Friday’s Finds

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

I have selected only one insight this week, in addition to some empty space …

The Heretic’s Toolbox: Seeking the Emptiness by adam weisblatt – “We fill our brains with information, but it’s within the empty spaces of not knowing that we actually learn.”

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

Roger Schank: the on line education revolution: its all about the design

Learning by doing is really how we learn: Teaching others to do this is the next step in the education revolution

@aronsolomon – Generation Why

We had two sources of information: adults in our limited networks and the few books in the public library. We learned painfully passively and tentatively. We were pre-pre-digital, Generation Why is post-digital. They have eclipsed the foundation of their digital native-ness to make information work for them. Done well, it’s an art form of depth and texture.

@CathyNDavidson – Standardizing Human Ability – via @quinnovator

And in the first burst of Fordist assembly line labor, educators took the apparatus of scientific labor management and turned it into scientific learning management. Virtually all of the protocols now in place for measuring academic success are based on Taylorist principles. Not on ages’ old traditions of learning, but on a system of reducing human qualities to measurable, standardized productivity designed for the assembly line.

@S4pattern – @jerrymichalski Education as Embracing Agency

This caught my attention: “What we really want is for kids to have again a sense of agency.” He variously describes agency as: permission; the ability to do something, to act on something; a sense that it’s ok to go out and change your world, to try to make a difference; a responsibility for the task at hand.

@dweinberger – Louis C.K. and the Decent Net, or How Louis won the Internet

The Internet is a calamity of norms. Too many cultures, too many localities, too many communities, each with its own norms. And there’s no global agreement on principles that will sort things out for us. In fact, people who disagree based on principles often feel entitled to demonize their opponents because they differ on principles. The only hope for living together morally on the Net is to try not to be dicks to one another. I’m not saying it’s obvious how to apply that rule. And I’m certainly not saying that we’ll succeed at it. But now that we’ve been thrown together without any prior agreement on norms or principles, what else can we do except try to treat each other with trust and a touch of sympathy?

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

@mikeridell62 – “Just as the industrial age ended slave labour the information age is likely to end mass-wage labour.”

@tom_peters – “Winners: Thrive on chaos-ambiguity. Sense of humor. Live by: Try-something-right-now. Celebrate failures. Resilience. Relationships nut.”

@jhagel – Finite Games as Probes in complexity – via @timekord

As I noted above, Carse insightfully points out that boundaries are necessary for finite games while infinite game players seek to undermine all boundaries.  Given my preoccupation with the importance of edges, this might appear to be a contradiction.  To be clear, I am drawn to edges (what Carse labels as horizons) precisely because they generate possibility, not because they define limits.  Edges are fertile ground for an infinite game that draws out potential and possibility in part because finite game players tend to avoid them and they attract those who are more excited by infinite games.

@crumphelen – “an experiment to narrate my work/learning for one day” [good example of PKM]

Tame, Wicked and Critical Problems: An introduction to the Cuckoo Clock Syndrome – via @commutiny

Elegant solutions do not work for Wicked problems because they sit across various difficult cultures and institutions. Not everyone responds well to punitive hierarchical measures. Nor is everyone affected equally by the incentives and support offered by individualists. Rather, what is required when approaching Wicked problems are ‘Clumsy’ solutions; those that broach and draw upon different cultural understandings. Here, Grint emphasises the importance of implementing ‘experimental’ approaches “because we cannot know whether the approach we adopt will eventually work; if we did it would be a Tame or Critical problem.” The key is for policymakers and leaders to act as ‘bricoleurs’ and ‘experimental pragmatists’, eschewing nicely framed Elegant responses which are the preserve of many policymakers.

Yes, government researchers really did invent the Internet [in response to a WSJ op-ed]

In truth, no private company would have been capable of developing a project like the Internet, which required years of R&D efforts spread out over scores of far-flung agencies, and which began to take off only after decades of investment. Visionary infrastructure projects such as this are part of what has allowed our economy to grow so much in the past century. Today’s op-ed is just one sad indicator of how we seem to be losing our appetite for this kind of ambition.

NYT: “Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble with ‘Curation.’ Sehnsucht: German for “addictive yearning.” That about nails it.” @CharlesHGreen

Here’s The Awl’s co-editor, Choire Sicha, for instance, on the subject of rebloggers who fancy themselves curators: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it. . . .” To which a commenter added: “My Tumblr isn’t so much curated space as it is a symptom of deeper pathologies made manifest.”

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

Supreme Court of Canada: copyright law should not stand in the way of technological progress – via @mgeist

Trust in the professionalism of your workforce is the only thing that scales across the entire org – by @nickcharney

The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation – by @kanter

Curation has nothing to do with personal expression or sharing nor with collecting links, tweets or blog posts that you may find interesting.   Curation is all about helping your audience dive in and make sense of a specific topic, issue, event or news story.  It is about collecting, but it is also about explaining, illustrating, bringing in different points of view and updating the view as it changes.   It is also about sharing with your community – not passing along stuff that you have not read or contextualize or shooting out links.  But engaging in dialogue to help them make sense.

