Networked Knowledge: out of the ivory tower

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Many of the important issues that face our society are complex and require a good knowledge of science. Yesterday, I explained some of what I’ve been trying to learn about nuclear fission and power generation. Understanding how people learn and how we can integrate learning into work is a prime professional interest of mine.

More and more political and personal decisions have to made on some understanding of science. Of interest to me are: nuclear power; hydro-fracking; climate change and uranium mining. Each requires significant knowledge to understand the issues.

Obviously, the public media are not designed to deal with these kinds of issues. They are in the business of selling advertising and getting readership. Some journalists inform but most, including the good ones, can only shine a lens and let us make up our minds. My post yesterday was intended to show that mainstream media were not very good at informing us on complex subjects. I wanted to explain how I was able to get information and put some things together. The self-correcting nature of a blog would ensure that somebody might set me straight or point me to better sources of information. Comments on Twitter indicated that I might be seriously misinformed. I am still learning and will continue to do so. Learning is work and work is learning; that’s life in perpetual Beta.

Image: Ivory Towers by Colin Smith

I’d like to highlight one aspect of how we treat knowledge in our society. Complex scientific fields are the realm of research institutions, like universities.  It takes a long time to get expertise and competence is conferred through peer review. But peer review has its problems and much of the research is published in the language of specialists that only the select few can decipher. There is also little incentive in the highly competitive (for research funding) fields of scientific research to publish widely or to synthesize research so that it is understandable by the average adult. These same adults who vote for politicians who set research funding policies.

The media aren’t informing and the informed aren’t using media.

Part of my responsibility in using networked knowledge is to give back to the community. I believe it’s our part of the social learning contract. The scientific community has the same responsibility. I was asked, “Please, don’t spread this wrong thinking around.” So in return, I ask the scientific community to step up and spread their knowledge. The whole world is trying to understand these issues.

Update: I’m noticing The Guardian and the CS Monitor are providing good in-depth analysis of the nuclear situation in Japan now. Very good to see. Now we just need this on a regular basis for many other complex scientific issues, especially when there’s no urgent crisis.

Fuelled by Informal learning

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Caveat: It seems I have to put a warning sign on this post. I am not a nuclear physicist and the opinions on this post are personal and are not professional, scientific advice on radiation or its effects.

I’ve had a crash course in nuclear physics this week. I took basic Physics in university, but my major was History, so I never really got into it. This interconnected world sure makes it easy to learn informally though.

From Twitter, I was led to an excellent overview of how the Fukushima Daiichi reactor works at Why I am not worried … which is now being hosted by MIT’s Nuclear Information Hub:

The solid fuel pellet (a ceramic oxide matrix) is the first barrier that retains many of the radioactive fission products produced by the fission process.  The Zircaloy casing is the second barrier to release that separates the radioactive fuel from the rest of the reactor.

The core is then placed in the pressure vessel. The pressure vessel is a thick steel vessel that operates at a pressure of about 7 MPa (~1000 psi), and is designed to withstand the high pressures that may occur during an accident. The pressure vessel is the third barrier to radioactive material release.

The entire primary loop of the nuclear reactor – the pressure vessel, pipes, and pumps that contain the coolant (water) – are housed in the containment structure.  This structure is the fourth barrier to radioactive material release. The containment structure is a hermetically (air tight) sealed, very thick structure made of steel and concrete. This structure is designed, built and tested for one single purpose: To contain, indefinitely, a complete core meltdown. To aid in this purpose, a large, thick concrete structure is poured around the containment structure and is referred to as the secondary containment.

Both the main containment structure and the secondary containment structure are housed in the reactor building. The reactor building is an outer shell that is supposed to keep the weather out, but nothing in. (this is the part that was damaged in the explosions, but more to that later).

Then I read today on the MIT site that, “Radiation levels on the edge of the plant compound briefly spiked at 8217 microsieverts per hour but later fell to about a third that.” What’s a microsievert, I asked myself, and how dangerous are 8217 of them? I was able to find out via Wikipedia that:

1 Sv = 1000 mSv (millisieverts) = 1,000,000 µSv (microsieverts) = 100 rem = 100,000 mrem (millirem)

And I further read that at 250,000 µSv “Some people feel nausea” and at 1,000,000 µSv there is “Mild to severe nausea”. Makes 8,217 µSv look pretty small to me.

