Harold Jarche

Public Service Announcement – Missing Children

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A local mother here in New Brunswick, Canada has appealed to the general public to help her find her two boys, who were abducted by their father on December 31st. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have the basic information on this site.

The mother, Nicole Gallant, has also sent this link to additional photos of Sage & Ovila. Here is the press release.

Update: 19 January, and both boys are still missing.

Update 10 February: "Police in Louisiana have found two New Brunswick children who have been the subject of an international search for more than a month." :-)

CopyLeft Commies

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I guess that I’m a Copyleft commie, if you believe Bill Gates. Here’s Bill’s comment that launched a thousand blogs:

"No, I’d say that of the world’s economies, there’s more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don’t think that those incentives should exist."

Follow this with Michelle Delio’s overview of some of the issues around patents and open source:


  • Recently     – IBM just gave a few hundred of them [patents] away while other companies are greedily gobbling them up.
  • The issue – "The real story here is that we are in the midst of a huge revolution because the patent system hasn’t kept up with technology and changes in society," says Sunstein [an attorney specializing in intellectual property law].

On the other hand, Creative Commons offers creators an option to control their own copyright – With a Creative Commons license, you keep your copyright but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they give you credit — and only on the conditions you specify here.

There is also a Canadian petition circulating on user’s rights, which gives a different perspective from what one hears from the established media companies. If you want a good (US) historical perspective, then read or listen to Lessig’s book, Free Culture.

Finally, if you think that the movement for copyright and patent reform is just a bunch of radical commies, then you should read Will Shetterly’s Biblical parable to see what happens when an idea/technology, ?ɬ† la McLuhan, "flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits".

For the Toolbox

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As a new Training Development Officer (TDO) in the Canadian military, I was told by the more experienced officers to build my own “TDO Toolkit”. This was to be a selection of templates and job aids to help me with my future employment. TDO’s were mostly responsible for ensuring quality control of training programs, and many of us worked as the lone training specialist in an organisation.

Much of my work involved the development of new job specifications, followed by the creation of training standards for personnel who worked on some aspect of our newly purchased helicopter.

One of the tools that we used was DIF (difficulty, importance, frequency) analysis in determining if we needed to develop training on a specific task. In my first year on the helicopter project, I had to examine several hundred tasks for training suitability. The diagram below shows you a quick & dirty way that this can be done. This is the simple diagram, and there is also a more detailed version that we used.

DIF.jpg

Why Moodle?

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From Global Literacy is an overview of comparisons of the Moodle learning system with several others. Moodle is multilingual, SCORM compliant, based on a constructivist pedagogical model and is free (as in free beer and free source code). We (Mancomm) have been using Moodle rather successfully with a group of Montreal area nurses, who are co-developing their knowledge base on a new nursing care methodology.

Via incsub

Thinking longer

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Via Jay Cross, are these comments from some of the most interesting and thought-provoking people in the world, through Edge: the World Question Center. The comments of Esther Dyson really struck a chord:

We’re living longer, and thinking shorter.
Unfortunately, this carries over into how we think and plan: Businesses focus on short-term results; politicians focus on elections; school systems focus on test results; most of us focus on the weather rather than the climate. Everyone knows about the big problems, but their behavior focuses on the here and now.

As a consultant, you are often called in as a last resort, and asked to come up with a quick and pragmatic solution. Don’t bother us with details and an analysis, just get the job done. However, getting down to the root causes of a messy problem may take some time. Fixing systemic problems takes even more time and effort.

We have to learn how to slow down. This can be through regular time for spirituality, exercise, reading or socialising. Organisations should incorporate slow time into their workflow. I once read that in Japan it was OK to sit at your desk and read, whereas in North America we take that as a sign of having nothing better to do. As Socrates said, “The unreflected life is not worth living”. I will take “thinking longer” as a new year’s resolution.

Firefox problems

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I’m having some problems with Firefox today. I can’t see my images that I have on my site, such as the one here. I have also lost the DHTML editor toolbar in Drupal. I know that it’s not a Drupal problem, because I have lost all of my Bloglines feeds too. On the other hand, everything works just fine in IE and even Opera. I have uninstalled and re-installed Firefox, but the problem continues. Any suggestions? I have already run a complete virus scan.

Update: Well it seems to be a Firefox problem and I can’t fix it. I’ve reloaded Firefox twice, even used the UK version instead of the US version. I can’t see any of my subscriptions in Bloglines and I’ve lost functions in Drupal, so it’s back to the dark side I go … Any other recommendations out there? This is weird.

Update 2: I’m now using Mozilla Navigator, and it seems to be working just fine. We’ll see.

Update 3: Have reloaded Firefox 1.0 on my XP SP2 system , but keeping Mozilla as a backup. Using shift-reload, I was able to see the functions in Drupal this time around. Didn’t work last time. Maybe it was just a chair-keyboard interface problem. Anyway, thanks for everyone’s help. Also, you may have noticed that I had allowed direct posting of anonymous comments for the last 24 hours. The online casino spammer caught on to this at 11:00 AM this morning, so they’re now turned off again.

