I’ve another link in "External Info Sites" on the navigation bar to the left. It’s called Jots and it’s supposed be a mix of the capabilities of Furl and Del.icio.us. So far I’ve noticed that Jots is fairly easy to use but does not handle long URL’s very well. It also requires that you type in the Tag name. Furl gives you a drop-down menu that is much easier and faster. The "Jotted’ button that you can add to your toolbar tells you if anyone else has already jotted a page – a neat feature. Supposedly you can create groups where bookmarks are only visible to group members, but everytime that I try to create a group, I’m told that it’s an invalid group name. There is no help menu so for now I think I’ll stick with Furl and take a foray into Del.icio.us soon.
Solving Tough Problems
Solving Tough Problems by Adam Kahane is a short book with a powerful message. It is a series of stories about Kahane’s progress from an analytical researcher with a degree in physics to an internationally-recognized facilitator of participatory problem solving. I picked up this book in Montreal last week and later noticed that Kahane is originally from Montreal. He tells the story of his early work with Shell and the likes of Peter Senge and then the eye-opening Mont Fleur sessions in South Africa just prior to the end of apartheid. A major theme in the book is how to overcome ‘apartheid thinking’:
“My analysis also allowed me to recognize a widespread “apartheid syndrome”. By this I mean trying to solve a highly complex problem using a piecemeal, backward-looking, and authoritarian process that is suitable only for solving simple problems. In this syndrome, people at the top of a complex system try to manage its development through a divide-and-conquer strategy: through compartmentalization – the Africaans word apartheid means “apartness” – and command and control. Because the people at the bottom resist these commands, the syndrome either becomes stuck, or ends up becoming unstuck by force.”
At just under 150 pages, this is a short book but one that I will read many times over. The main lesson for me so far is that it is necessary to focus on listening, and that many answers are already there; we just have to relax and let them come to us. I see learning in the same way – when the learner is ready, the teacher will appear. As Kahane says, “If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves”.
This way of approaching complex problems has worked, but requires a shift in approach, much like Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. This is where we don’t actually let go of our so-called ‘left brain’ analytical processes, but park them in order to open up our ‘right brain’ conceptualization and feeling abilities. Here is some advice from Kahane’s colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters:
There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple persectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”
I strongly recommend this book for anyone working in groups, meetings, committees, or any other form of social organisation.
This New Business of Learning
The New Brunswick learning industry is getting together in a couple of weeks to discuss several business opportunities. I won’t be there due to other commitments, but that’s what happens when you’re a free agent – you can’t be in two places at one time. I’m adding my comments before the meeting and I think that Godfrey Parkin’s recent post is a good place to start:
Corporate learning has to follow the Google’s “search & connect” model instead of the General Motors “produce and sell” model. Training purists sneer at “just-in-time” help systems, insisting that people need to know how to do things themselves. They undervalue collaborative learning networks, regarding them as somehow cheating. They fervently believe that adult learners must be led, child-like, through pre-determined learning paths mapped out and controlled by a central authority. They gauge the worth of an employee by his or her ability to survive on a corporate desert island, bereft of books, colleagues, mentors, databases, systems, or communication.
Jon Husband recently sent me a paper that synthesised some of the major forces of change in our digital lives. These include greater Internet access; the two-way web as the operating system; and the influence of open source business and development models. Taken together, they are giving individuals much more control and creating millions of separate markets. We’re all individuals and we all have access to the world’s information and can connect with pretty well anyone we want (think long tail). The basis of all business models has changed. The basis for the training business is changing too.
I have already talked about Google as the best learning platform around. No LMS can compete with it. Open source is also changing business models (witness Google again, or IBM or Novell), including service companies. A learning services firm has to stay ahead of the curve because even services can become rules-based and modular, making them ripe for competition from areas where wages are lower.
Lately, I heard that the current enterprise software development model is fundamentally flawed. I think that the same is true of many business principles that are taken for granted. That’s why everyone is looking for the next big thing. The key, in my opinion, is looking at the world with fresh eyes and listening with fresh ears. I wish good vision and hearing to my colleagues.
Open CD
If you want to learn more about using open source applications, but don’t know your way around places like SourceForge or don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research, then checkout the OpenCD project. You can download the whole CD or individual programs including standards like Firefox and OpenOffice as well as others that I plan on testing such as GIMP. According to the website:
This is an excellent place to start and you can find out why OpenOffice is making such inroads from a recent post by Stephen Walli.
[I’m currently working on a project in Montreal so posting is light this week.]
Ready for Work
Ready for Work is a self-paced online study programme in the UK designed for potential and recent full-time education graduates. This is a free government-sponsored initiative to prepare people for the workforce:
- Ready to learn
- Thriving in diversity
- Showing respect at work
- Be enterprising!
- Managing stress at work
- Health and safety in the office
- Making email work for you
- Working with the internet
- Data protection at work
- Drugs and alcohol at work
- Be a responsible employee;
- Me and my career
One more online learning programme is not going to change the world but this initiative got me thinking about changes to our education systems. What if the government and industry sponsored more of these types of top-up programmes for job-ready skills? These could be targeted at those people just about to enter or re-enter the workforce. The education system could then move away from a focus on workplace skills and concentrate instead on learning skills. My experience is that the education system is so slow to change that by the time a new programme is implemented it’s already too late for current economic conditions.
Schools keep teaching yesterday’s work skills. Therefore the education system should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking and media literacy and the like. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business may make for happier learners, teachers and parents.