Four ways social networking has forever changed the way we work – by @joemckendrick

Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business.

Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development.

The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management.

Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.

 Why are we always so ‘busy’ without reflection time? via @jimbobtyer

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.

What, me, busy?

Marsh Wren by Simon Pierre Barrette

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

@RalphMercer – “Consensus, the general agreement to fail together.”

Eide Neurolearning: Remembering inhibits learning

In an interesting study, researchers from Duke University found that learning and remembering compete when both are made to occur at the same time.

@sjgill – How to create a learning culture in organizations

That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it’s about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

Forbes: The End of Middle Managers (And Why They’ll Never Be Missed) – via @bdupperin

The captains don’t “manage” every day. They have just one meeting as captains per week. That meeting determines the deployment of strategy. We hand off to the captains—then they hand off to the teams, who hand off to the individuals who deploy day to day, and then they get out of the way (as they resume their own production roles, side by side with their teams.)

At this point, our entire company is flat.  With no hierarchy, everyone leads within their areas of stewardship and responsibility.  Many will have excess capacity and offer to help another teammate or even go to another department to ask how they can help. (Yes, this really happens—in some cases, it happens every day.)

@changethinking – The Dirty Little Secret Behind the 70% Failure Rate of Change Projects – via @LucGaloppin

The inconvenient truth is that after many years of applying our craft, with plenty of opportunities to have an impact and more than enough practitioners to make a difference, there is no hard evidence that we have made even a dent in the appalling prognosis for executing change. The latest research continues to show what the original findings revealed—7 out of 10 projects still fail to reach their stated intentions.

Adam Scislowicz – Brokerage Rules & Trust:

 @brianinroma – Want to end email hegemony? Follow these simple tips.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter, and also heard in passing at ICALT 2012 this past week in Rome.

@rosariocacao – “@adriancheok at ICALT: you don’t have time to make explicit your tacit knowledge”

@britz – PKM = People, Simplicity, Discipline

@AdrianCheok – “How to cope with email overload” – [nice succinct summary]

@cufa – “Serious case of info overload/illegible pics on too many slides at #icalt2012 – are we not meant to be learning and teaching experts?”

@RichardTheGeek – The Lord of the Phones – 3 phones to bind them [at ICALT 2012]

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

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation ~ Bertrand Russell” – via @JenniferSertl

@MickSainsbury – PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation

Organisations should be facilitating a culture of PKM and promoting its value to its people as a significant strategy for capacity building, continuous improvement, innovation, renewal, reconstruction and engagement.

PKM feeds the intellectual capital of an organisation.

@TomSpiglanin – Social Net Work and the Workplace Professional

This is the concept of net work: individual nodes who connect work teams to vast social networks through communities of practice, making the work teams significantly more productive and effective. If there is power in a single connected node, imagine the increased power of multiple nodes connecting the workplace to individually cultivated communities of practice. The net work product has the potential to grow exponentially better.

@JayCross – Learn Informal Learning Informally. Experiential

This workshop is not a course. It’s more like Outward Bound meets Oxford. You learn by doing.

 You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it?

Objection 4. “Our people are too busy for this. It will take too much time”
Too busy to learn, but not too busy to reinvent wheels, rework solutions, and revisit old problems? You need to explain that KM is a time-saver, that it cut project times by up to 16%, that it’s the lazy person’s way to work. As one of my colleagues said “You work surrounded by the knowledge of others, Why on earth would you not use it? It will save money and time, it will make your life easier, and you will do a better job”. Basically, if people are so busy, there is not argument NOT to introduce KM.

@JohnnieMoore – Strip out the strategising and you may create the conditions for swift trust

Of course in big organisations, talking strategy can be a high status activity – those who are seen to be good at it get the big bucks. That presents a pretty serious impediment to more agile processes happening inside the hierarchy. But it’s not going to stop them happening outside.

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

@JamieNotter – “Key lesson: for people to give energy to these new things, they need to stop doing other things.”

@AnnaFMackenzie – “I agree. Writing is writing – it takes practice and discipline to write well. I find blogging helps thesis writing.”

@dominicad – “A richer organization has more options for slack time.”

«Il n’y a pas d’éducateurs, «mais seulement des gens qui montrent aux autres comment ils s’y prennent pour s’éduquer eux-même. ~ J. Guitton »  – via @PascalVenier

Team Wikispeed, where learning really is the work – via @jhagel

You can certainly gain knowledge by reading a textbook, but acquiring “tacit knowledge,” education that comes from first-hand experience, is a much more powerful and effective way to learn. Talent development in firms today typically comes in the form of stale training courses and presentations rather than a focus on tacit knowledge development. At WIKISPEED, however, the team learns almost entirely through hands-on experience. Volunteers work in pairings of inexperienced and experienced individuals who take on small projects. Not only does this help novice volunteers learn faster, it also reduces the time and cost of documenting every process because knowledge is exchanged between peers rather than consolidated in formal training programs.