The mainstream media reports tell a different story. Here’s one from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Most of the attention in the past three days has been focused on Daiichi units 1 and 3. A complete meltdown — the melting of the radioactive core — could release radioactive contaminants into the environment and pose major, widespread health risks.

There is no mention of radiation levels, or what would happen in the event of a core meltdown [containment], in this story and in many others by the CBC and other mainstream media/entertainment sources.

Update: A more detailed explanation of the factors at play, via Twitter:

There are some characteristics of a nuclear fission reactor that will be common to every nuclear fission reactor. They will always have to contend with decay heat. They will always have to produce heat at high temperatures to generate electricity. But they do not have to use coolant fluids like water that must operate at high pressures in order to achieve high temperatures. Other fluids like fluoride salts can operate at high temperatures yet at the same pressures as the outside. Fluoride salts are impervious to radiation damage, unlike water, and don’t evolve hydrogen gas which can lead to an explosion. Solid nuclear fuel like that used at Fukushima-Daiichi can melt and release radioactive materials if not cooled consistently during shutdown. Fluoride salts can carry fuel in chemically-stable forms that can be passively cooled without pumps driven by emergency power generation. There are solutions to the extreme situation that was encountered at Fukushima-Daiichi, and it may be in our best interest to pursue them.

This is why it’s so important to be a self-directed learner. Who stands to benefit by the stuff that’s being Pushed to you? Advertisers? Whether it’s news or education, we have the networks that can help us figure things out. It just takes a little effort.

It’s not just the media, either. This weekend I came across an article in The Atlantic, Lies, Damn Lies and Medical Science that showed that “as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed”. We need to think for ourselves.

Update 16 March: The CSMonitor (almost mainstream media!) is providing some good in-depth reporting:

Meltdown 101: What are spent fuels and why are they a threat?

Opinion: Japan’s Nuclear Crisis: 6 reasons why we should – and shouldn’t – worry

Good coverage by The Guardian – Japan Nuclear Crisis Live Updates

I must say that the mainstream press are stepping up on this.

18 March: From a science journalist: Nuclear power won’t kill you

A Working Smarter Conversation

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Join the five of us for an online conversation

Ask a question; win a book. Then register to join us online on 30 March 2011

We will discuss whatever interests you in the realm of Working Smarter.

Do you have burning questions about social learning, web 2.0, or working smarter? Want to find out how other organizations are grappling with the culture, politics, and governance of implementing informal learning?

Ask us a question or suggest a topic. The more controversial the better.

We will give free copies of the Working Smarter Fieldbook to six people who leave a comment below.

REGISTER


Four very interesting folks to follow, in my opinion ;)

 

 

"Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem"

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Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

QUOTE: “How to squelch human potential – Step 1) Create assembly-line schools, 2) Distract w/ pop culture, 3) Build corporate cube-farms. Mix well” by @Richard_Florida

Dyer: Why the Arabs can handle democracy via @ewellburn

A mass society, thousands, then millions strong, confers immense advantages on its members. Within a few thousand years, the little hunting-and-gathering groups were pushed out of the good lands everywhere. By the time the first anthropologists appeared to study them, they were on their last legs, and none now survive in their original form. But we know why the societies that replaced them were all tyrannies.

The mass societies had many more decisions to make, and no way of making them in the old, egalitarian way. Their huge numbers made any attempt at discussing the question as equals impossible, so the only ones that survived and flourished were the ones that became brutal hierarchies. Tyranny was the solution to what was essentially a communications problem.

Fast forward ten thousand years, and give these societies mass communications. You don’t have to wait for Facebook; just invent the printing press. Wait a couple of hundred years while literacy spreads, and presto! We can all talk to one another again, after a fashion, and the democratic revolutions begin. We didn’t invent the principle of equality among human beings; we just reclaimed it.

