Friday’s Finds

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)”

Here’s what I learned via Twitter this past week.

Social computing (or Knowledge Management) is not a strategy, it’s a support tool, a sense-making tool, a way of being. via @johnt

You could say we could use new social tools for everything, that’s why we see HR 2.0, Sales 2.0, Marketing 2.0, etc…that’s why existing products are starting to get features like blogs, social networks. So really it’s a way of being or a literacy, rather than a strategy. But yes, to get buy-in you may go the strategy route; but that’s just to get your foot in the door, and it’s also to help the blank faces when they are given tools that aren’t designed to do a specific thing…and what it takes to get adoption (the difference between transactional and interactional).

JOHO the blog: From ~5000 BCE to 2003 CE: 5 exabytes of information were created. In the last 2 days: about 5 exabytes of information were created [exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes]

via @downes: “In other words, it’s less about cramming people into universities and colleges, and more about getting universities and colleges integrated into the wider community.” OLDaily

@willrich45 – “Reading: “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” by @shirky Nice response to Carr.”

The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it’s our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.

An excellent set of priorities: 1. Collaboration 2. Performance Support 3. Learnscape Design by @BFChirpy

It’s useful to look at collaboration anxiety through the LADR [Language, Authority, Direction, Role] lens but the cognitive limits to our ability to collaborate are just as important as the social limits. They quote Herbert Simon2 in the introduction:

“solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”

One way to make a solution transparent is to reduce cognitive load.

@timoreilly “Excellent: The greatest change in the history of media is not analog to digital but scarcity to surfeit, via @macslocum” Digital Deliverance

As I’ve been writing since 2004, the greatest change in the history of media is that, within the span of a single human generation, people’s access to information has shifted from relative scarcity to surfeit. Billions of people whose access a generation ago to daily changing information was at most one or two or three locally-distributed printed newspapers, one, two, three, four television channels, and one or two dozen radio stations, can now access virtually all of the world’s news and information instantly at home, office, or wherever they go. The economic, historical, and societal ramifications of this epochal change in media will be far more profound than Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, Tesla’s and Marconi’s invention of broadcasting, or any other past development in media.

QUOTES

via @VasilyKomarov RT @nickthinker: Those who can lead an inexpensive (low cost) life and appreciate the simple and free things are actually the “new rich”!

@reactorcontrol “Tim Berners-Lee describes social networks as “vertical silos”, because they are not interoperable. #dzf4″

Some things I learned via Twitter this past week.

Learning through Practice

@charlesjennings – ID – Instructional Design or Interactivity Design in an interconnected world?

We need designers who understand that learning comes from experience, practice, conversations and reflection, and are prepared to move away from massaging content into what they see as good instructional design. Designers need to get off the content bus and start thinking about, using, designing and exploiting learning environments full of experiences and interactivity.

@donaldclark – 10 techniques to massively increase retention

This is the classic ‘forgetting curve’ by Ebbinghaus, a fundamental truth in memory theory, totally ignored by most educators and trainers. Most fixed ’courses’ or ‘lectures’ take no notice of the phenomenon, condemning much of their effort to the world of lost memories. Most educational and training pedagogies are hopelessly inefficient because they fail to recognise this basic truth. Smart learners get it. They revise over a period, with regular doses to consolidate their memories.

Quotes of the Week

Abraham Lincoln: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Annual Message to Congress: 1862)

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”-Howard Aiken; via @RudolfChristian

Lots about Facebook

@betchaboy “Freakin AWESOME post about the whole Facebook privacy debacle by Andrew Birch, A must read IMO”

@JaneBozarth “DH sat next to young family at ball game. He heard kid’s full name, school, and family secret password. They’re worried about Facebook privacy.”

WikiHow: How to Permanently Delete a Facebook Account via @lpgauthier

@zephoria “The privacy Machiavellis are masters of the bait and switch” by Chris Hoofnagle:

Privacy “messaging” is masking the actions and goals of companies such as Google and Facebook. These for-profit companies have business models that depend upon increasing the collection of personal information, yet they tell us that “privacy is important.” The real question is: How important?

and more

Trojan Mice: small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way; via @charlesjennings

@vineetnayar “Structure of a family has transitioned from command and control. Why can’t that structure work in an organisation?” Star Organisation

“GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning.” NYT op-ed piece. via @elatedca

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

@nickcharney : “In a field that changes rapidly, there are no experts, only degrees of amateurs.”