90% of companies with >1,000 employees recently changed their organization structure. <50% were successful! – via @JostleMe

“an alarming statistic, and one with perilous implications. Apart from the high costs and squandered opportunity, a failed reorganization can leave an enterprise even worse off than it was before, with lost productivity, a weakened market position, and a disengaged workforce, among other impacts.”

 culture is an emergent property of all the little things you do – via @JDeragon

We are accustomed to thinking that the intangibles of life exist separately from tangible things; material things separated from spiritual, personal things distinct from commercial. This is not so. The knowledge economy has taught us how intangibles like intellectual property and design can be converted into money. Consider how much of the cost of a computer covers its tangible components versus how much you are paying for its technology and software. Tangibles and intangibles are often interchangeable. Material wealth can buy intangibles like lifestyle, time, rich human experiences, and education. In the same way, intangibles like knowledge, wisdom, culture, and caring can generate tangible wealth, too.

@TomSpiglanin – Why would I need to manage my own knowledge in the first place? 

At the end of the day, we are individually responsible for our own professional development, not our employer. After all, the only knowledge we can truly manage is our own.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet not-conflicting goals. by @StoweBoyd

As swift trust and ad hoc project teams become the dominant form factor for working over the next few years, we will see the transformation of large businesses away from monolithic power and belief systems, to something much more of a mosiac. In  this not-too-distant future businesses may principally be organized around helping every employee find and achieve their personal meaning for work, instead of trying to indoctrinate workers to a corporate agenda.

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

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. ~ Oscar Wilde” – via @PeterWinick

Cheating” is (finally) recognized as a 21st century learning skill – via @rbgayle

The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).

[I really enjoyed the book Little Brother, and so did my sons]

@RosabethKanter – “If can’t have certainty about outcomes, try fast achievable projects & certainty of process.”

Clouds eventually give way to clarity. What separates the best from the rest is whether leaders communicate, improve, engage, invest in relationships, and remain true to principles. This can make the difference in getting stuck or emerging triumphant.

@TheEconomist – “There is a remarkable tendency to trust experts, even when there is little evidence of their forecasting powers”

There may be another, psychological, reason why investors want to pay for advice: the avoidance of regret. If you choose to put all your money into technology stocks on the back of your own research, and such stocks collapse, you only have yourself to blame. But if you have listened to the advice of an expert, then the decision is not your fault.

@edCetraT – “couldn’t make it to #IEL12 ?No worries @LnDDave curated the shared resources for you”

Note: I talked about the future of the training department at IEL12 but no one picked it up, so here is a picture, which should be worth 1,000 words ;)

@sjgill – “A learning organization needs tools that people can use to discover information”

So the question becomes, “How do we make work and learning part of the same process?” One way is to help people develop new knowledge in the course of their work when faced with a new task or a new challenge, whether that is operating a new tool or becoming an effective leader. This is done by making information accessible and by making the tools to create knowledge from that information accessible, too.

@gwynnek – “Remember when people only lurked? Now 76% of Twitter users post status updates. Up from 47% in 2010. ht @mbjorn”

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

@LucianT – “3M publicly hire for ‘Misfits’ – people that don’t fit into the norm. 35% of their revenue comes from products created within last 5 years”

@LeeJCarey – “Don’t be an instigator, don’t interrupt, don’t be disruptive, don’t talk back, don’t rock the boat; now get out there and lead”

elearnspace: What is the theory that underpins our moocs? by @gsiemens

The Coursera/EDx MOOCs adopt a traditional view of knowledge and learning. Instead of distributed knowledge networks, their MOOCs are [mostly] based on a hub and spoke model: the faculty/knowledge at the centre and the learners are replicators or duplicators of knowledge.

Shelley Wright: A wicked problem – via @SheilaSpeaking

Finally, we need to encourage and support the risk-takers and innovators in our school systems. Too often the status-quo is supported because of the comfort level it affords. As Brian Harrison stated in a recent blog post, “…it is clear to me that we cannot sustain a great system of public education by rewarding those in our schools and systems who do not innovate at the cost of those who do.”  Too often those who are engaging students in meaningful learning close their doors, so they can do what is best for their students. Why? To reduce the backlash from others. I know. I’ve done it, and I’ve listened to the stories of many other educators who have experienced this same phenomenon. If we truly want to do what is best for kids, we need to support teachers who willingly engage the messy landscape of student-centred learning.

Tweets from DAU/GMU Innovations in eLearning where I spent much of the week:

@moehlert – “You can’t research social learning without being a participant yourself”

@Dave_Ferguson – “Thought: do some (many) people not see collaboration with others as “learning” because it doesn’t look like the schoolhouse model?”

Jane Hart: “Between 33% and 66% of employees are meeting their own needs by going AROUND the training department.” via @jsuzcampos

@wadatrip – “It is ok to fail if you learn a lesson and even more so if you share the lesson you learned from the failure.”

Craig Wiggins @oxala75 live-blogging @quinnovator Clark Quinn’s session