Friday’s Finds

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week.

QUOTES

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both”

@courosa Look at a single Twitter page. Think about prior knowledge / literacies needed to decode that page. RTs. links. voice. events. #MediaLiteracy

@Dave_Ferguson My comment to @rnantel : fixing most performance problems with training is like fixing a leaky faucet by painting the kitchen.

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KM tools for small business: an array by @jackvinson

But wait a minute.  Why go with these additional systems?  Why not just help people in the business do a better job with what they have?  Why not teach and encourage advanced Personal Knowledge Management skills, possibly using some of the online services?  That’s not a bad idea, actually.  If everyone can use the same tools and those tools can share information amongst colleagues, that may be a good starting point.

via @sebpaquet What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense / wisdom? Quora.com

Focus on spending this money in ways that improve your happiness and reduce your stress levels, and be cautious about using it to buy things that other people say you “should” buy.

Designing for complexity by giving up control: a traffic example via @johnniemoore

Recommended viewing for contemplating the power of self-organisation and the hidden costs of top-down control. The best line in the commentary was this: “Road capacity might be limited but empathy is boundless.”

A Man with a PhD: Sounding strident & desperate for a reason by @RBGayle

We sound desperate and strident because dealing with this level of managed ignorance puts tremendously unnecessary stress on our ability to solve complex problems.

@NatashaChart did a lack of print copyright law jump start Germany’s industrial development and popular literacy? Spiegel Online International

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country’s industrial might.

[snip]

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

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

Quote of the Week: @hrheingold “Free, open, multimedia university of tomorrow is here now, technically. Knowing how to self-organize learning with others is another matter”

via @nancyrubin Collaboration – If it Were That Easy We Would all Do It – Well

Five Models of Collaboration:

• Communities of Practice/Interest
• Content Collaboration
• Process Collaboration
• Project Collaboration
• Goal-based Collaboration

@davecormier “next time someone makes fun of twitter …  tell them about you guys finding the name of the berry that Posey ate for poison control [baneberry]”

we took the kids into the woods, on a little trail on the back of Dave’s ancestral lands. and we spun our heads back, three of us at once to see Posey in her tutu and her grandmother’s fake plastic pearls chomping heartily away on…something.

three parental mouths opened in unison to say what’s she eating? and then Dave crossed the three steps between him and her in only one and he pried the berry from her mouth. ew, she said.

he grabbed the culprit to ask the internet, once we were back at the house.

Photo & The Culprit

via @helinur the best goal is no goal :

So what does a life without goals look like? In practice, it’s very different than one with goals.

You don’t set a goal for the year, nor for the month, nor for the week or day. You don’t obsess about tracking, or actionable steps. You don’t even need a to-do list, though it doesn’t hurt to write down reminders if you like.

What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion.

via @markwfoden Case study on using micro-blogging to support informal learning [PDF] at Pitney Bowes:

• Better Employee Learning: Yammer facilitates and augments the highly valuable “casual learning” that happens every day within Pitney Bowes.
• Easily Searchable Knowledge Base: Each discussion is archived and accessible to all within the organization for future access.
• Better Knowledge Flow: Knowledge isn’t siloed into specific regions or departments.

via @elsua Starting another day with this required reading: Am I Crazy? Or Is It The Whole Firm Where I Work? by @stevedenning

A century hence, when historians come to write the history of the current age (assuming our species survives so long), they will, I believe, be puzzled as to why so many people managed—and so many more people allowed themselves to be managed—in ways that were known to be unproductive, crimped the spirits of those doing the work, and frustrated those for whom the work was being done. Why, they will wonder, did this continue for so long on such a wide scale?

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

Why focus on informal & social learning? by @CharlesJennings | Related Slide Presentation

In many cases non-formal and social approaches will replace formal learning. In a few cases they won’t.