[Which will make it even more difficult to formalize instruction]

The learning opportunity imbalance by Gary Wise

Jane Hart: The State of Learning in the Workplace Today (May Update) via @c4lpt

Implementing social media tools in formal courses will certainly help to improve workplace learning and adding in to the mix some “informal learning” will also help to supplement learning.

However to reinvent formal learning requires a re-think of the existing provision of formal learning, in particular providing more opportunities for collaborative learning, recognising the importance of user-generated content, and more relevant design of learning “solutions” for today’s learners.

But to go further and to transform learning requires a complete new understanding of the role of “learning” in an organisation. Adopting an integrated enterprise-wide approach to organisational learning such as this is not just about the technology, but will require a new mindset and new skillset – both for L&D and learners.

Upstreaming Conversations: Don’t seek thought leadership; figure out how to learn faster. via @stuarthenshall

In a world of rapid change, instant real-time updates and network effects, managing or marketing ‘thought leadership’ seldom puts runs on the board. It is only when the organization becomes more collaborative, more effective at asking better questions and more agile at interpretation and at finding direction that organizational performance begins to improve.

Empires of Ideas: 1. Generate ideas 2. Select & test ideas 3. Get ideas to spread. via @timkastelle

Consequently, if we’re going to build our own empires of ideas, we need great ideas, but more importantly, we need a method for processing and executing ideas. And we need to be able to get the ideas to spread.

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

Breakthroughs Happen At The Edge of Chaos via @VenessaMiemis [which links to an image showing that between stability & chaos is where we find creativity and the closer we are to chaos, the more potential there is for breakthroughs]

To which I responded, “For individuals, that would be the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky)”

Speaking of Vygotsky:

Graham Attwell: Personal Learning Environments & Vygotsky. via @fdomon

Within this perspective a Personal Learning Environment could be seen as allowing the representation of knowledge, skills and prior learning and a set of tools for interaction with peers to accomplish further tasks. The PLE would be dynamic in that it would allow reflection on those task and further assist in the representation of prior knowledge, skills and experiences. In this context experiences are seen as representing performance or practice. Through access to external symbol systems (Clark, 1997) such as metadata, ontologies and taxonomies the internal learning can be transformed into externalised knowledge and become part of the scaffolding for others as a representation of a MKO within a Zone of Proximal Development. Such an approach to the design of a Personal Learning Environment can bring together the everyday evolving uses of social networks and social media with pedagogic theories to learning.

Note: This post also had Jay Cross (@jaycross) asking me if there is any difference between PLE and PKM (personal knowledge management), aside from their DNA; to which I responded that I didn’t see a major difference in the tools & practices, though PKM assumes a worker while PLE typically assumes a student/learner. The terms are pretty well interchangeable if you remove the formal student/teacher/institutional relationships. I’m not sure what came first, PKM or PLE, but it doesn’t really matter. Whatever you call it, at the edge of chaos, we need to take control of our learning.

Speaking of breakthroughs at the edge of chaos, Euan Semple asks if we need a new religion (@euan):

The church and its myths predominated for centuries until Darwin, Freud and the carnage of the first world war trenches knocked a big whole in those assumptions. People weren’t ready for the vacuum left by the undermining of those stories though so the totalitarian regimes of Fascism and Communism filled the gap. When those myths too fell apart we were left with the myth of capitalism and the market and isn’t this beginning to look decidedly suspect since the collapse of the banking industry? Even watching the farce of the old them and us story of the right and left politics running out of steam in the UK general election is like watching another big story die.

The old, stable ways don’t work any more, says Ed Morrison (@edmorrison) in Re-engagement networks and the NASA Shuttle shutdown:

You can see the challenges, as I do, in the streets of Kokomo, or any Midwest auto community.
To address these challenges, we began to think about what a new system of economic adjustment — economic re-engagement — would look like. We designed re-engagement networks and set our challenge in a different light: In communities facing major transformations, we need to design and strengthen different types of re-engagement networks. This kind of thinking heads us in a different direction — away from the transactional, social service model that provides the foundation for our current systems.