Modern democracy first appeared in the West only because the West was the first part of the world to develop mass communications. It was a technological advantage, not a cultural one – and as literacy and the technology of mass communications have spread around the world, all the other mass societies have begun to reclaim their heritage too.

The Arabs need no instruction in democracy from anybody else. They own it, too.

RWW How Recent Changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service Might Hurt Academic Research via @jonhusband

Twitter’s recent announcement that it was no longer granting whitelisting requests and that it would no longer allow redistribution of content will have huge consequences on scholars’ ability to conduct their research, as they will no longer have the ability to collect or export datasets for analysis.

We all know that our bosses legally spy on us. But what do they do with the info? by @jessebrown [read through to the conclusion]

“Almost everybody monitors—close to 100 per cent,” says Avner Levin, a business law professor at Ryerson University and director of the school’s Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute. “It’s become a fact of corporate life. There’s hardly a discussion about it anymore.” While British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec have legislation guaranteeing some level of employee privacy, Ontario offers none. Many companies ask you to sign away every possible claim on your own data. You may have agreed to be spied on when you signed your employment contract.

Why the weak students end up as educators CS Monitor via @pgsimoes

We also need to develop our future teachers’ own minds, by holding them to the same intellectual standards as other college students. Their so-called methods courses would be much richer if we asked them to read and write about the key dilemmas in their fields. And they should also take more classes outside of the ed-school, where intellectual requirements are already higher.

Would that make them “better” teachers? I’d like to say yes. Surely, though, it would make them more complex, curious, and contemplative human beings. There is nothing in the world more inherently fascinating than education. But ed schools have made it boring, by stripping it of its intellectual edge – and by letting our students slide along.

The students know it, too. That’s why weaker ones flock to the subject – and the more able ones stay away. In each of the past four decades, as my colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining fraction of America’s top college students have chosen to become educators. If we want to reverse that trend, we’ll have to make teacher-preparation programs challenging enough to lure these students back in.

PEG: Knowledge Workers in the British Raj – by @pevansgreenwood [excellent series]

The future of our business – post Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business Design – is not in applying a new human-resources paradigm to our existing workforce. Much like the British Raj in provincial India, our businesses need to adapt to an environment where we don’t have the time or resources to micromanage every task. The workforce which staffed our bureaucracy in the past is not the same workforce we need in the future. The future of our business is with a smaller, more dynamic workforce of self-starters, built around flat organizational structures and more general skills which devolve responsibility for operational problems to the front line and empower them to work together and solve these problems under their own direction, while freeing the executive team to focus on steering the organization through the challenging environment we operate in today.

 

Frictionless learning

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Gary Wise, in Close to the Edge: The Radicalization of Training,  suggests that workers need an environment with:

seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets – at their moment(s) of learning need – in work context-friendly amounts – in compelling, readily-consumable formats – to/from the right devices.

This is definitely part of the solution and goes a long way in addressing the training department’s predominantly event-based, fire & forget, mindset. However, it’s also content-centric and appears to assume that if you have the right content, learning will happen.

But more of our work is in exception-handling or is increasingly complex and requires the sharing of highly contextual tacit knowledge. That means we also need to be connected to the right people at the right time. Professional social networks enable these connections. I would add to Gary’s description, “seamless, frictionless and ubiquitous access to/from the right learning assets as well as a dynamic network of colleagues/co-workers …”. Once again, this sounds like wirearchy:

a dynamic [multi-way]  flow of power and authority based on information, knowledge, trust and credibility, enabled by interconnected people and technology

Emergent Value

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A certain amount of hierarchy is necessary to get work done. Networks route around hierarchy. Networks enable work to be done collaboratively, especially when that work is complex and there are no simple answers, best practices or case studies to fall back on. This is where real business value lies – complex work.

The above image, by Verna Allee, shows the relationship between hierarchies and networks in various domains. While most organizations need to deal with all of these domains, each takes different control methods and communications platforms. Complex work requires looser hierarchies and stronger networks, something many organizations need to improve.