There are 8 drivers for this change:

1. There is a strong imperative for continuous learning – the world is changing so fast that we need to continually update our knowledge, skills and productivity. Doing it in discrete steps just doesn’t work any more – even if the steps are small ones. We all need to develop the mindset of continuous, always-on learners. Informal and social learning approaches fit this need better than staccato formal learning …

via @roundtrip – 10 ways the “world of work” will change in the next 10 years @Gartner_inc “non-routine” work = adaptive innovative

1. De-routinization of work
2. Work swarms
3. Weak links
4. Working with the collective
5. Work sketch-ups
6. Spontaneous work
7. Simulation & experimentation
8. Pattern sensitivity
9. Hyperconnected
10. My place

@johnniemoore Is there a real innovator’s dilemma in an age of abundant creativity. Or just a bureaucrat’s dilemma pretending otherwise?

From HBR: Higher education is overrated; skills aren’t [as I wrote in the university myth]

Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Knowledge may be power, but “knowledge from college” is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. Growing numbers of informed observers increasingly describe a higher education “bubble” that makes a college and/or university education a subprime investment for too many attendees.

via @nomad411 New Zealand rejects software patents.

In updating its policy position, the New Zealand government acknowledged the growing importance of open source, and the logical reasons for excluding software from the list of patentable inventions.

Evaluating knowledge workers – a cartoon essay by @tonykarrer

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

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position.  It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

via @bbetts -Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

A Man with a PhD: Natural selection: networks & diversity

One thing to remember is that true and pure natural selection would tend to drive genes to the best possible – the most fit – actually removing diversity. To a first approximation, selection would seem to produce a single set of genes that are ‘best’ evolved for a particular environment. Any other set of genes would be less fit.

In reality, selection is often not that fine, there are a range of different gene products that can probably be almost equally fit and most biological systems are designed to support a wide range of diversity.

This argument implies that one cannot hope to get ahead of others just by finding the “right” network. “People think of their network as something they can expand, or buy a new version of, or change in some dramatic way as if it were clothing that you can take off and put on,” Burt says. A network does not give added competitive advantage independent of your effort. Rather, it allows a person to become more skillful at managing various connections so that he gains greater competitive advantage. It is what a person does with his network that counts.

via @jhagel – Generating Serendipity: diversity; sharing; network weaving; provocation

Serendipity is the emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.

Much of lasting value comes into being serendipitously. How many of the most amazing things that have happened to you have happened because of an overheard word, an accidental encounter, a connection made by a friend? Serendipity is the antithesis of control.

Connections drive innovation [and learning] by @timkastelle

The moral of the story is simple. Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas. And then we’ll forget things like how to make a fishing hook. Or a trident missile.

via @charlesjennings – Paris stages ‘festival of errors‘ to teach French schoolchildren how to think

“I’m a scientist. I had nothing to do with education. But then my six-year-old boy went to school and his teacher told me, ‘He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions,'” said François Taddei, the author of an education report published last year for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“This is the problem of the French system,” he added.

“You are supposed to know the right answer. You are not supposed to express your own opinions or ask questions.”

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

Quotes of the Week:

@ralphmercer – “committees are places to lure great ideas to be killed while absolving everyone of the blame”

via @planetrussell- “Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while giving the appearance of stability.” —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.

“when hiring, we don’t care about formal education” says @JasonFried of 37Signals – the new workplace, the new normal

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via @sebpaquet – Cognitive research shows that facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds:

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

via @robpatrob – Jesse’s Café Américain – Nothing was sacred: The theft of the American dream:

“Eliminating government” is a trap put forward by the plutocrats for those unable to reason except by prejudice, as they desire to exercise their power unimpeded by the rule of law. Once you knock down the protections and the safeguards in the name of reform, the wolves will turn on the public in an orgy of looting and exploitation. This is an old story, and sadly it often works.

The approaching end of the corporation as a closed box by @euan

So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation’s managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.

“Social” thinking vs Doing – by @jderagon

Gaining  new knowledge or creating new knowledge and knowing what to do with it is more productive than doing what others do. To gain or create new knowledge requires thinking which is a lot deeper than doing.

