Note: This is a re-post from last week due to a system change (Drupal 4.4 to 4.6).
One interesting observation I made this week is that not everyone is as open to sharing their thoughts and opinions in a public way as my fellow bloggers are. Coming from a community of practice that shares ideas and uses sharing mechanisms like Creative Commons, public Furl and Bloglines archives, you sometimes take for granted that everyone has this outlook. I came across some strong opinions that knowledge is power and it must be kept to oneself or a small circle of people. I keep on learning :-)
Seb also referred to this related paper.
Learning
Learning
Solving Tough Problems
Solving Tough Problems by Adam Kahane is a short book with a powerful message. It is a series of stories about Kahane’s progress from an analytical researcher with a degree in physics to an internationally-recognized facilitator of participatory problem solving. I picked up this book in Montreal last week and later noticed that Kahane is originally from Montreal. He tells the story of his early work with Shell and the likes of Peter Senge and then the eye-opening Mont Fleur sessions in South Africa just prior to the end of apartheid. A major theme in the book is how to overcome ‘apartheid thinking’:
“My analysis also allowed me to recognize a widespread “apartheid syndrome”. By this I mean trying to solve a highly complex problem using a piecemeal, backward-looking, and authoritarian process that is suitable only for solving simple problems. In this syndrome, people at the top of a complex system try to manage its development through a divide-and-conquer strategy: through compartmentalization – the Africaans word apartheid means “apartness” – and command and control. Because the people at the bottom resist these commands, the syndrome either becomes stuck, or ends up becoming unstuck by force.”
At just under 150 pages, this is a short book but one that I will read many times over. The main lesson for me so far is that it is necessary to focus on listening, and that many answers are already there; we just have to relax and let them come to us. I see learning in the same way – when the learner is ready, the teacher will appear. As Kahane says, “If we want to help resolve complex situations, we have to get out of the way of situations that are resolving themselves”.
This way of approaching complex problems has worked, but requires a shift in approach, much like Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. This is where we don’t actually let go of our so-called ‘left brain’ analytical processes, but park them in order to open up our ‘right brain’ conceptualization and feeling abilities. Here is some advice from Kahane’s colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters:
There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple persectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”
I strongly recommend this book for anyone working in groups, meetings, committees, or any other form of social organisation.
This New Business of Learning
The New Brunswick learning industry is getting together in a couple of weeks to discuss several business opportunities. I won’t be there due to other commitments, but that’s what happens when you’re a free agent – you can’t be in two places at one time. I’m adding my comments before the meeting and I think that Godfrey Parkin’s recent post is a good place to start:
Corporate learning has to follow the Google’s “search & connect” model instead of the General Motors “produce and sell” model. Training purists sneer at “just-in-time” help systems, insisting that people need to know how to do things themselves. They undervalue collaborative learning networks, regarding them as somehow cheating. They fervently believe that adult learners must be led, child-like, through pre-determined learning paths mapped out and controlled by a central authority. They gauge the worth of an employee by his or her ability to survive on a corporate desert island, bereft of books, colleagues, mentors, databases, systems, or communication.
Jon Husband recently sent me a paper that synthesised some of the major forces of change in our digital lives. These include greater Internet access; the two-way web as the operating system; and the influence of open source business and development models. Taken together, they are giving individuals much more control and creating millions of separate markets. We’re all individuals and we all have access to the world’s information and can connect with pretty well anyone we want (think long tail). The basis of all business models has changed. The basis for the training business is changing too.
I have already talked about Google as the best learning platform around. No LMS can compete with it. Open source is also changing business models (witness Google again, or IBM or Novell), including service companies. A learning services firm has to stay ahead of the curve because even services can become rules-based and modular, making them ripe for competition from areas where wages are lower.
Lately, I heard that the current enterprise software development model is fundamentally flawed. I think that the same is true of many business principles that are taken for granted. That’s why everyone is looking for the next big thing. The key, in my opinion, is looking at the world with fresh eyes and listening with fresh ears. I wish good vision and hearing to my colleagues.
