Thanks for the code

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One of my earlier blog posts is still online, which I stumbled upon this week, much to my surprise.

Note: Nine years ago I was warning how production jobs were leaving Canada and getting outsourced. Deep conversations about R&D in this Province never materialized though. The industry was much too focused on “jobs”, which were subsidized by the government. One of the few large eLearning R&D projects in the province just finished last year. The private sector partner is an Ontario company and no further R&D is happening in New Brunswick.

I later shifted to using Blogger (WordPress had just been created in 2003) with a link off my website. It was easier than trying to manage a blog by myself.

Note: It’s interesting that the whole learning objects discussion seems to have disappeared from the mainstream. MOOC’s are the current educational hot topic. I have also moved on, doing much less work in the educational sector and now more focused on integrating learning into the enterprise workflow.

My self-hosted blog started in 2004 using the Drupal CMS and I later switched to WordPress, which made it much easier to manage. Drupal was too much for a mere blog.

Hosting my own blog was one of the best decisions I ever made. Using WordPress was fortuitous, as Automattic is probably the best internet company there is. Best in the sense of supporting its greater community. Best in “not being evil”. The company is doing a very good job of making the Web a better place.

Blogging has provided me with a medium for self-expression and self-publication and a unique medium to reflect on almost a decade of work. Thanks to all those people who believed enough in blogging to write code that works! Many of us really appreciate it.

Etiquette for sharing

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Many people like to share things online. Twitter is full of links to other websites. For a long time you needed to use URL shorteners to ensure you stayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit. There are now many to choose from, including open source and full-service analytics. Now Twitter has its own URL shortener – t.co – that converts every link that is shared. This is so Twitter can analyze all of this sharing and then sell the aggregated information.

One problem with using a third-party URL shortener with Twitter is that you are adding another potential point of failure in the link. I now copy & paste the full URL into Twitter, and it auto-shortens the link. There is only one potential point of failure and people can see the original URL as ALT text. This is user-friendly and respectful to readers.

Many people like to analyse what happens with their online activity and use tracking tools. For example, if your site exports its RSS feed using something like Google’s Feedburner, then the link people click on in their aggregators has extra information attached; so you can be tracked. I think it’s very rude to pass on these kinds of links and I always clean these URL’s before sharing them. All you need to do is delete everything after the question mark (in bold):

… tryingtotrackyou.com/?utm_source=feedburner …

I use Google Analytics on this site and understand why people want to see their social media traffic. However, it is easy for users to block these services, just like using pop-up blockers. My RSS feeds are clean and I provide a full-feed so I don’t force people to come to my site to read an article, just so I can increase my traffic. I think it’s important to share as openly as possible. I appreciate full feeds and clean URL’s as a reader.

Recently I have noticed another layer of complication being imposed by those who share links. Not only are tracking URL’s used, but these links go to another third-party site, like paper.li or tumblr.com which usually add no additional context for the reader. Often they are just clippings of the original website so the reader has to find the link to the original to read the complete article. All of these services are adding additional points of failure. If these services go down, as many do, then the chain is broken.

My intention with this post is to explain why it’s important to understand some of the technical aspects of how the web is working so we can do what people do best – be social. Please don’t be unintentionally anti-social. I would also be interested if there are any other common anti-social online practices that should be stopped.

Etiquette at the Ball for the Victorians of London Society

Do you want fries with that?

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@birgittaj – “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power. ~ Benito Mussolini”

HCI : “more than 50% of line managers believe that shutting down the L&D function would have no impact on employee performance!”

Too many training departments have become mere “order takers,” responding to requests for training by harried but ill-informed managers who believe that training is the solution to every kind of performance problem. (Managers probably don’t really believe that, but ordering training is easier than tackling the real issues.) I call this the “McDonald’s Clerk” approach to training; take the order and, at most, see if they want fries with it.

Governance in a Networked World : SNA is an 80+ year old science but has been largely ignored by the social analytics community.

Now there may be good reasons for this. Some of the language is frankly impenetrable for the newcomer. The SNA measures can be quite complex and as with traditional statistics, need to be applied with care. That said there is clearly an opportunity here to build a bridge between the current social analytics practice to the more sophisticated but far more powerful world of SNA. It will require some careful translation of the language and some very selective use of the measures, but the potential I believe is worthy of a genuine 2.0 label.

