Harold Jarche

Blogs are Personal

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I’m currently managing a few blogs. One is for a community of practice focused on elearning for R&D. It doesn’t get much traffic, and so far I’m the only one to post. Another one is a joint effort, but there aren’t many posts. I noticed that my colleague Hal has not made many posts on this one either, but is writing for his own blog.

My experiences confirm (to me anyway) that blogging is personal. You can’t really just dip into it because you won’t be passionate, and your readers will know it – and leave. You also have to feel that you have ownership of the content. This blog gets the most hits of any of my blogs, even more than some of my previous blogs. I don’t think that group blogging will take off; an exception being Many2Many. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and blogs seem best for personal, passionate individual dialogue (is that an oxymoron?). Personally, I blog to connect with others and for the knowledge management aspects of blogging. It keeps a lot of my thoughts and ideas together.

Learning …

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I’ve been on my own for just over a year, and as I had a couple of days off over the holiday weekend, I thought I’d reflect on what I’ve learned, or confirmed, this past year:

  • Learning: is a process, not a product — subject-based teaching is a mistake — we have to focus on process skills like metacognition, problem solving and collaborating, because the subjects will change. I first realized this through Kieran Egan’s writing, and it has been reconfirmed many times.
  • Work: Markets are conversations — it’s only through conversation that we begin to understand each other — success comes when producers and users understand each other, and help each other.
  • Technology: It’s a world of ends, and innovation happens on the edges — look at the edges to find opportunities (but not traditional financing).
  • All Three: Marshall McLuhan was right, especially regarding the Laws of Media.

These are the messages that are staying with me.

Natural Enterprises

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There’s something happening in Atlantic Canada. It’s still below the surface, but I started to notice it when I got off the corporate train and had more time to read, listen and watch. At the last local cybersocial, I was asked to talk about Open Source, and suddenly many others connected to the event. I have been finding more and more people in the region doing interesting work at an international level. People like Steve Mallett, with his work for O’Reilly, and Hal Richman who has worked on international projects with the UN. This week I was on PEI and met the folks at SilverOrange who are contributing to the Mozilla project, and have five years of solid business success.

I am also helping Rob Paterson teach a course at UPEI on the New Economy. Rob and I discussed the need for new business models that are based on trust and cooperation, such as Dave Pollard’s Natural Enterprise [I helped to coin this term – my very small contribution so far]:

Natural Enterprise (NE): "A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates."

Natural Enterpises exist already, and the more I look around the region, the more I see. Maybe this is because we are on the edge, away from the bustling core. Canada is on the edge of the USA, and Atlantic Canada is on the edge of Canada. In networks, much of the value comes from the edges. Perhaps our perspectives from outside the mainstream enable us to see the larger patterns.

I’m optimistic that our region is going to be a hotbed of collaboration between NE’s. There are a lot of creative, intelligent and innovative small companies collaborating on some big projects. What I have noticed is that most of these people are already giving back to their communities, and they want to make this a better place to live and work. They also understand the hard lessons of business and know how to deliver projects on-time and on-budget. Every time I meet another NE, I feel better for our collective future.

Firefox and Drupal

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OK, I’m trying to use more open source technologies and am using Firefox 0.9.1 and I like it. Unfortunately, there is a function that does not work with the Drupal text editor. Firefox won’t let me paste text from the clipboard into the body of a post. That means that I can’t quote text from other blogs – an essential part of blogging. The help file from Mozilla that automatically pops up makes no sense at all to me. I’ve looked into the forums but to no avail. Is there an easy way to do this, or should I just use IE, which lets me copy & paste with no difficulty. If I can surmount this obstacle, I will gladly dump IE and its security issues. Help.

Open Source CMS

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Here is some solid, unbiased, advice from CMS Watch on using open source CMS; which is also applicable for using open source learning content management systems.

In my opinion, one major issue with every OSS CMS package is that most require a major developer learning curve to fulfill even small content requirements. So you can count on configuration and customization, regardless of your environment.

… However, OSS CMS software has really evolved lately, some even becoming, in my opinion, "enterprise capable." Having access to all the source code can allow you to build to almost any content requirements that you may have. OSS also allows you to "try before you commit." You can run a prototype whenever and for however long you want. So, you can certainly pay out on your investment.

There you have it from Tony.

Human Performance Improvement

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BPTrends‘ latest e-mail advisor (PDF) discusses the relationship of human performance improvement with other business process improvement methodologies.

Those involved in business process change within organizations need to draw on and integrate a wide variety of approaches and technologies, ranging from strategy change systems and process analysis tools, to ABC, BPMS, a wide variety of software automation systems, Six Sigma, and job design. ISPI represents a well-developed source of theory and practice designed to help improve human performance within organizations. It’s a rare process improvement project that doesn’t require changes in management and the jobs performed, or that wouldn’t benefit from better feedback or an improved incentive system. The ISPI is a resource that business process change practitioners ought to be familiar with.

Goals of Public Education

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Jeremy Hiebert makes a good point about evaluating the goals of public education.

How well would you do on a Grade 11 algebra exam right now? How’s your current knowledge of your country’s political history? Photosynthesis? Even those of us who remember some of this stuff would have a hard time explaining how the "knowledge" had helped us in any meaningful way. Educational reformers would tend to agree that the system is not achieving its goals (maybe has never achieved them), but the solution isn’t to do more of the same thing … it’s time to question the goals themselves.

I agree that most public education tests the wrong thing. On Kirkpatrick’s scale; the public school sector would get to Level 2 (Learning), but we should be focusing on Level 4 (Results), or Phillips’ Level 5 (ROI). But it’s not even as simple as that.

We have to question the goal of public education itself – is it to develop better citizens, better thinkers, better individuals, or better workers? As Kieran Egan showed in The Educated Mind, some of these goals compete with each other. We cannnot ask our schools to help our children develop good behaviour, learn thinking skills and pick up workplace skills – for a workplace that has yet to be created. Schools should concentrate on what they can do best – develop thinking skills. A second area could be physical skills – Mens sana in corpore sano.

This lack of focus, and being pulled in many directions by every special interest group, ensures that our public schools never have a core area of focus. If we, as a society, can give the schools a mandate to develop cognitive skills (and we will take care of the behaviourial and social issues) then our shools can have something that can and should be measured. Until the mandate is clear, the results will be unclear.