Open CD
If you want to learn more about using open source applications, but don’t know your way around places like SourceForge or don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research, then checkout the OpenCD project. You can download the whole CD or individual programs including standards like Firefox and OpenOffice as well as others that I plan on testing such as GIMP. According to the website:
The OpenCD project aims to introduce users of MS-Windows to the benefits of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). We include only the highest quality programs, which have been carefully tested for stability and which we consider appropriate for a broad audience. We provide a description and screen-shots of each program, so you can get an idea of what it does before installing. All these applications install and un-install cleanly, so you can be comfortable testing them with the knowledge that they will not adversely affect your system. The programs on the disc are all distributed under an Open Source License (OSI approved), which allows you to freely use and distribute them. You may even change the programs using the source code, which we make available, and distribute your own modified versions, provided you then in turn make the source code available, and give appropriate credit to past contributors.
This is an excellent place to start and you can find out why OpenOffice is making such inroads from a recent post by Stephen Walli.
[I’m currently working on a project in Montreal so posting is light this week.]
Ready for Work
Ready for Work is a self-paced online study programme in the UK designed for potential and recent full-time education graduates. This is a free government-sponsored initiative to prepare people for the workforce:
- Ready to learn
- Thriving in diversity
- Showing respect at work
- Be enterprising!
- Managing stress at work
- Health and safety in the office
- Making email work for you
- Working with the internet
- Data protection at work
- Drugs and alcohol at work
- Be a responsible employee;
- Me and my career
One more online learning programme is not going to change the world but this initiative got me thinking about changes to our education systems. What if the government and industry sponsored more of these types of top-up programmes for job-ready skills? These could be targeted at those people just about to enter or re-enter the workforce. The education system could then move away from a focus on workplace skills and concentrate instead on learning skills. My experience is that the education system is so slow to change that by the time a new programme is implemented it’s already too late for current economic conditions.
Schools keep teaching yesterday’s work skills. Therefore the education system should focus on facilitating learning and critical thinking and media literacy and the like. When students are ready to enter the workforce they will then have the learning skills to blast through whatever job training interests them. Getting the education system out of the job training business may make for happier learners, teachers and parents.
Real Time Collaboration Tools (cheap)
As broadband becomes ubiquitous, synchronous (real time) web applications for learning and business are getting easier to implement. However, many of these systems are still quite expensive. Luigi Canali de Rossi (Robin Good) has an excellent video presentation that covers low-cost web collaboration tools such as voice over IP, web conferencing, screen sharing, document sharing, etc. This is worth 37 minutes of your time, especially if you intend to spend money in this area.
Look Forward
I’ve been at a few conferences and meetings lately and some of the discussion has been around innovation and making Atlantic Canada more productive. Much of what I heard centered around yesterday’s problems. One theme was “how can we create more knowledge jobs”, especially in the e-learning sector. I find this backward-looking because I agree with Dan Pink’s premise that the major factors influencing North American work in the next few years can be put into the context of three questions:
- Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
- Can a computer do it faster?
- Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age?
Pink says that we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, and I see this very clearly. In the e-learning marketplace more and more is being outsourced to excellent companies in Asia. We cannot work cheaper than these companies and we should not try. However, most of the jobs that I see being created are in the area of e-learning content production. When it comes to services, such as e-learning development, the value is higher up the stack. High value services are based on unstructured problem solving, while lower valued services are rules based or even modular. When services are commoditized then competition is based on price and Asia will win over North America (so get used to it). Since services are constantly being commoditized, the aim should be to stay ahead of the pack and higher up the stack. We already see this happening with software development.
Therefore, I don’t believe that the e-learning courseware development model will last very long before companies shift production overseas. I doubt that the intructional designer hiring boomlet in New Brunswick will last for long, unless production moves up the stack. This will take Conceptual Age skills.
There are some companies that are focused more on creativity (right brain stuff) and I would bet that these business models will last longer. One of these companies is FatKat Animation in Miramichi. We need to foster more of these creative companies, the schools that help to educate them like NBCCD and more breeding grounds for future artists. This does not mean that we should abandon the digital economy, only that we have to become the creative and conceptual leaders in the world economy or we’ll wind up with a future generation of digital gas jockeys.
This is old stuff in terms of ideas, but I’m getting scared that our government and industry leaders are still too focused on the Information Age and don’t see the upheaval coming with the Conceptual Age. Once more Marshall McLuhan was correct when he said that, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Small Scale Intelligence Collection, Collation and Dissemination
At yesterday’s breakfast meeting in Fredericton we received a firehose of information on competitive intelligence and then had about 10 minutes to digest and reflect before being asked to comment. Luckily, I had already done some work in the field of web-based competitive intelligence, thanks to Conor Vibert at Acadia University, so the concepts weren’t new. I had also spent a short period as a combat intelligence officer many years ago. With the limited time available, we did not discuss how you could integrate competitive intelligence gathering techniques into your daily work flow.