Humans were not born to read – The brain has to be rewired in order to perform this newfangled skill – via @anniemurphypaul

“Reading is a cultural invention,” [Dr. Guinevere] Eden said. “There’s nothing designed in the brain to make us readers. Reading has only been around for 4,000 years, maybe a little longer. There are no systems in place from an evolutionary perspective designed for reading.”

@dpontefract – Analysis: Coursera, EdX & Udacity

There is the possibility that edX and Coursera in particular are using these non-credentialed courses as loss leaders. (see the FAQ of edX – no Harvard or MIT recognition comes with a completed course nor are any credits issued) If the courses are free, and they lead to nothing more than a certificate of completion (affiliated by no university whatsoever) students may want an actual official degree or designation from one of the Academic institutions at some point for their efforts. Do you really think Harvard is simply going to give away their crest for free? MIT? Princeton? Highly unlikely. I see these projects as opportunities to upsell fee-based programs and degrees that otherwise might not have occurred due to the lack of a sales channel.

@sjgill – Do you need a CLO?

The unintended consequence has been to reinforce the notion that work and learning are separate and that one has higher value than the other when, in fact, the success of the organization depends on continuous learning. To break out of this mental model, companies should stop doing things that appear to centralize responsibility for learning. Don’t put all the emphasis on a course catalogue and don’t hire a CLO.

XKCD on teachable moments:

Note the XKCD cartoon’s Alt Text – “Saying ‘what kind of an idiot doesn’t know about the Yellowstone supervolcano’ is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.“

The performance appraisal treadmill

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In The Paradox of Performance Pay, Allan Hawke shows how it has clearly led to decreases in organizational performance.

Peter Scholtes, who has researched and written extensively about performance, appraisal and pay, argues that such a performance ”management” regime is inherently the wrong thing to do because three faults are common to all variations on the theme:

  • It doesn’t work.
  • It’s wrong to focus only on individuals or groups, because most opportunities for improvement involve systems, processes and technology.
  • Performance ”management” is judgment, not feedback; it’s a hierarchical dynamic.

W. Edwards Deming called annual performance appraisals one of the five deadly diseases of management. Performance ratings are nothing more than a lottery, Deming said in 1984. This pertains to all levels in the organization.

ANNUAL RATING OF PERFORMANCE

  • Arbitrary and unjust system
  • Demoralizing to employees
  • Nourishes short-term performance
  • Annihilates team work, encourages fear.

Perhaps the performance appraisal treadmill is keeping organizations from testing out and adopting better management models for the networked economy. How could anyone possibly show progress in 365 days? It also makes one wonder about the effectiveness of publicly-traded companies that get a ‘performance appraisal’ from the market every quarter.

JFK Report Card 1930

Performance appraisals are like academic grades and keep the focus on the individual. In the collaborative, social enterprise this is counter-productive. There is no place for this practice in doing net work. In today’s enterprise, work is learning and learning is the work, and it has to be done cooperatively.

The Web changes business

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So you think the Web won’t change the business you’re in? Do you believe that education, training, and instructional design organizations will carry on with business-as-usual, as people keep paying for traditional courses? Look at how these business models, which were all created since the birth of the Web, have managed to change entire industries.

  • Google – Advertising
  • Craigslist – Classified Ads
  • Wikipedia – Encyclopedias (print & electronic)
  • Amazon – Books
  • LinkedIn – Recruiting
  • Elance – Freelancing
  • GMail – Email (web-based & almost unlimited storage)
  • WordPress – Custom Web Design, Hosting & CMS
  • Moo – Business Cards
  • Etsy – Local Artists & Artisans go global in minutes
  • iTunes – Music on demand

Given that 65% of todays’ students will end up in jobs that don’t exist today, we know work will change significantly in the next decade. The network economy is changing everyone’s business, and will significantly affect education and training as well.