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

Some thoughts:

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) gets smaller, while flow (conversation) gets longer – the challenge becomes how to continously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day.

The challenge for educators and organizations is not how to integrate or adopt web technologies but rather how do we teach, learn and work in networks. Digital networks have changed all hierarchical relationships.

@DavePollard – The Lifecycle of Emergence [if OD, KM, ISD and other siloed disciplines are declining, is there something new emerging?]

Practitioners in a system of influence can even throw ‘lifelines’ or build bridges to invite (or pull) forward those stuck in earlier paradigm thinking, methods and tools — rescuing them from e-mail, for example, by showing them IM, virtual presence and other effective real-time collaboration tools, or showing them new and effective group processes and practices that get them past dissent, disengagement, dysfunctional power dynamics and feelings of helplessness and disempowerment.

Why we need to “kill social media” via @WWWayne

In our view, social media is about the evolution of human communication. Cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics matter in marketing again. Concepts like “social framing,” whereby individuals often perceive issues through the prism of their friends, are starting to help us rethink the way we communicate and the ways people gather, act, and synthesize information. Rethinking social organization through social media is beginning to have a transformative impact on governments and businesses.

Power increases hypocrisy & grace (undeserved merit) decreases it! via @CircleReader

Results: when power (or lack thereof) was legitimate, the powerful also exhibited moral hypocrisy (being less moral themselves but judging others more harshly), while the powerless weren’t – just as before. But when power (or lack thereof) was illegitimate, the powerful didn’t show hypocrisy. In fact, the moral hypocrisy effect not only disappeared but was reversed, with the illegitimate powerful becoming stricter in judging their own behavior and more lenient in judging the others.

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Best humourous tweet of the week:

@shareski: I walked by hotel room 404 and was tempted to hang a post-it saying “Room not Found!”

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

Think Tweets are simple, 140 character messages? Think again via @TammyGreen [interesting annotated map]

With annotations, Twitter could become a platform for sharing anything, not just 140 characters of text. What will developers do with that data? We can only imagine. Perhaps new apps will allow users to share media like photos, videos and music? Or they’ll add more details about a tweeted link? Will you tag your tweets? Share vCards? Create polls? These sorts of innovations will launch shortly and we expect to be surprised and delighted by what the developers come up with.

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@charlesjennings “Less is More: A different approach to learning & development (L&D) in a world awash in information” [requires free membership to access]

So, what are the core skills we need to help people develop so they can operate in this ocean of information?

To be honest, I don’t have a definitive list. But I think I know some of the capabilities L&D should focus on. If we help people develop these, at least they’ll be on a solid footing to extract positive and practical use from the volumes of information they come across each day:

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@EskoKilpi “I rewrote my post about communication and competition”

Social networks provide problem-solving capability that results directly from the amount of communication and level of diversity in communication. Most organizations would soon fail if all employees thought alike or had little, or no contact. There are two new challenges: First is to understand the need for (net)working with difference. The second challenge is even bigger because of reductionist thinking: our assumption has been that by understanding the parts in detail, we understand the whole. This is simply not possible! What happens in interaction between the parts is more important than the parts. The whole is the emergent pattern of that interaction.

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@dsearls “If we see the Net as a medium rather than as a place, we risk losing it. Here’s why: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes”

We need to make clear that the Public Domain is the market’s underlying geology–a place akin to the ownerless bulk of the Earth–rather than a public preserve in the midst of private holdings. This won’t be easy, but it can be done.

We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it.

We need to stress the fact that the primary “end” in the Net’s end-to-end architecture is the individual. The Net’s success is due far more to the freedoms enjoyed by individuals than to the advantages enjoyed by large companies whose existence predates the Net.

We need to remind policy makers that the Net’s biggest success stories–Amazon, Google, eBay and Yahoo–are the stories of Bezos, Page, Brin, Omidyar, Yang and Filo.

We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it.