If this is one of the first times that you’ve come to this site, perhaps as a result of the CSTD conference, here are some of the tools that I use for competitive intelligence. If you look at the left Navigation Bar you will see a section marked "External Info Sites". The first one is my account at Bloglines. Bloglines is a web feed reader (also called an aggregator). It allows me to view any site via a "feed" seen within the bloglines window without having to go to the actual site. If you follow the link you will see what web sites I read. Advantages of feed readers are that you can see what has changed since the last time you looked at a site, and you can preview a post without having to go to the site. This saves a lot of time and allows you to quickly scan many sources. I usually have ~100 feeds that I monitor. There are other feed readers available, such as Newsgator, but Bloglines is perhaps the simplest. If you want to know if a site has a feed then install the Firefox browser and a small orange icon in the bottom right corner will alert you.
A description of how feeds work, with a technology called RSS, is available here. I know this URL because it is saved in my Furl account. I have made this account public as well, so that I can share websites of interest that I don’t mention directly in this blog. Furl also saves a copy of the page for me so that I get to view it even if the site is taken down. Think of Furl as a replacement for "Favourites" or "Bookmarks" in your browser, with these additional advantages:
- you can use multiple categories for an individual post;
- it saves a copy for your private viewing;
- you can access your account from any computer;
- it can be publicly viewable for sharing; and
- your Furl archive is fully searchable.
If you are interested in blogging then you might want to start by Furling because it’s easier and simpler. A similar tool is Del.icio.us.
Blogging is another intelligence method, by which you can post a nascent idea and see what kind of response you get. I’ve recently posted about the benefits of blogging for small businesses. The advantage in this case is that the post to which I’ve referred is within the database of my own website. I own this data but share it under a Creative Commons license that covers everything on this site.
I hope that this is helpful for those new to blogging and the two-way web.
Blogs & Wikis for Learning
There was a fair amount of interest in our presentation at the CSTD Symposium on Mancomm’s use of wikis with healthcare professionals. The MASIE Center has recently published this commentary on the impact of blogs and wikis on learning;
- Instructor Blogs to offer a more dynamic and personal perspective on the teacher’s expertise and view of the context.
- Wiki Handouts that are launched by the instructor or instructional designer and then evolved by the various learners in the classroom or on-line programs.
- RSS Feeds from Blogs and Wikis that are linked to Compliance subjects. As the content changes, the learner receives a RSS feed linking them back to the Blog to receive an update and even take a Compliance Re-Check.
- Context Rich Wikis which are used as ways of making the role of SubjectMatter Experts easier and more time efficient.
These examples are for more traditional training models, where you have an instructor and students. In our case (mental health community of practice) the wiki was used for a diverse group of physically separated professionals to post and share common practices that were not available in any published manuals or procedures. So far this group, many of whom had no computer experience, has created +600 wiki pages.
As for blogs, there are many applications for informal learning, such as this post which is a follow-up to our face-to-face presentation in Fredericton on Monday. For instance, blogs can be used to post presentation material so that learners can determine if the material is suitable for their needs and can act as a medium for questions in advance so that the facilitator can customize the scheduled F2F meeting to meet learner needs. I encourage anyone to use this blog as a follow-up to what was presented and let’s see where the conversation and learning goes.
Linking to subject matter experts (SME) is made easier with blogs and wikis, as one Canadian military officer told me at the conference that they are trying to connect the best SME with their soldiers in training. This could mean a synchronous web session between soldiers in New Brunswick and the expert currently serving in Sudan or Afghanistan. Blogs and wikis can be the glue that holds the learning conversation together between time zones.
“Muse on Gutenberg”
I’m posting the comment to my last post here because it deserves to be highlighted and available to those who only read this blog through an aggregator. The author [you could include your name, even though I have an idea] explains the key issues in our electric/internet era in a much better fashion than I can. When we had our CSTD breakfast meeting today, explosive change of this type did not even register with most participants. We spend too much time looking into the rear view mirror.
If you can’t decrypt the following, then start with McLuhan for Managers.:
muse on gutenberg
Submitted by Visitor on Tue, 17/05/2005 – 02:36.
Agree, the “printed word is already being pushed aside by the likes of IM”. IM is called ‘chat’ essentially because it mimics ‘speech’ afforded by instant electric interaction, not printed text. The medium of IM is ‘electric speech’ as an effect, not text.