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell

Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying.

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

via @couchlearner – The Most Important Question to Ask a Consultant Before Saying Yes – by @timberry:

So the most important question to ask, before you agree to a consulting job,  is who is actually going to be doing the work. Who will deliver it, and who will you talk to in the interim. Yes, you’d think that would all be obvious. But the bigger and more successful the consulting company, the less likely that the actual work will be done by the people you talk to. For example, with most of the top 10 consulting firms the partners sell the jobs (they call them engagements) and the associates – relatively recent hires – do the work.

Has Knowledge Management Been Bad For Us? by @rickladd

But I think we’re missing the point about the real value of knowledge. If, in fact, the largest (by far) percentage of an enterprise’s useful knowledge is locked between the heads of its employees and, if (as we frequently say about tacit knowledge) much of it can’t be accessed until it’s required, why are we not spending more of our limited funds on facilitating the connection and communication, as well as the findability and collaborative capabilities of our employees?

@robpatrob – How to break through the culture barriers in Social Media – Veterans Affairs [VAC] creates a Wedge

So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.

The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.

@DanielPink “The real reason China is laughing at the US” – Creativity: one core skill here, via @charlesjennings

@rossdawson – 5 graphic frameworks showing the future of media:

Here are some of the things I learned on Twitter this past week:

QUOTES OF THE WEEK:

@KareAnderson “Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

“Most of what we know we learn from other people. We pay tuition to a few of these teachers … but most of it we get for free, and often in ways that are mutual – without a distinction between student and teacher … We know this kind of external effect is common to all the arts and sciences – the ‘creative professions.’ All of intellectual history is the history of such effects.” Does Milwaukee have enough college graduates to thrive?

@faboolous “Knowledge work thus requires that each party offer something with no guarantee that they will get anything specific in return”.

@bduperrin “The more social you are you [the] more opportunities you get, the more busy you are, the less social you become.”

@jonhusband “Unfortunately, HR is the home base for the management practices based on old mental models about work & motivation .. not synched with networked work”

@tdebaillon “Most companies aren’t designed for collaboration.” My Little Enterprise 2.0 Diffusion Framework

@umairh “The problem isn’t that we need new jobs. It’s that we need a better economy, composed of new kinds of companies, built for a higher purpose.”

Henry Mintzberg: “In a word, corporate America is sick.” – “A viable economy needs to be led by explorers, not exploiters.” – “The Problem Is Enterprise, Not Economics” via @jonhusband

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

@Louisvancuijk – “Knowledge is only a rumour until it is in the muscles.”

Connected, a declaration of interdependence by @tiffanyshlain

Combining powerful visuals, humor, animation, irony, and serious messages, Connected explores the visible and invisible connections between the major issues of our time — the environment, population growth, technology, human rights, and the global economy – demonstrating how they are all interdependent. Following the filmmaker’s exploration of her own place in the world during a transformative set of circumstances in her life, Connected exposes the importance of personal connectedness in relation to understanding global conditions, ultimately showing how all of humanity is invested in today’s crucial issues.

Online Communities are Changing my World – by @edavidove

#1 – I was organizing a conference in London UK for a client. I researched the internet (blogs, discussion threads, social networks, etc.) and found 2 very interesting speakers to participate. One was from Finland and one was from the USA. The first time we met in person was at the conference. We continue to network and collaborate to this day. One of the speakers connected me to an incredible career opportunity.

Birthing; midwives; knowledge management; organizations & structures – by @johnt

What I got out of it is that midwives are facilitators in uncertain situations.

No two births are alike, and nearly all births don’t fall on the planned date.

Every “mother to be” is different and the midwives both have to deal with people and their situation. They don’t know what to expect as they have not seen the “mother to be” going through a birth, either has the “mother to be” if it’s their first (even if it was the second or third baby, not every birth is the same anyway, so not even the “mother to be” knows how she will react to new circumstances, especially in different environments).