As simple work gets automated, it still needs to be controlled. Complicated work is outsourced but needs to be coordinated. The high value work, as I’ve contended before on this blog, is complex (and creative) and requires collaboration to get things done. This has to be enabled by communications platforms that do more than the traditional Intranet. Enterprise collaboration tools – Socialcast; Jive; Brainpark – are the platforms for complex, collaborative work. In addition, knowledge workers need to regularly poke their heads out of these private networks and get involved in public, social networks – Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook – which are rather chaotic. This is where they may find new ideas and create emergent value for their organizations.

All levels are needed in any large organization, and they shouldn’t be confused. Enabling the outer rings is critical for long-term success and that’s what business leaders, IT departments, HR and Legal have to enable; very soon.

Follow-up post: Embrace Chaos

Finding the time for networked learning

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A survey of small and medium sized businesses (SMB) showed workers spend about half their day on unproductive tasks:

Knowledge Workers are among the largest staff component in a typical SMB

SMB Knowledge Workers spend an estimated 36 percent of their time trying to

Contact customers, partners or colleagues

Find information

Schedule a meeting

Approximately 14 percent of SMB Knowledge Workers’ time is spent:

Duplicating information (e.g. forwarding e-mails or phone calls to confirm if fax/e-mail/text message was received

Managing unwanted communications (e.g. spam e-mails or unsolicited time-wasting phone calls)

Note: I registered for access to the complete report but it does not go into survey methodology or indicate the sample size, so I would not consider this scientific, but it’s an interesting data point.

These activities are important but obviously they take too much time. Finding the right information faster can be addressed individually through frameworks like networked learning (personal knowledge mastery). Finding information, plus the remaining four activities can be made more effective and efficient through social networks. For example, the largest stated benefit of organizations using social media is increasing speed of access to knowledge (McKinsey 2010). Simple tools like Doodle can make scheduling a breeze. Social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn let you find the right people faster.

The ROI for social media in business is pretty obvious: reducing wasted time.

In addition, there is a huge performance benefit. Not only is there less wasted time but that time can go into learning.

Since +90% of our learning is not supported by formal instruction, the opportunities for using social media at work are evident — more time for personal learning as well as a medium for networked learning.

 

Network Learning Workshop Toronto May 2011

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I’m running a one-day workshop with University of Toronto’s iSchool Institute on 27 May 2011. If you know of anyone in the Toronto area who might be interested in attending, please pass on the information. In the past several months many people have approached me asking for tips and techniques on managing digital overload. This is the course for them.

Follow the link for registration details:

Network Learning: Working Smarter

Are you tired of dealing with information overload in your work? Perhaps you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. Clay Shirky, professor and author, says, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”

This course gives you the processes and tools to create your own information filters.

“In the period ahead of us, more important than advances in computer design will be the advances we can make in our understanding of human information processing – of thinking, problem solving, and decision making…” Herbert Simon, Economics Nobel-prize winner (1968)

Network Learning (also called Personal Knowledge Management or personal learning networks) is an individual, disciplined process by which we make sense of information, observations and ideas. In the past it may have been keeping a journal, writing letters or having conversations. These are still valid, but with digital media we can add context by categorizing, commenting or even remixing it. We can also store digital media for easy retrieval.

The Web has given us more ways to connect with others in our learning but many people only see the information overload aspect of our digital society. Engaging others can actually make it easier to learn and not become overwhelmed. Effective networked learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned by them. It also helps us to work smarter.

Weekly mind-stretching

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Here are some of the things I found via Twitter this past week.

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ~ O. W. Holmes Jr – via @zecool

Forget About Being a Fast Follower – via @TimKastelle

Experimentation is very intertwined with innovation. Both require a hypothesis – if we do X, then we will get benefit Y. Both require a lot of work for uncertain outcomes. Both require rigor and careful planning. And both are consistently avoided by turning to “experts” who provide an answer, which takes less time and exposes the executive to less risk. After all, if the idea fails and the expert supported it, it can’t be the executive’s fault!

