This move is a retrograde action. The drive-through province has become the drive-away-from province.

A governing principle for work literacy

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Work literacy aims to help people develop skills necessary for the knowledge-intensive and interconnected workplace, or as the website says:

Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

I’m all for that and believe it’s necessary; it’s just not enough. Michele Martin says on the Work Literacy blog that:

… knowledge workers need to figure out how to leverage the social aspects of the web to make their traditionally solitary online activities more effective and useful. As Tony [Karrer] points out, this will be a big challenge because people are not necessarily aware of the extent to which these social changes impact how they do their work. We first have to make them aware of this changed context and then help the develop the skills to be successful in this new world.

The context of work is definitely changing.

When Henry Ford developed his automobile mass production system he based it on the results of the time-motion studies of F.W. Taylor. Taylorism was the unifying theory that work could be standardized and workers could be organised around jobs, tasks and responsibilities. Ford implemented that theory. I think that for work literacy to become part of the workplace it needs to be grounded on a common vision. If not, then work literacy is just an incremental way of making the industrial workplace (with its org charts, line & staff, job classifications, etc) a bit more efficient.

The industrial model needs to be replaced because more and more work cannot be organised along Taylor’s guidelines. I think that the governing principle of Wirearchy, “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology” is a good start. Embracing this principle would create havoc in most organisations though.

A two-way flow of power and authority exists in few organisations but it is possible and I think necessary in an interconnected world. It’s how open source projects work and it is part of the tacit pact in many Web 2.0 ventures. Companies have to treat their customers in a trustworthy way or they may all leave, which of course will destroy the company as most of the value resides in the community. Think of YouTube without contributors.

Work literacy focuses on the tools and techniques for social media but there is an underlying subversive component. Social media are the equivalent of an industrial factory for each worker. Almost every worker has the ability to get a message out to the world in the blink of an eye. That message can go viral and the organization has no control over it. Workers can also connect to massive amounts of information or find specialists in any field. They don’t need the company database, which is probably out of date anyway.

As anthropologist Michael Wesch states, “when media change, then human relationships change“. The Internet has already changed everything. The social contract that we call employment has been changing for a while. Unions are shrinking, the self-employed are growing (2 million in Canada, which is more than all manufacturing workers) and low wage service jobs are our largest growth sector. What unites us is our ability to easily connect with each other, without traditional intermediaries. We’re just not used to it yet, but initiatives like CarrotMob show what the future may hold.

For me, work literacy is showing people that they have access to the most powerful communications medium in history and that individuals have to grab hold of it, understand it and use it for the good of society, because we are society. Work literacy is not about doing your job better. It’s understanding what it means to work, to create and to be responsible, all within the context of being visible to everyone else. For workers, work literacy means growing up, damn fast.

So here’s my reading of the situation. In an interconnected, interdependent and highly-stressed world there’s no more us and them. It’s just us. We can all figure this out together and maybe our organization will survive. It may not, but we may have learned how to cooperate in the process and then some of us may create something new. Trust is the foundation of the new workplace and work literacy can help us build trust because these social media tools are transparent. That means that bosses are going to lose control – better now than later.

Work literacy is the way in which we connect with information, build knowledge, gain trust and strive for credibility in the Internet age.

Online learning tips the scales

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The price of fuel seems to be driving an uptake in online learning for higher education. Ray Schroeder has even started a blog about Fueling Online Learning, which I discovered via George Siemens.

I remember about a decade ago the discussions around the return on investment of online learning and the major factor was the reduction of travel time. You could save a LOT of money by not sending people on courses. However we learned that most people like to travel, get out of the office and socialize while learning. Some may even say that learning is a social endeavour.

So the scales may have finally tipped in favour of learning at a distance. Luckily for learners, there are a lot of social tools to add to the mix and a course doesn’t have to be a page-turning electronic book. Even if the institution only provides the content, learners can create study groups or plug into other networks, just avoid places like Ryerson if you intend on being a social learner.

Getting enough people wanting or needing to learn online should tip the scales toward more social learning. Perhaps we may escape the course/module constraint, especially as more workers use the Net for professional development. We, the pioneers in working and learning on the Web [check the header here], know the advantages of connecting to multiple networks and learning either serindipitously or just-in-time to solve a problem. It’s like water for fishes; we just do it.

As we get more online learners, let’s reach out and show them that it may not be easy but it’s possible to have rich learning experiences and meet some very interesting people online.