Performance Consulting: finding the best solution from the training, informal learning, performance support mix – by @c4lpt

When confronted with a learning or performance problem, the normal and traditional response from L&D is to create a training solution, probably in the form of an all-singing, all-dancing content-rich e-learning course. For a long while I’ve compared this approach with using a hammer to crack the proverbial nut!

Steve Denning: HBR: Rushing to the 20th Century – via @RossDawson

Want to kill your firm quickly? Then study the current issue of Harvard Business Review. Imbibe its philosophy, its attitudes and its values. Implement everything it says. In so doing, you will be well on the way to turning your organization into a fully-fledged 20th Century organization, with a life expectancy of around 5-10 years.

Competition is overrated: Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding — not other startups – via @sebpaquet

1) Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

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

You can’t measure discovery learning with an LMS but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant; by @jaycross

I fear the training community is on the wrong side of these questions. The world is open-ended; it’s not assembled from black and white answers. Real life is painted in shades of gray.

You can’t measure discovery learning with an LMS but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. This does it mean you shouldn’t use an LMS to monitor compliance and formal learning either. In a healthy learning ecosystem, “Pull learning” and “Push learning” are symbiotic; you need a bit of both.

Clay Shirky: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution” via @jayrosen_nyu

@gminks “What I learned this week at the #e2conf in Boston”

No matter what anyone tells you, no one really has a clue how to “do” social in the enterprise.

Here’s why I say that:
There is way too much posturing and selling from vendors

There seem to be two vendor camps (which are pretty traditional tech camps I think):

1. Buy one application to rule them all. Let it sit on top on top of all your current business apps, and create social using this one application.
2. Pay a consultant to create apps for a custom social layer between social apps and business apps
My take-away is that there seems to be a gold rush going between vendors and consultancy firms to gain mind share about the best way to create and manage this social layer.

@c4lpt “A MUST-READ blog post from Charles Jennings “Real learning let’s not confuse it with completing templated exercises”

Most of us have been persuaded that the majority of real learning occurs in the workplace through experience and practice and over the water cooler through conversations and reflection. It may be an interesting intellectual pursuit to argue whether the % of learning that occurs outside classrooms and other formal module, course, programme, curriculum structures is 70%, 80%, 90% or some other figure and whether the evidence supports one assumption over another, but arguments like that add little value to the fact that there is an increasing body of empirical evidence that says we learn as we work.

Some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

@snowded – Good, Bad & Ugly on the Wikipedia

Despite the frustrations, experience tells me that in general right wins out in Wikipedia but there are times when it gets downright frustrating. Right finally won out, at least for the moment on British issues when two disruptive editors were proved sock puppets but it took a year! That’s the Good of the title. In comparison two currently unresolved issues show the dangers that are inherent in a system where some editors are better at playing the game that others.

via @KoreenOlbrish Your company culture is a meaningless platitude

The great corporate cultures are a simple mix: a few polarizing decisions or excesses, with a handful of quirks mixed in. Preferably quirks that reinforce the rest of the culture.

Are you illiterate if you don’t know how to program?

In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among the eleven authors of a paper that espoused the value of programming as an essential skill for all. For those who cannot program in the 21st century, they declared solemnly, “It’s as if they can ‘read’ but not ‘write.’” Is it true: will we be lost without the ability to create code?

via @smitty1966 Roger Ebert’s take on Twitter: should be Twitter’s manifesto for new users.

I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct.

QUOTES

via @minutrition RT @umairh: in the age of strategy, what counted was knowing the terrain. in the age of wisdom, what counts is knowing the soil.

@VMaryAbraham “These guys are some of the smartest in the microsharing room, but I haven’t yet heard the 140-nugget that makes the case.”

@charlesjennings “ROI on social learning? ‘social networks are necessarily loose-edged and impossible to make fully explicit’ (David Weinberger)”