ADAPT: leverage complexity; develop ‘wise’ IT; encourage cross-mentoring; tap networks; strategic community-building – by @Quinnovator

The reflection was that the mechanisms we were suggesting then, to make companies more resilient, were actually strategies making companies more flexible and adaptive.  It’s been a number of years, so it’s interesting to me to see what we were recommending back then and it’s even more relevant now:

  • leverage human complexity: encourage diversity and use it to drive richer solutions
  • develop ‘wise’ information technology: use technology more strategically to complement our capabilities
  • encourage always-on cross-mentoring: have mentoring networks to provide support across tough times and develop people in multiple dimensions
  • tapping social and value networks: reach out across organizational boundaries to partners and customers and eliminate blockages
  • strategic community-building: facilitating information flows

@mbauwens “Most of the economic growth during the Internet era has been largely unmonetized”

As for the great stagnation in real wages in particular, the biggest reason is probably the extraordinarily rapid pace at which the BRICs and developing world has become educated and accessible to the developed world since the Cold War. In other words, outsourcing has in a temporary post-Cold-War spree outraced the ability of most of us in the developed world to retrain to the more advanced industries. The most unappreciated reason, and the biggest reason retraining for newer industries has been so difficult, is that unmonetized value provides no paying jobs, but may destroy such jobs when it causes the decline of some traditionally monetized industries. On the Internet the developed world is providing vast value to the BRICs and developing world, but that value is largely unmonetized and thus produces relatively few jobs in the developed world. The focus of the developed world on largely unmonetized, though extremely valuable, activities has been a significant cause of wage stagnation in the developed world and of skill and thus wage increases in the developing world. Whereas before they were buying our movies, music, books, and news services, increasingly they are just getting our free stuff on the Internet. The most important new industry of the last twenty years has been mostly unmonetized and thus hasn’t provided very many jobs to retrain for, relative to the value it has produced.

Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people | The Raw Story via @tomatlee

Unfortunately, the Air Force’s contract description doesn’t help dispel suspicions. As the text explains, the software would require licenses for 50 users with 10 personas each, for a total of 500. These personas would have to be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent.”

It continues, noting the need for secure virtual private networks that randomize the operator’s Internet protocol (IP) address, making it impossible to detect that it’s a single person orchestrating all these posts. Another entry calls for static IP address management for each persona, making it appear as though each fake person was consistently accessing from the same computer each time.

 

 

 

Learning Assessment

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For March the LCBQ is:

How do you assess whether your informal learning, social learning, continuous learning, performance support initiatives have the desired impact or achieve the desired results?


Jay Cross responds:

You need to wait a while before taking the assessment. Smile-sheets and test scores prove nothing because they are administered before the forgetting curve sets in. The reason only 10%-15% of what is learned shows up on the job is that most of what you learn disappears rapidly unless it’s reinforced by reflection and practice. That’s why it’s a good idea to wait three to six months — to see what sticks.

In the Canadian military, it is called Validation, as opposed to Evaluation. The latter is to make sure your training program is using appropriate methods and resources. The former is to ensure that you’re meeting operational needs.

We used rolling validations in the Air Force. First, they were based on training that had clear Performance Objectives (PO’s). We would follow up with a quick survey to course graduates, their immediate supervisors and perhaps other senior operational staff. Six months after each course we sent out a survey. It listed all the PO’s on the course. Graduates were asked if 1) they had learned the skill on the course; 2) if they had to use that skill in the past six months and 3) if they felt competent with that skill [yes, it’s subjective]. Supervisors were asked if that graduate had performed the skill in the past six months and if so, whether the graduate was competent.

This was a very quick pulse-taking that could then be followed up with more in-depth interviews.

Could you do this with informal or social learning? Of course you could. You just need to describe the capability you wish to measure.

For example, after 6 months on the job, with access to micro-sharing, company blogs and the development of a personal knowledge management framework, you could ask similar questions.

Do you have to regularly access information and knowledge to do your job?

Have you learned to access information and knowledge faster than when you started 6 months ago?

Supervisors can be asked if people are effective at getting access to information in a timely fashion.

The Big Question is, what do you expect to achieve? In a complex environment, there is no linear relationship between cause and effect, so we know these measurements are only indicators. Used correctly, and administered as lightly as possible, they can help make informed decisions on priorities, support or resource allocations.