‘The Daily Telegraph’ newspaper, conversely, tried to reclaim text as its ‘medium as message’ by appropriating the instant effect of reportage enabled by the electric telegraph.
What’s happening therefore is an erosion of the alphabet into orality because electric communication in its effect is speech-based (audio-tactile), not print-based. Hypertext is non-linear and speech-based (acoustic) because linear space as a ‘print-based’ narrative can be circumvented with every hyper-link. We’re not required (forced) to follow narrative from word to sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, etc. anymore, as was the case for 500 years. Just bookmark it, if anything.
As a result, as McLuhan said, the ‘user is the content’ driven by the users purpose for learning–context dependent on their sophistication, intentions, needs, capabilities, desires, etc.
Their lived ‘context’ subverts mere text. Context as scope, depth, relation, pattern, process, tangent, association, bridge, etc. are spatial, non-linear, non-Euclidean metaphors. Effect and cause collapse together with instant time and space. Real-time communication therefore is speech-based and aural–timeless, always floating in the present tense, so ideas have to be bounced.
‘Bounced’ back and forth communication in IM requires repetition, resonance, the structure of lyrics and poetics, in order to get something across Learning from the rappers, IM becomes more and more acronym RAP (brb). Rhythm is repetition, repetition, repetition…’read my lips’. Rhythm is tribal. Yet IM itself is be replaced by video chat just as blogs are being replaced (subsumed) by video-blogs. The bell tolls for print.
The tragedy of Gutenberg resulted from the German Protestant bible competing against the Christian latin, the infamous Reformation. A time of nasty inquisition. The effect was that the Renaissance (Church) got replaced by the Enlightenment (State), pushing rationalism further known as Modernism, Objectivism, Formalism, Realism, Socialism, blah, blah, most of the ‘isms’.
Now, linear education has been reversing (imploding) since the telegraph, ushering in post-structural and postmodern (just used to be called, rhetoric)–in painting, Dadism, Surrealism, and in music, all that dissonance and jazz. And, non-linear narratives become (one liners) staged improv (Bush-isms).
Now, Cartesian sciences have little hope of probability against non-linear narratives unless they teach ‘method’ to save face during their ‘culture wars’. That is, method is first show as constructed for objectivity (sorry Plato)–a centimeter is a usefully contrived unit of space, not an intrinsic eternal form.
As non-linear modes of perception become more and more prevalent to subsume linear print ‘concept-based’ text, science is forced to become more and more multidisciplinary (i.e., accountable to its methods, not extoll its contrived objectivity). We don’t need to globalize. We can internationalize, instead… ecologies subsume boundaries.
Because the ground keeps moving… IM is speech-based or percept-based media so our speedy typed texts are basically concepts fast parsing into speech-based thinking. Speech is Q&A, interactive, dialogic, fluid and interpretive, not definitive like your everyday print-based dictionaries. Dynamic flux not static statements create persuasion–action. Verbal contracts replace written. Networked relationships superimpose individuals. In short, Clark might well quip in, say, less than 10 years, the ‘tragedy’ of non-linear video and speech”, pushing poor old linear Gutenburg out the pixel.
It’s a dangerous time. The orals versus the prints (arts vs. sciences)–we’ll need a graphical operating system about now… not just cute Penguins. Balancing linear and non-linear depends on the balance of competing mediums (i.e., multimedia/convergence).
So the real battlefield will be information or knowledge design–the competition between written print, image and sound/speech. The content providers trying to construct meaning interaction is coming to everyone’s multimedia desktop, as a basic skill set, not just the 3R’s
McLuhan saw the need to see this shift as a civil imperative–to ‘perceive the grammar of communication’. If we confused message as medium, we’ll drown in violence from media fallout (PAX American). The medium is unconscious (i.e., seeing the word at the expense of the alphabet). The printed alphabet created linearity. Gutenburg just pushed it upon us faster using his 15th century xerox. Now we need him back before we dump narrative (keyboard) overboard with Dragon Naturally Speaking. That’s a tough challenge, ahead, to master the matrix…
As we ponder how to tinker with the ADDIE instructional design model, developed to train soldiers for WWII, the real issue is what are we going to do in the post-print world that is fast approaching. I think it’s time to master more of the non-linear and non-literate media (e.g. Flickr & podcasting)