Friday’s Finds

Weekly review of items of interest found on Twitter:

“As of today I will try to no longer use the word “copyright” but instead call it what it is, ‘Use Monopoly‘” @sleslie

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let’s try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist’s heirs or some corporation’s shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.

George Wald on The Origin of Death: a thought-provoking read, recommended by my 15 year old son.

From Social Networking to Swarm Intelligence – self-organizing systems and teams for unpredictable ecosystems. via @charlesjennings

The rise and fall of the professionalism of work: The inevitable rise of networked communications in organisations is deeply challenging to many of those currently in managerial positions. @euan

Then along comes the web. The web is about making better decisions faster. It is the evolution of knowledge on steroids. It cuts out the middle men and allows communication and learning to flow through and around the blocks in its way.

“Is it possible for bureaucracies to become more nimble? Or is it just contrary to their nature? When creating a #KM [knowledge management] bureaucracy, make routine only those things necessary for safety; keep everything else nimble & more free-form.” @VMaryAbraham

Jane Hart’s Guide to Social Learning (2 pages). via @c4lpt

Taxonomy of trainers: It seems trainers either ‘just know’ they make a difference or can’t find a way to prove it. via @charlesjennings

What I found of interest on Twitter this past week:

There is no point collecting common knowledge if it isn’t shared. There is no point sharing knowledge if it isn’t used. Jack Vinson

When you make the complicated simple you make it better. When you make the complex simple you make it wrong. Dave Gray

Does open source software drive open and transparent management? S+B makes the case. via @CharlesHGreen

The hierarchy-innovation trade-off via @nickcharney (he’s looking for discussion & debate on this).

One company at DevLearn 2009 reported an estimated savings of $3-5 million per year in linking global repair operations by using Yammer (private version of Twitter) via @lrnchat

Twittering the student experience via @jalam1001:

The academic departments involved in the study were so impressed with the affordances of Twitter that they have continued to use it in their pedagogic academic practices and plan to work with other bodies in the University such as the Students’ Union to promote the use of Twitter as a lightweight communication channel in the coming academic year.

“Within five years, textbooks will be the biggest market for e-book devices” Forrester Research via @charlesjennings

Australian guide to social e-learning in an academic context via @fdomon

Here’s a new social networking site dedicated to theatre: MITI Show Space This is one more Community in a Box that we’ll see more of as the internet becomes the medium for work, learning and co-operation.

Google Wave Cheat Sheet via @jsuzcampos

As part of my – sense-making, moving from tacit to explicit, sharing with others – PKM system, here’s what caught my attention via Twitter during the past week. This week, I’m going to focus more on what others found interesting, as there was a lot of traffic as a result of the LearnTrends conference. LearnTrends once again emphasized my perspective that Work is Learning and Learning is the Work.

#learntrends

Janet Clarey (@JClarey): “We need to help people get around in their network and learn from it, instead of building Communities of Practice.” via @rlohuis

Chris Hardy: “new technology plus old organization = costly old organization; need new biz models and plan DAU [defense acquisition university].” via @littleasklab

Deb Schultz: “Organizational learning will be about connecting the dots for content instead of creating the content.” via @rdeis

Jerry Michalski (@jerrymichalski): “Kids are naturally curious, traditional education suppresses it; ‘unschooling’ of adults brings curiosity back.” via @SuzNet

Gary Woodill (@gwoodill): “We only started to really use classrooms a lot in corporate training after the founding of ASTD in 1947.”

Danny McCraine (@dmccraine) “If we know the public school system is broken, why do we emulate it in a corporate environment?”

Comments from George Siemens’ (@gsiemens) Session:

“opens the whiteboard up to let participants create the agenda…whoa! crazy fun! ” @chambo_online
“Very intrigued to have 130 people writing on a whiteboard all at once at #learntrends … and amazingly, it didn’t suck” @cynan_sez
“130+ people writing on same Elluminate whiteboard and GWave also being completed. Online learning has arrived” @GillianP

Jay Cross (@jaycross): “Hallmark of Future Work. Past: Subject Matter Experts. Future: Subject Matter Networks” via @Melissa_Venable @rdeis

JimFolk (@JimFolk) “Agile networks > now agile learning #learntrends see concept of Edgility that I use.”

ScottSkibell (@ScottSkibell) “Wow, I never thought of training as a form of media. Many similarities to other industries. Some aren’t good.”

Jane Hart (@c4lpt): “Ask the [social networking group] how they will determine whether the community has been successful.” via @dmccraine

@mdkemmler “Interesting comment someone made – ‘Sharepoint is a creativity powervac'”

via @gwoodill Study on mobile phones/PDAs for informal learning – PDF

George Siemens (@gsiemens) “‘networks as cognitive agent’ – a useful professional phrase when explaining to the unconverted” via @GillianP

Let me sum up #learntrends: “context; agile; social; augmented; mobile; meta; networks; culture; CoP; 3d; virtual; systems” via @jadekaz

The Cost of Not Paying Attention to Culture & Social Learning

The CLO article on France Telecom’s toxic culture and how training was thought to be an effective way initiate culture change, raised many comments on its sheer folly [Training is a solution in search of a problem]:

Sometimes it takes a series of events so unfathomable for reality to truly hit home.