Real Time Collaboration Tools (cheap)
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, synchronous (real time) web applications for learning and business are getting easier to implement. However, many of these systems are still quite expensive. Luigi Canali de Rossi (Robin Good) has an excellent video presentation that covers low-cost web collaboration tools such as voice over IP, web conferencing, screen sharing, document sharing, etc. This is worth 37 minutes of your time, especially if you intend to spend money in this area.
Look Forward
I’ve been at a few conferences and meetings lately and some of the discussion has been around innovation and making Atlantic Canada more productive. Much of what I heard centered around yesterday’s problems. One theme was “how can we create more knowledge jobs”, especially in the e-learning sector. I find this backward-looking because I agree with Dan Pink’s premise that the major factors influencing North American work in the next few years can be put into the context of three questions:
- Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
- Can a computer do it faster?
- Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?
Pink says that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, and I see this very clearly. In the e-learning marketplace more and more is being outsourced to excellent companies in Asia. We cannot work cheaper than these companies and we should not try. However, most of the jobs that I see being created are in the area of e-learning content production. When it comes to services, such as e-learning development, the value is higher up the stack. High value services are based on unstructured problem solving, while lower valued services are rules based or even modular. When services are commoditized then competition is based on price and Asia will win over North America (so get used to it). Since services are constantly being commoditized, the aim should be to stay ahead of the pack and higher up the stack. We already see this happening with software development.
Therefore, I don’t believe that the e-learning courseware development model will last very long before companies shift production overseas. I doubt that the intructional designer hiring boomlet in New Brunswick will last for long, unless production moves up the stack. This will take Conceptual Age skills.
There are some companies that are focused more on creativity (right brain stuff) and I would bet that these business models will last longer. One of these companies is FatKat Animation in Miramichi. We need to foster more of these creative companies, the schools that help to educate them like NBCCD and more breeding grounds for future artists. This does not mean that we should abandon the digital economy, only that we have to become the creative and conceptual leaders in the world economy or we’ll wind up with a future generation of digital gas jockeys.
This is old stuff in terms of ideas, but I’m getting scared that our government and industry leaders are still too focused on the Information Age and don’t see the upheaval coming with the Conceptual Age. Once more Marshall McLuhan was correct when he said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Creative Commons Media
Do you believe that private property extends to digital media? Did you know that much copyrighted popular media was appropriated from past works that are now in the public domain. Isaac Newton said that , "If I have seen further [then other men] then it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". We owe much to our common past and shouldn’t forget that we are currently creating the past from which our children will have to be creative.
I remember a conversation about copyright I had in Tunisia a couple of years ago. An IT manager was discussing software licenses and how he was not bothered by using non-licensed software from major North American vendors. He could not understand how these companies could claim software intellectual property rights when the concept of zero, necessary for computing, came from the Arab world and no North American company had ever paid for this IP. So why start charging now?
The open source movement is about making source code freely available, while the Creative Commons (CC) is an organisation that allows individual creators to share their work but still retain certain rights. CC makes it easy to understand copyright and to use licenses that have been vetted by legal counsel in many countries.
So if you don’t have time to read the book then check out these videos that explain the CC concepts much better that I can.
Small Scale Intelligence Collection, Collation and Dissemination
At yesterday’s breakfast meeting in Fredericton we received a firehose of information on competitive intelligence and then had about 10 minutes to digest and reflect before being asked to comment. Luckily, I had already done some work in the field of web-based competitive intelligence, thanks to Conor Vibert at Acadia University, so the concepts weren’t new. I had also spent a short period as a combat intelligence officer many years ago. With the limited time available, we did not discuss how you could integrate competitive intelligence gathering techniques into your daily work flow.
If this is one of the first times that you’ve come to this site, perhaps as a result of the CSTD conference, here are some of the tools that I use for competitive intelligence. If you look at the left Navigation Bar you will see a section marked "External Info Sites". The first one is my account at Bloglines. Bloglines is a web feed reader (also called an aggregator). It allows me to view any site via a "feed" seen within the bloglines window without having to go to the actual site. If you follow the link you will see what web sites I read. Advantages of feed readers are that you can see what has changed since the last time you looked at a site, and you can preview a post without having to go to the site. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly scan many sources. I usually have ~100 feeds that I monitor. There are other feed readers available, such as Newsgator, but Bloglines is perhaps the simplest. If you want to know if a site has a feed then install the Firefox browser and a small orange icon in the bottom right corner will alert you.
A description of how feeds work, with a technology called RSS, is available here. I know this URL because it is saved in my Furl account. I have made this account public as well, so that I can share websites of interest that I don’t mention directly in this blog. Furl also saves a copy of the page for me so that I get to view it even if the site is taken down. Think of Furl as a replacement for "Favourites" or "Bookmarks" in your browser, with these additional advantages:
- you can use multiple categories for an individual post;
- it saves a copy for your private viewing;
- you can access your account from any computer;
- it can be publicly viewable for sharing; and
- your Furl archive is fully searchable.
If you are interested in blogging then you might want to start by Furling because it’s easier and simpler. A similar tool is Del.icio.us.
Blogging is another intelligence method, by which you can post a nascent idea and see what kind of response you get. I’ve recently posted about the benefits of blogging for small businesses. The advantage in this case is that the post to which I’ve referred is within the database of my own website. I own this data but share it under a Creative Commons license that covers everything on this site.
I hope that this is helpful for those new to blogging and the two-way web.