The college in transition

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I really enjoyed my visit to Algonquin College in Ottawa today. I met many motivated educational change agents who are looking at how they can improve their learning environment, with and without technology. The campus is home to a wide range of students, though I was surprised that most are under 24 years of age. I had expected more mid-career students

I must admit that on arrival this morning (using the highly efficient Ottawa transit system), I found the new construction trades building to be quite stunning.

As the opening keynote speaker, my job was talk about some of the bigger issues facing Canadian colleges today. One of the topics was the appearance of new open, online offerings from US universities like Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT. If these folks are offering free courses, why would you want to take the bus to a community college, one might ask? Here’s an interesting perspective on what EdX might mean.

Perhaps these new(ish) models, like MOOC’s, will address some of the issues facing higher education, as I heard a few stories of students being completely tuned-out of the formal education process.

Like most organizations adapting to the networked society, the college is trying to balance its existing hierarchies (there are many) with the impact of ubiquitous connectivity & pervasive proximity.

It will be interesting to see how the shift to a mobile campus develops and what external forces will influence the direction of this college. I think colleges, with their work-oriented programmes, are in a much more resilient postion than their brethren at four year universities. But on the other hand, I’m not a futurist. I just tried to show how communication revolutions lead to fundamental shifts in how we organize work, and how this changes our relationship with knowledge, and society’s view of education.

It’s perpetual Beta.

The college in perpetual Beta

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I will be speaking at Algonquin College in Ottawa tomorrow and one of the main themes I will be discussing is how networks are changing our communications, work and education systems. It’s called The College in perpetual Beta:

One of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. In this “network era”, work is learning and learning is the work, but what does that mean for traditional education and our continuing professional development? How can we prepare students, staff and faculty for a world where we are simultaneously connected, mobile, and global; while conversely contractual, part-time, and local?

Algonquin College is the largest community college in Ontario with over 18,000 full-time and 35,000 part-time students.

Manual, not automatic, for sense-making

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I started Friday’s Finds three years ago, in an attempt to make my finds on Twitter more explicit. I had been using Twitter actively for over a year at this time and realized that I was not making much sense of it. Now I make a weekly summary of my favourites: reviewed, filtered, and reassessed. The actual tools I use for personal knowledge mastery are quite limited. Google Reader is my aggregator — I link my Delicious & Diigo social bookmark accounts together but mostly use Diigo, I write my half-baked ideas regularly on my blog, and I engage in many conversations on Twitter which I curate here. That’s about it.

I prefer simpler tools that force me to think and connect by myself. If it was automatic I wouldn’t think about it much, but that’s what I want to do; think more, not less. As I mentioned in Personal Information management for Sense-making, George Siemens’s complaint that, “Too many aspects of my sense-making system are manual”, is what I see as a strength of PKM. By keeping sense-making activities ‘manual’, we are forced to do something.

For me, the act of writing a blog post, a tweet, or an annotation on a social bookmark, all force me to think a bit more than clicking once and having it served up from an automated system. The routine of reviewing my Twitter favourites and creating Friday’s Finds is another manual routine that I find helps to reinforce my learning and (hopefully) add to my knowledge.

I’m describing this in more detail here as some of these issues came up during our PKM Workshop this week.

So without further ado, here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“Integral to the training of an athlete is difficulty, obstacles, and defeat. The same is true of entrepreneurs. —@AronSolomon”

“Lack of trust leads to increase in command & control, which leads to decrease in trust. —@jitterted” —via @flowchainsensei

“Big-city wages, small-town prices” is a damn fine business model. —@gapingvoid

The six human skills that will matter long term [a dissenting opinion] – via @dhinchcliffe

But six will survive, say Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee, no matter how fast and smart computers become. Those skills are: statistical insight; managing group dynamics; good writing; framing and solving open-ended problems; persuasion; and human nurturing. These will define the jobs they think will exist at the end of the universe.

… Indeed, when we view the two researchers’ six skills from the perspective of the boardroom, what appears strikingly absent is any reference to taking decisions.

Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains – via @brianinroma

Today, a new wave of technologies — collaborative or social technologies, most of which appeared only within the last decade — is entering the workplace. But as with the technology of the 1980s and 1990s, the ability of these technologies to drive real productivity growth will depend on whether or not they are accompanied by thoughtful changes in the way work is done.