Just ask France Telecom. Since the beginning of 2008, 24 employees at the company have committed suicide and an additional 13 have attempted suicide. Many of these victims left suicide notes implying the company’s working environment was a key factor in their decisions — one even explicitly cited “overwork, stress, absence of training and the total disorganization in the company.” Some of the attempts occurred on France Telecom premises.

In September, the telecom giant announced the launch of a training program that will teach its 22,000 managers to recognize signs of depression. However, this reactive measure is akin to handing out first-aid kits. It addresses the symptom rather than the root problem: The organization’s culture is quite literally toxic, slowly suffocating its employees.

What I learned on Twitter this past week:

Work

The Taylorist Stranglehold on buildings, management & IT via @drmcewan

“Hierarchies aren’t evil, networks aren’t chaotic. Both are incarnations of the same structures in the semi-ordered domain that is human life” @tonzylstra

via @skap5 – 17.5% unemployed or underemployed. Not just the bottom of a cycle. A burning platform for an innovation economy and transforming education.

The best potential clients for Enterprise 2.0 are 1) losing the industrial war, or 2) have a culture of pushing out/down power via @robpatrob

Founder Collective: we expect to generate returns almost exclusively from seed stage investments. via @jonhusband

Learning

via @JoanVinallCox Learning is a primal joy, like sex, & it is imperative, like eating & drinking.

“Students as enemies” metaphor is pervasive. This is not a done deal. via @smartinez @akamrt

Video: Discussions about using Twitter and microblogging in education. via @zecool

100+ ways to use social media for learning. via @c4lpt

The flu virus may be telling us to rethink our approach to science & education.

Look who’s smiling :-) Technology in the classroom. via @fmeichel @FrancoisGuite

Systems

Great article on the use of system dynamics modeling for complex problems in international development. via @hrichman

“The capitalist nightmare: search is both theft & the very ontology of the web.” inspired by @crowdedfalafel

Interesting similarities between Convergence of Key Media Trends via @kanter & Constellation W [Convergence & Ruptures] via @jonhusband

Here’s what grabbed my attention on Twitter this past week.

Networked Life means less command & control; but more self-control Euan Semple

via @jclarey Confessions of a Learning Consultant: I have designed and delivered programs with no more than minimal impact on my client’s business.

via @moehlert “Students who spend 8 yrs in grad school are being seriously over-trained for the jobs that are available.” Harvard Magazine [good debate in the comments]

via @cammybean is a 2002 study at Sara Lee by Atos KPMG (link to translation from original Dutch) that 80% of learning occurred spontaneously during work [paraphrased]:

What surprised the participants at the workshop was that a large proportion of learning was self-directed by workers. Nearly 80% of their learning fell within the categories of “spontaneous learning at work”, “networking with colleagues” and “consulting manuals and instructional materials”. Based on these definitions, learning at Sara Lee is about 80% informal and 20% formal learning.

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences & scientific stupidity: Donald Clark

via @kwheeler Why Silicon Valley beat Route 128 in Boston. Good article. TechCrunch

via @Socialearning The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education – Curtis Bonk

via @mathemagenic A personal view on knowledge work: Mathemagenic

via @dstojanovic Using twitter in academic setting? Here is how to cite. RT @GersteinLibrary: How to cite Twitter and Tweets

via @SoulSoup “The Complete Guide to Google Wave“, a free book you can download & share.

Here’s what caught my attention on Twitter this past week and some stuff left over from the week before:

Quote of the Week: Ingmar Bergman likened aging to hiking up a mountain, “The longer one walks the more winded one becomes, but the view!” via @marciamarcia

Food

Sustainable Food Lab: accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream

Lasagna gardening = my kind of gardening

Food for Thought

via @tonykarrer is an article on The Future of Knowledge Workers, or the aggregated insights of senior business professionals. I’m not sure how good any of us are at forecasting events, but I noted that collaboration ranked high on their list:

The survey asked what types of knowledge work are likely to become the most highly valued in the organization over the next 10-12 years. Collaborative work (project design team, global consultancy, etc.) received the highest ranking by the survey respondents. This is consistent with the high interest expressed throughout the survey in increasing collaborative support capabilities. Expert judgment work (research scientist, legal specialist, etc.) ranked a distant second, followed by process-oriented work (financial reporting, quality assurance, etc.) and transaction work (tech support center, billing inquiry, etc.).

“Emergent behaviors are unintended consequences that make you happy” FastForward Blog by @jmcgee

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds | Video on TED.com seeing from another’s viewpoint via @BillBell

How to organise a children’s party (video) by @snowded “we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries”

Peter Senge on Organizational Learning

I was offline for much of the week but I did manage to live-tweet Peter Senge’s presentation at the CSTD conference. Instead of my standard mix of Friday’s Finds, here is a special summation of a fascinating presentation. With no notes, no PowerPoint and one transparency on an overhead projector, Peter Senge held everyone’s attention.

