learning is not something we got

by

I came across an older blog post today that reminded me about the year 2001. That was when I left my university-based job at the Centre for Learning Technologies (which was closing) and joined a small local e-learning company that had developed a learning management system (LMS) where I was the head of professional services.

I joined in February of that year and we attended a major trade show, Online Learning 2001 in late September. This was only a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks. We flew through Newark airport and during our stopover had a clear view of the smoking Twin Towers. It was eerie and quiet as few people were traveling at this time. Many other local learning companies traveled to this event as our pavilion was hosted by the New Brunswick government. On arrival we attended a reception hosted by the Canadian consulate and each person was given a lapel pin with crossed US and Canadian flags which we all gladly wore in solidarity with our American neighbours.

Read more

be the revolution

by

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, via @Susan Kaye Quinn

“To those who can hear me, I say do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.” —Charlie Chaplin The Final Speech from The Great Dictator, 1940

George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf

Nevertheless, simply on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics.

Read more

every medium reverses its properties when pushed to its limits

by

In 2018  — seeing the figure through the ground — I used the Laws of Media developed by Marshall and Eric McLuhan to examine the impact of social media. McLuhan’s Laws state that every medium (technology) used by people has four effects. Every medium extends a human property, obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good), retrieves a much older medium, and reverses its properties when pushed to its limits. These four aspects are known as the media tetrad.

This image was the resulting tetrad.

Read more

rebuilding trust one catalyst at a time

by

I have worked in the fields of human performance improvement, social learning, collaboration, and sensemaking for several decades. Currently in all of these fields the dominant discussion is about using and integrating generative artificial intelligence [AKA machine learning] using large language models. I am not seeing many discussions about improving individual human intelligence or our collective intelligence. My personal knowledge mastery workshops focus on these and leave AI as a side issue when we discuss tools near the end of each workshop. There is enough to deal with in improving how we seek, make sense of, and share our knowledge.

Read more

let’s go on to organize

by

Ten years ago I wrote a series of posts for Cisco on the topic of ‘The Internet of Everything’ (IoE), which was a variation on the Internet of Things, or the idea that all objects, such as light-bulbs and refrigerators, would be connected to the internet. With AI in everything now, I guess we are at that stage of technology intrusion, or rather techno-monopolist intrusion.

I would like to review some of the highlights from a decade ago.

tl;dr — little has changed

Read more

in the bleak midwinter

by

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Capitalism is what happens when you believe glorified fishmongers should chart the course for humanity.” —@aral

“11 yrs ago I found this funny: ‘How many Microsoft designers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as ‘industry standard’. But now I can’t unsee this: ‘How many huge companies does it take to fix the climate? None. They just define global warming as ‘industry standard’.” —@HelenCzerski

“it’s easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem” —@tef

Read more

learn to rest

by

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit” — Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables, via @FelicityShoulders

“Maybe one of the Hall of Fame-level cons of all time was economists dressing up their discipline as an exact science, fake Nobel and all.”—@brunoc

Read more

unintended but not unknown

by

From The Guardian — Not quite religion, not quite self-help: welcome to the Jordan Peterson age of nonsense.

But living on social media, seeing the world through its lens, is like returning to a pre-information age. First, because everything is current. Records of previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and mutable.

As history fades, so does truth itself. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about turning up the noise. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. Meanwhile, mob mentality ramps up the risk of speaking up against the beliefs of a large group.

It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs are not really about the external facts, but about which group you identify with. People rely less on their own capacity for reason and more on each other. This is the petri dish from which systems of faith have always tended to arise. —Martha Gill, 2024-11-24

Read more

decentralized social media

by

‘Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it’s a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’ —Zhilin Zhang, University of Oxford, 2024

In November 2022 — from platforms to covenants — I wrote that I firmly believe open protocols connecting small pieces loosely joined is a better framework than any privately owned social media platform. Twitter was just too darned easy for many years. I am connecting more on Mastodon though I have not mastered all of its functions. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to what is called the ‘fediverse’, a federated network of hosts using the protocol.

Read more

two decades of blogging

by

Bryan Cantrill discusses what he has learned after 20 years of blogging through the decades. I too, crossed the two decade mark this past February. Bryan was asked four questions on the occasion by Cynthia Dunlop.

  1. What blog entry was I most proud of?
  2. Which one was most difficult to write?
  3. What impact of blogging have I found surprising?
  4. What advice would I have for those getting started with blogging?

So I thought it might be a good idea for me to do the same.

1. I am proud of a post that received the most negative feedback ever. I was even asked to change the title of the post. Our future is networked and feminine looked at how there were many ancient tribal societies led by women but both the advent of institutions, like kingdoms and religions ‘of the book’, and later capitalist markets were clearly male-dominated. Today, in a network society, we are seeing more avenues for feminine influence, as evidenced by movements like ‘me too’, and of course there is a resulting push-back from patriarchal institutions and markets. The shift is not complete but if we don’t blow ourselves up, I think it will happen.

Read more