These new technologies hold out the promise of many business benefits. They greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. As they make their way from use in our personal lives into the workplace, they offer the promise of significant improvements in generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge, finding helpful colleagues and information, tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise, and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Collaborative technologies have the potential to shift the way we interact with people on our teams, find external expertise when it’s needed, and share ideas and observations more broadly.

“free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place —Roger Schank”

I am writing this diatribe for a simple reason. We now have a large amount for money available to start building masters degrees. I am seeking universities who want to work with us, but these universities need to abandon their old models in the new on line space. I would be happy to hear from people who think their university could do that. MIT and Harvard will continue to pretend they are doing something important but free courses are not free degrees and courses never really worked that well in the first place. Students don’t typically attend college because of all the great courses. Universities may like to think that but while a Harvard degree may well be worth a lot, Harvard courses are just a form of entertainment.

Boundaries are for learning

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Opportunity lies at the edge of systems. Real value creation happens at the edge of organizations. That’s also where we find learning opportunities. Understanding the role of boundaries in human systems can also give us ways to take advantage of them for learning, as Kathia Laszlo writes in Reflecting on Boundaries: Who is teaching and who is learning?

“The boundaries of a system are part of its structure. There are structures that are enabling and others that are limiting. There is a delicate balance between openness and safe space. Diversity is healthy, but with certain limits. As systems thinkers, observing and reflecting on the role of the boundaries is an important practice. We need to remember that social systems are human creations. We must recover our power as social systems designers in order to reconfigure those boundaries and enable new and more life-affirming interactions.”

For example communities of practice can be bridges between our work teams and our loose social networks. Perhaps the boundaries between each of these systems — teams, communities, networks —  can be used for learning opportunities as well.

Think of opportunities to open doors between the work space and the looser dialogue in communities of practice. Bringing in specific examples from the work space to the community is another opportunity for learning. Finding new metaphors and models in our social networks and discussing these within the context of our community of practice can foster innovation. Perhaps there are roles in communities of practice that can be used in your work teams. Maybe looser social network protocols will revitalize a community of practice. Think about where the boundaries are and their influence on learning.

None of this is profound, but I think it’s helpful for community managers and facilitators: guide people to the boundaries to get new ideas to flow in and out. As Kathia writes:

“How can I facilitate the evolution of this organization or community?” is a question I frequently ask myself. And often I find that the answer to this question relies on my ability to expand the boundaries of the system so that we can move from either/or to both/and. If in the old system there where those who teach and those who learn, how can we create a culture in which everybody teaches and everybody learns? How can we move beyond acquiring knowledge to creating meaning? How can we collaborate rather than work against each other?

PKM live with Euan Semple

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Seb Paquet describes the social web as enabling “ridiculously easy group-forming”, and that’s what we did. During our PKM Workshop this week, we discussed the books we would recommend to others. Euan Semple’s “Organizations Don’t Tweet” came up and I mentioned that I had reviewed it. I also suggested that Euan might be available to discuss the book. He graciously agreed to talk with us, even though his work schedule is quite hectic. This evening we set-up a Google+ hangout and Euan talked about several ideas in the book as well as some of his experiences as a change agent in large organizations.

I started the conversation by mentioning the direct connection between PKM and the chapter on Literacy Re-discovered:

Things to remember:

  • Having somewhere to write like a blog or Twitter makes you more aware of what is happening around you.
  • We are communicating more to each other through the medium of writing than we have done for decades.
  • Writing an effective blog post or tweet is a literary skill.
  • Much business writing is badly done and ineffective.
  • The metaphor of the document has become a liability in the era of blogs and Wikipedia.
  • Improving our writing skills and seeing it as part of everyone’s job will improve the effectiveness of our organizations.

A number of other observations were shared, and the group is now gathering its notes together in our discussion forum and continuing to learn together. We practised Seek (find books & authors), Sense (get recommendations for our context), and Share (have a conversation and narrate our learning). It was great to see this in action. It was a real bonus for the workshop, and something we hope to keep doing in future workshops, when the opportunity arises. As Hugh says:

Getting people together across multiple timezones and several countries to have a meaningful conversation is now ridiculously easy. Sometimes we forget just how revolutionary this is.