This past week I’ve started using two new web applications.
BlogFlux is a blog monitoring service, similar to Technorati, but with one really exceptional module – MapStats. You can see the MapStats button on the navigation bar to the left, under External. Ever since I created this website, I have had a statistics service that gives me the number of visitors, number of pageviews, popular content, etc. MapStats gives this information and more – it’s contextualized by geography and behaviour. For instance, I now know that someone in a specifc city (or at least their server is there) came to my website following a Google search for a specific phrase. Everyday I can see how many people actually came onto this site and what brought them here. This is excellent feedback. BlogFlux filters out all of the RSS pings, comment spammers and trackback spammers so that I get an accurate picture of real people coming to this site. And of course, this service is free. BlogFlux is only available for "real" blogs, and yes they do check, as I can attest.
The other Web 2.0 tool is Writely. This is an online collaborative word processing application. It’s like a wiki, but much easier to use and invite other collaborators as you go. Current functionality is with MS Word, but the developers are looking for an OASIS translation library in order to make it compatible with OpenOffice.org. So far, it’s a simple and efficient tool for collaborative document development. Writely even supports embedded pictures in your Word document.
Both of these services are in Beta, so you have to be willing to accept some glitches. BlogFlux has been very quick in addressing any issues that I’ve raised (thanks Ahmed). They have even reduced the javascript file for the MapStats button from 22kb to 8.4kb [now 2.8kb], so pages can load quickly.
I would recommend BlogFlux and MapStats for any blogger and I think that Writely is the first of what will soon be a basic tool for everyone – the web-based word processor.
Work
business & working
Knowledge-worker jobs, health insurance & education
William Draves at Nine Shift talks about the end of the middle class, with fewer jobs offering a middle class wage, so that workers feel that they have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. According to Draves, the three keys to keeping a strong middle class are – knowledge worker jobs, health insurance and education. It seems that Canadian politicians are on the right track at both the federal and provincial levels, though I’m not sure if all of their methods are adequate or well-targeted. At least we don’t have to convince them about the importance of these three pillars.
So what will replace the corporation as the source of middle class jobs? I’m not sure, but there’s a good discussion of this at Mark Federman’s blog.
Search Tips
Yesterday, Eliiott Masie stated that Google was one of the best learning tools around (anyway, that’s what he says he told Bill Gates). Following his presentation, Ben Watson said that Google search results are information overload and that he doesn’t find it a useful way to get just-in-time information. I use Google a lot (it’s how I’ve developed my limited skills with HTML) but I think that there are many people who do not know how to maximize the full potential of a search engine.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has just republished ten tips for searching the web, so now there is a ready performance support tool for anyone who wants to improve their search skills. That’s the power of networked communities. I Furled it too!
You can also go to Google’s advanced search tips.
Bureaucracy = Death
Seth Godin’s quotable Bureaucracy = Death raises a number of issues on why preventive actions are seldom taken by bureaucratic organisations. Seth talks about the effects of bureaucracy on marketing, but it also results in inertia in healthcare, education, et al. I doubt that his idea of a Chief No Officer would be embraced by many companies or institutions.
My belief is that it is the basic nature of managerial organisations that is the prime contributor to a reactive versus a preventive mindset. Why were the levees around New Orleans not maintained? Why is there no funding for programmes such as Canada’s Participaction, but we continue to add more expensive acute care machinery to our hospitals? Why is early childhood education ignored when it is a prime contributor to healthy, contributing citizens? And finally, what can we do to change this?
Innovation – Ideas Need to be Exploited
Here is an excellent quote from BusinessPundit, via Small Business Trends:
Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable.
This is a good follow-up of an earlier post I made on The Medici Effect, showing that having a good idea may be important, but follow-through is critical.
Performative Ties
An article on Performative Ties from Knowledge@Wharton (requires free membership) describes how professional services companies use informal transfer methods to leverage their knowledge. In a study conducted by Prof. Sheen Levine, it was found that:
…what gives firms competitive advantage isn’t just their repository of sheer knowledge, but their use and encouragement of so-called “performative ties” — those impromptu communications made by colleagues who are strangers in which critical knowledge is transferred with no expectation of a quid pro quo.
Performative ties, as described in this article, seem to be similar to the weak ties that could help you get a job much easier than strong, familial ties can. The research on performative ties for knowledge-sharing inside corporations shows that loose peer-to-peer networks are effective ways to transfer implicit knowledge.
I think that those same performative ties exist outside these professional services companies, especially amongst bloggers. Reading or commenting on a blog creates a weak tie that can be used to ask a more pointed question via e-mail. I have done this on a several occasions, and have received similar requests. The responses are always quick and candid.
According to Levine, “What they [professional services firms] do well, is move knowledge around effectively, taking the company’s entire accumulated know-how and gathering it quickly to a single point to create a solution for a client.” If that is their prime competitive advantage then looser groups of independent consultants, who share through their blogs, may be just as effective at providing professional services as these more structured companies that currently rule the market. That’s positive news for me and my associates :-)
Gas up or plug in?