The Medici Effect

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In reading Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, I was able to take away a lot of practical ways of increasing innovation especially by looking for the intersections between fields of practice. Kind of like my tag line ;-)

Johansson tells you to look for reversals which may give you insights into new ways of doing things. He uses a restaurant as an example, saying that the assumption is that restaurants have menus, but the reversal would be a restaurant without a menu. This would be one where, “The chef informs each customer what he bought that day … the diner selects the desired food items and the chef creates a dish from them, specifically for each customer.”

Looking for reversals is the same strategy that Federmann & deKerkhove advise in McLuhan for Managers; based on McLuhan’s Laws of Media. You might want to read these two books in tandem.

Johansson states that those with lots of good ideas are also those with lots of bad ideas. The important thing is to generate many ideas, and follow through on those that show promise. Innovation is the following through part. As Guy Kawasaki says, “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.”

Johansson suggests that the way to be creative is to start early and let the idea develop over time. Don’t wait till the last minute:

… we should start by working hard and in a focused manner on a problem or idea and develop it as far as possible. Then we should wait, move on to something else, and forget about the problem for a while. [and repeat]

The Medici Effect is a quick read and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend this book as a window on some new possibilities.

A Bridge from Nowhere

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Robert Paterson has taken the chasm analogy and applied it the population of PEI. He even has a new curve to show how the Island rates. New Brunswick and many other rural regions are not much different from what Rob describes.

I said yesterday that my work focused on bridging the gap between innovators/early adopters and the pragmatic majority. Rob’s premise is that government panders to the majority and ignores the innovative. Given that innovation is the current buzzword of bureaucrats and politicians, you would think it isn’t so. To take the analogy further, PEI (and many other regions) are so focused on the pragmatic (and visionless) majority that they have forgotten that ALL of the innovation comes from the left side of the curve. It’s not just bridges across the chasm that are needed, but something has to be there to get across. Kind of scary when you think about all of the innovators leaving for places that rate higher on the Creativity Index.

Rob’s solution – “If I was King, my Population Strategy would be to build the cultural container to attract the creative to come here and to keep our best young here as well.”

If I was King …

I would limit the centralized control of departments of education, and allow for independent solutions. The government should get out of the education delivery business, and get into the supporting learning business. Let people decide the best way that they want to learn. Learning and experimenting, not Education, will breed innovation.

But I’m not King; so I guess on a local level we have to support innovative, small companies that can attract and retain a few good people. One graduate, one dropout, one entrepreneur, one SME, and one new venture at a time. Let’s continue to help these folks and that will help all of us.

Bridging the Chasm

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Chasm2.jpg

Geoffrey Moore’s analogy of “crossing the chasm” is used a lot in information technology. Basically, the premise is that any new technology is quickly adopted by innovators and early adopters, but there is a chasm to cross in order to get the more pragmatic majority to adopt the new technology. For marketing, this is the real challenge – can the new product get widespread acceptance? In many cases (but not all) the development costs can only be recovered if the majority purchase the goods or services.

I previously referred to this model and tried to tie it to Gladwell’s “tipping point” theory. Much of my consulting work is in bridging the chasm

  1. I attempt to be an early adopter myself, and use this experience to work with the early pragmatic majority. I also use a broader definition of technology; being the application of organized and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems. I spend much of my time watching the innovators, and
  2. try to determine which of their ideas and new technologies would make sense for my clients. To do this, I have to keep trying out new tools and processes in my own work.
  3. It’s a real balancing act, trying to be on the leading edge but not the bleeding edge.

Some of the technologies that I believe are ready to cross the chasm in the next year [2005] are:

… as well as some that probably won’t get across, yet:

Update March 2006: It’s seems that the use of blogs has exploded, with Technorati’s current count at 29 million. Workflow learning has stalled a bit, while the value of informal learning is catching on. Wikis are also becoming more popular, especially those that replicate word processesors, like Writely. There also seems to be a growing interest in natural enterprises and something to replace corporatism as a guiding model, so I am more optimistic than last year.
[Picture based on Wikipedia entry.]

University Enrolment in Atlantic Canada

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On a previous post on University & College Trends, I questioned whether there was any data showing enrolment trends in Canadian universities. A recent report from the Association of Atlantic Universities shows some interesting figures. For instance, both Acadia and Mount Allison are down 7.4% and 6.8% respectively in undergraduate enrolments this past year. Overall Atlantic numbers are:

Full-time Undergraduate + 2.2%
Full-time Graduate + 1.9%
Part-time Undergraduate – 0.1
Part-time Graduate + 4%
Visa [international] students + 8.3%
Total First Year Students – 7.4%

The distribution is not even, but there appears to be a trend to more international students, which can only be beneficial for Atlantic Canada in the long run. I hope that our industries and government know how to capitalise on this.