The average life expectancy of large companies is about 30 years, but some are over 200 years old. What is the reason for this? Organizational learning! Basically, individual learning in organizations is irrelevant. Work is almost never done by one person alone. Almost all value is created by teams and networks of people.

In Silicon Valley it was observed that the more turbulent the employment situation, the more stable were the professional social networks of workers, whether employed or not.

Knowledge is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the  only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks.

The field of knowledge management was co-opted by information technology vendors, and became useless for organizational learning.

A practitioner (definition) is someone who is accountable for producing results.

The main factors contributing to organizational longevity are: a shared sense of identity, a tolerance for experiments (planting next year’s seeds), being fiscally conservative, and sensitivity to the environment. The last one is very important. Companies and industries must understand and support their environment (no fish, no fish sticks to sell).

We have had falling commodity (food) prices over time due to globalization. This equates directly to falling farmers’ revenue. A systems thinking approach would realize that this is not sustainable. Our global food system is the greatest generator of poverty in the world. We need to create global food chains that don’t drive farmers off their lands. Look at the Sustainable Food Lab whose goal is to accelerate the shift of sustainable food from niche to mainstream.

Did you know that it takes 250 litres of water to make 1 litre of Coca Cola? The company is now addressing this, but we all need to understand the entirety of the environments we live and work in. The first step is to see and understand the system. Then we need to take some time and reflect. In this way we can change the mental models we use to describe our world. All businesses are managed based on existing mental models. If you change the models, you can change the world.

A new business model, started in Europe, is that if you produce it, you are responsible for it forever (e.g. take back your car at the end of its life). This is a positive change  and social justice proponents, as well as environmentalists, have to stop being negative. We must see the extraordinary opportunities for change.

As training and development professionals, we were asked what is all this learning for. There were many responses, such as to improve the bottom line or to make a better world. Peter Senge showed us that the objective of all of our endeavours should be learning how to live together.

This week’s finds on Twitter are all dedicated to education:

Testing:

Mark Federman: standardized curriculum and testing contribute to the deterioration of public education.

How grades replaced the teacher’s name: William Farish: The Worlds Most Famous Lazy Teacher. via @nwinton [the story by the student at the end of this article is worth a read]

Listening to the mainstream media and educators discuss the New Brunswick public education standardized test results was disheartening. I liken it to two obsolete institutions trying to prepare our society for life in the early 20th century. Here is CBC perpetuating the industrial myth

Literacy:

New Zealand Education Minister: “Digital literacy is no longer a novelty.” via @josiefraser

Food for Thought:

Good food is the wedge that has caused a revolution in a Wisconsin School. In 1997, a private group called Natural Ovens began installing a healthy lunch program. via @robpatrob

Universities:

John Polanyi on TVO’s Big Idea: “the role of the university is to provide context and connect”

Sleep is for those with job security [life without tenure as a post-doc] via @lemire

Fields medalist Terry Tao has seen the future of academic work, and it is networked and collaborative: via @sebpaquet

Some things I learned on Twitter this past week.

Several articles and posts on Knowledge Management

KM: Safe-fail probes & diffusion of innovations | how to support emergent work practices via @mathemagenic

@rickladd “I recently finished a 2 year Masters program in Knowledge Management & I’m certain I could have learned far more on my own through research & social media”

“… all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge …” Cognitive Edge

Best practice alternative: look for emergent principles & infer what would on principle be best learnlets.com via @quinnovator

Social Media & Learning

@mpetersell: Just wrote a summary of my first #lrnchat experience: Many Ways to Learn: I Have Learned…Socially!!!

great collection of nonprofit social media slide presentation We Are Media: Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits via @kanter

Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching by Lisa M. Lane: via @moehlert

General Interest

The Decline of Empire by Chalmers Johnson – best hour I have spent – via @robpatrob

evidence of last common ancestor of humans & living apes found, Disproves “Missing Link” via @northernchick

80% of Cuba’s agriculture is organic YouTube video series

Weekly review of what I’ve found and learned on Twitter:

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Models: wrap-around, integrated, collaboration. Jane Hart’s social Learning slideshare presentations. Interesting. via @charlesjennings

mobileYouth: Content is Dead … Long live Context – youth marketing mobile culture research via @northernchick @KellyOlexa (five years ago I suggested Context & Community)

I Finally Get It – Why Social Networking is So Important via @kevindjones

The key to a successful online community: Listening via @aponcier

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Two Knowledge Management definitions @snowded Cognitive Edge and @elsua ELSUA (with several others) via @jackvinson

Safe-fail probes & diffusion of innovations via @mathemagenic (supporting emergent work practices)

Mapping Government 2.0 against the Hype Curve (there are a variety of potential service models along the curve)

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Replacing desktops with laptop, netbook or thin client could reduce energy consumption by 86%

Public Speaking Tips: research ideas, audience engagement, chart techniques, and more via @ldguymn RT @6minutes

Jury nullification: the Canadian criminal justice system’s dirty little secret (I followed a series of tweets and blog posts that led to this)