An interesting dichotomy is appearing in our world. The price of communication is decreasing while the price of transportation is increasing. Most of our transportation systems rely on oil and it is becoming more expensive to travel any distance. At the same time, many of us have the luxury of cheap global communications, with fixed monthly long-distance rates, e-mail and more recently – voice over IP.
I’m wondering if the recent price increases in gas will finally push us into new models of work. Some organisations allow for tele-commuting and there are virtual workers with satellite offices spread all over the world, but the norm is still the worker going to the workplace. For some this is a necessity, but in many cases it’s a job requirement to ensure that employees are kept under control.
Working at a distance – with the Internet as my medium and software as my tools – has been my work reality for a few years. It takes some skill and knowledge to work virtually but I sure am glad that I no longer have my 110 km (68 mile) daily commute with gas at $CA 1.30 per litre (=$US 4.15 per gallon).
Gloria Gery on Performance
I read Gloria Gery’s Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) in 1994. At the time, I was responsible for training development on a helicopter that the Canadian military had just purchased. EPSS became a key reference book for my approach to training design and the later creation of a specification for computer-based and web-based training. The focus of our team became much more one of performance versus training, and luckily I found that air crew were very open to the idea of performance support.
Jay Cross and Tony O’Driscoll have just written an excellent review on Gloria’s contribution to the work, learning, performance field. According to Jay:
The first time I heard Gloria speak, seven years ago, she provided the mantra of my efforts, “Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized.”
In my experience as both an internal and an external consultant, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. Gloria Gery was ahead of her time, as there is still a shortage of good references on how to develop performance-centred workplace interventions. EPSS Revisited is a more recently published book on the subject but as I have noted there are few how-to resources on EPSS and fewer on workflow learning.
In the words of Gloria Gery:
Performance Support focuses on work itself while training focuses on the learning required to do the work. Integrating resources in the workplace is inevitable, and the need is urgent. Filtering resources so people get the tools and resources they need while actively working is the goal. Work process and roles are the primary filters. The mechanisms vary: portals, performance-centered workflow interfaces, enterprise applications, integration projects, etc, but what’s important is that performer be able to name that tune in one note, to perform in exemplary fashion.
Natural Capitalism Without Venture Capital
Business Opportunities Weblog found this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the fact that few companies actually receive their funding from venture capitalists:
In fact, a recent report from Babson College and the London School of Business concluded that fewer than one in 10,000 companies in the United States receive their initial funding from venture capital firms. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report also found that entrepreneurs provide 65 percent of their startup capital, with the rest of the funding typically coming from friends, family or co-workers.
"If self-funding by entrepreneurs and informal investments dried up, entrepreneurship would wither and die," the authors wrote.
"If self-funding by entrepreneurs and informal investments dried up, entrepreneurship would wither and die," the authors wrote.
This data supports the model of the Natural Enterprise developed by Dave Pollard, one that I have used and counselled its use for some start-ups. Dave advocates organic financing:
Natural Enterprise differs from traditional business (even traditional entrepreneurial business) in two critical ways:
- Where the traditional business develops its product, mass produces it, and then advertises to create demand for the product, Natural Enterprises start by identifying unmet customer needs, developing customized solutions, then delivering to the pre-qualified customers, and marketing virally.
- Where the traditional business has a hierarchical organization structure and common shares, with control of the business often wielded by corporations or people other than those who run it, Natural Enterprises are flat and unincorporated, controlled equally by their members.
Is this the real form of capitalism, especially for Internet-based and small businesses?
New Role for Instructional Designers?
Elliott Masie in his latest Trends newsletter asks this question:
What is the next role for Instructional Design?
My experiences in instructional design over the past ten years is that it hasn’t changed too much. In the military I learned how to apply the systems approach to training as well as how to create computer-based training, instructor-led training, etc. My conversations with e-learning companies, instructional designers and academics shows that instructional design is still wedded to the course as the basic unit of instruction (I use instruction instead of learning because the former is usually the focus). I believe that there is still a huge gap that instructional design could fill, given the right tools and perspective.
Let me start by saying that my most memorable projects in the learning field have been those that created non-instructional solutions, specifically performance support. These have included online job aids and just-in-time tools to do some specific task. The tools are not that fancy but the analysis required to find the right tool for the context can be quite time-consuming. The cost savings are usually evident and rather significant.
However, you will be hard-pressed to find a program that focuses on ‘how-to’ develop performance support solutions, because developing courses is so much easier. Don Clark has a good graphic on Performance, Learning, Leadership & Knowledge. This is a good place to start to look at the non-instructional side of performance design. My own experience shows that non-instructional interventions (EPSS, KM, CoP) are very intensive at the front end (analysis) but require fewer resources in the middle (design).
In traditional instructional design you may spend up to 20% of your project costs on analysis, but for performance support this amount could go up to 80%. Once the solution is clearly specified, it doesn’t require a factory floor of instructional designers and can be developed by a small team of programmers, graphic artists, etc.
The next role for instructional design should be to get out of the course in a box metaphor. The web as a medium is better suited for non-linear, non-instructional learning programs than for ADDIE-developed courses. Just as the printed book changed academia, so too the web is changing training and education. Get used to it.