Worthwhile Reading

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Halley Suitt, in Worthwhile, refers to the 800CEOREAD list of top 25 books for business. I have read only one of these, The Art of the Start, which I believe is an excellent reference book for any business. In perusing the other 24 titles, I noticed that there is nothing that peeks my interest. I guess I’m not your "average" business reader. For instance, here are my best reads this year, though they weren’t all published in 2004:

These are some of the books on my list to buy/read:

Any other suggestions for a free-agent, consultant, learning/business/technology guy?

de Kerckhove: Communication in Evolution

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For fans of Marshall McLuhan, or those interested in knowing more than just the phrase, “the medium is the message”, there is an excellent interview [dead link] online with Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program in Toronto. There is lots of stuff to chew on, as well as a concise overview of McLuhan’s tetradic Laws of Media:

“every new medium:

  • extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  • obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  • retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  • flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)”

The most enlightening for me is de Kerckhove’s view of a new kind of identity in our inter-networked world:

The key to the new identity is what I call “selving”, that is the self in progress, in becoming, as in quantum physics where “things are not, they merely tend to be”. The new identity is in perpetual formation and reformation at the moment of use and on line it is fluid and aggregative as when people meet and change their perceptions of each other during the meeting. I sometime suspect that screens were invented only for the purpose of allowing several persons, minds, identities to meet and share thinking and speaking at a distance. The new connective thinking system is the screen. Via What is the Message? [dead link]

“Don’t let the bozos grind you down”

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A short interview with Guy Kawasaki [Author: The Art of the Start], by Blogfonk. Here is Guy’s response to the question, "what is your motto?":

Don’t let the bozos grind you down. Because the bozos will try to grind you down, they’ll tell you that you can’t do something, that something won’t work, or that something isn’t needed. The only thing worse than a bozo is a person who listens to a bozo.

Comment Spam

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I’m getting a lot of comment spam from some low-life who is sticking links to an internet gambling site on my blogs. They’re easy to find & erase with Drupal, but still a pain. I like Alan Levine’s solution to disrupt comment spammers, and perhaps I’ll enlist the help of the International Spam Counter Attack Force (SCAF):

They have tools and techniques I could never understand, but with their help, our Trackback scripts were modified to collect some interesting data from our roach visitor. The people who act as local agents for SCAF have the ability to unleash a series of strikes on this person, their assets, records, etc, and once I give the go ahead, the trigger is set to go off at a random time in the future, maybe today, tomorrow, next week, a few months from now.

I’m open to comments and criticism on my blog, but completely unrelated comments that link to a gambling site are not acceptable. Since I pay to maintain this site, it’s my editorial privilege to keep it clean. Here are the multiple hosts from which this roach posts:

61.62.229.235
165.173.60.25
212.234.28.89
195.194.158.17
12.43.53.137
198.252.39.226
81.169.133.166
66.91.206.165
68.44.79.29
193.252.229.134
136.183.135.54
62.47.166.17

17 Dec: And the roach struck again early this morning (already removed) – any Drupal experts have suggestions?

eLearning is Dead

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NetDimensions is a Hong Kong based LMS vendor. My post for today, eLearning is Dead, Long Live Learning, is as a guest on their blog. It’s not very positive about LMS vendors, but they posted it anyway.

These folks seem to have the right attitude for a sustainable business model in the learning field. They are self-financed (employee-owned), they have a real conversation going on their blog, and they say that "we don’t have to pretend to being more than we are or try to paint pictures of the LMS market as being more than it is". To me, this indicates a good client focus, and there a number of high profile clients noted on their main website. The recent blog post by Jay Shaw, CEO, on this year’s Online Educa in Berlin is worth a read.

Most Popular Content

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For the community that actually reads my blog posts, here is the most popular content since I started blogging on this site in February:

  1. Drupal Theme Garden
  2. WebCT & Blackboard vs Moodle
  3. Drupal Review
  4. Free social software sandbox for teachers
  5. Dummies Guide to Change
  6. Training vs Education (but it’s all learning)
  7. Emergent Organizational Structures
  8. Collaborate to Compete
  9. Universities and Course Management Systems
  10. Analysing Human Performance

Thanks for your interest and please excuse the low number of posts until I’m better – which should be soon :-)

Design Learning that Digital Natives Will Love

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Yan Simard has written a recap of Marc Prensky’s presentation yesterday on how to design learning that digital natives (mostly younger folks) will love. It was given to LearnNB and the web community via Elluminate. I would have written a review myself, but since I’m still injured, my typing time is limited. I think that Marc made some very good comments, such as stating that most e-learning is really e-teaching. Thanks Yan.

Natural Enterprise

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Dave Pollard can’t find a publisher for his book, Natural Enterprise. I have used parts of it in my own work and have found it to be a refreshing perspective on how to grow a business without sacrificing your values. You can read most of it online, and I’m sure that others have used it as well. I would gladly buy a copy, as it is destined to remain on the desk, not hidden on a dusty bookshelf, like The Fifth Discipline. Natural Enterprise ranks up there with The Art of the Start in usefulness for business planning.

Communautique

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My colleague at Mancomm Performance Inc, Pierre Harvey, uses a term to describe his field of study and work – Communautique. In North America, some people call this Community Networking, but Pierre’s definition means more than this English term conveys. He says that Communautique comes from the terms communication, community and networking, plus nautique or nautical/navigation. Communautique can be defined as the applied science of the analysis, design, co-creation and deployment of knowledge and understanding via networks. There is a strong cultural component as well.

Communautique is a multidisciplinary applied social science that links information sciences and communications theory. Communautique systems are not designed and built once, like traditional knowledge management systems, but provide a reference framework and a network architecture development cycle that adapts to the emergent needs of individuals and groups. It is the kind of methodology that leads to the creation of a network of "small pieces, loosely joined", instead of a monolithic system that individuals have to adapt to.

Blogs, wikis and socio-constructivist learning systems like Moodle are the current tools of choice for my colleagues who practice communautique. What I would like is a better term in English than community networking. Is there already one that I don’t know? Any ideas for a new term?