Work

business & working

AIM 2008

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The 2nd Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference.
The Learning Event You Need to Succeed Online.
The Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference, in Moncton New Brunswick, May 4-6, 2008, brings together leading local and international experts to help businesses throughout Atlantic Canada market their companies online and win the web!

I will be a speaker at AIM this year and I thought I’d check out the other speakers listed. A quick search on each speaker revealed only a few who had some sort of online direct communication:

However, all of these blogs are company PR or multi-user blogs, and not much of the individual comes through, so it will be difficult for me to get to know these folks before the event. I do know some already, so that helps.

Since this conference is about marketing online, and one of the best ways to connect online is by having an authentic conversation with your market, I thought I’d meet several fellow bloggers; but not one other dedicated,  individual blogger shows on the list [please tell me if I’ve missed somebody’s blog or podcast or web radio show].

My topic for this event, which has yet to be confirmed, will be on how freelancers and small businesses can use the Web to market themselves, and a significant part of talk will be on the power of blogs. If you’re interested in blogging for business beyond carrying on a one-way conversation with the ether, then I hope to see you there.

Need an Escape Plan?

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I really enjoy the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog and now you can prepare your own escape to free-agentry with this audio program and workbook. Check out “3 Steps to break through the fear of leaving your corporate job so you can get on the road to starting your own business“:

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I have no connection with this offer, other than being a regular reader. This also seems like a great gift for co-workers who are constantly complaining about their jobs. Think of it as a get out of jail free card ;-)

How clear is your business case?

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Stock markets are shaky and a financial crisis seems inevitable. What does that mean for e-learning or learning 2.0? Will the training department be seen as a critical business function and will online collaboration skills be viewed as essential for maintaining a flexible learning organisation? Or will training and education be seen as luxuries in a time of belt-tightening, layoffs and uncertain markets?

I think that it will be difficult for training and education to be heard above the clamour for scarce resources and investments. Much of the e-learning market is still courses online and it’s hard to give a direct measure of value per course in times when each dollar is counted. Just think, what are the perceived business costs if a course is canceled or put on hold? Learning-related initiatives will need to have clear long and short-term value so that executives will not be able to ignore them. Whether you’re a vendor or inside an organisation, are you ready?

On the other hand, creating performance support tools can be a much more obvious business case. If you’re not in the performance improvement field, you may have to be soon.

The e-lance economy?

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In 1937, economist Ronald Coase published an article, The Nature of the Firm, in the journal Economica. Within the article, Coase argues that firms exist because there are costs inherent to free markets – such as costs of communication, of sharing information, of trying to find goods and services. Given these costs, Coase suggests that firms are formed because it is more efficient and less expensive to complete many of these tasks internally within a formal organization rather than outsourcing them to the market and thus incurring these added costs.

Alex Slawsby on the Innosight Blog looks at the nature of the corporation and how advances in information and communications technologies may be enabling a more modular approach to work, especially networked free-lancers, or e-lancers.

… the ‘e-lance economy’ may represent a modular stage of organizational evolution – indeed, an architecture of easily swappable or plug-and-play components (e.g. individuals or resources). In an age where closed, proprietary systems are recognized as inhibiting the ability of organizations to respond to or even identify innovation-borne change, modularity seems a promising answer; virtually every element of the value chain could come together on an ad-hoc, objective, modular basis without being hamstrung by the subjectivity and myopias brought on by business process and the long-term commitments to physical infrastructure, a capital investment in which innovation may quickly make irrelevant.

An example of this economy would be open source software development, with its lack of organisational structure and the ability for anyone with the right skills to plug in or out of the project, yet maintain the integrity of the code. A key question though is whether e-lancing will become the dominant economic model, as the corporation is, or only suitable for certain industries, such as the film industry’s project-based work model. If e-lancing is more effective in most industries and becomes our dominant work model, then organisations will have to rethink everything from HR to supply chain management.

TrainShift

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According to Nine Shift, one of the nine predictions for shifts that will occur during the first decades of this century involves our preferred mode of transportation.

Chapter 9. Trains Replace Cars: Shift Four
Time becomes more valuable. Since one cannot work and drive at the same time, knowledge workers migrate to trains where they can work and travel at the same time.

This past week I took VIA Rail’s The Ocean from practically my doorstep to within one block of my hotel in Montreal.  There are not many options for train travel, but this time it worked well with my schedule. I left Sackville at 4:00 PM, reviewed my notes and presentation for the next day, had a relaxing dinner and had a good night’s sleep. In the morning I arrived outside of Montreal and was able to have a shower, eat breakfast and arrive downtown at 8:15 AM, ready for a day’s work. I left on Friday evening, again had a pleasant supper and a full night’s sleep. Saturday morning was a time to review some work, catch up on a couple of Google videos that I had downloaded, and arrive home just after noon.

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My usual business trip to Montreal would have meant getting up at 4:00 AM, driving 50 KM to the airport, paying for parking, going through security, squeezing on board a small aircraft, and arriving on the west end of the island of Montreal to then take a taxi or airport shuttle downtown. The return trip would have been the reverse, with an arrival around midnight and then a drive home, perhaps in a snowstorm.

On the train you can get work done. Billable work in my case.  The airfare was the same price as the train, and I had two night’s accommodations included with the train. I also had a heck of a lot more room. The only thing missing was Internet access, though wi-fi is available in the central corridor between Quebec, Windsor and Ottawa.

For trips between 100 and 1,200 KM, the train makes a lot of sense. Now we just need more trains on the schedule.

Going to get me some learnin’

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Coining the term eLearning was the beginning of a problem that is the root of the issue in Tony’s post, where he looks for better terms to describe different interventions, suggesting ePerformance.

And the answer is that there is not a well known term to describe kinds of eLearning solutions that are not typical courseware. I talked about definitions of eLearning a while ago and the basic conclusion I came to is that when you say the term, while it could mean a wide variety of possible solutions – most people think of formal training delivered electronically (virtual classroom, courseware).

The term elearning has been co-opted, especially by software vendors, to only mean courses online, when it could mean much more. However, if one wants to really question our terms and definitions, there is an inherent flaw in using the word “learning” anyway. More accurate descriptors of our various endeavours would be instruction, training, education or performance improvement. I don’t see any great value in creating new terms for interventions that don’t help with our understanding.

For education and training via the Internet we have courses online, and can further describe these as synchronous, asynchronous, instructor-led, facilitated, collaborative, etc.

Barry Raybould’s 1991 definition of performance support as “a computer-based system that improves worker productivity by providing on-the-job access to integrated information, advice, and learning experiences“, only needs to be updated to include network-based systems.

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I’ve used the above diagram before to show how I describe the difference between instructional and non-instructional interventions, with the course being a prime example of an instructional intervention while an information job aid is a good example of a non-instructional intervention. Allison Rossett, in Job Aids and Performance Support, provides this definition:

A helper in life and work, performance support is a repository for information, processes, and perspectives that inform and guide planning and action.

Rossett’s definition could easily describe communities of practice or personal knowledge management as performance support. I believe that the main reason behind any confusion in our terms is because we used learning and elearning to describe what is really instruction. There is a clear difference between instruction (whether it be in the form of training or education) and performance support. We don’t really need a new term, we need to get rid of the old one – learning – which is an internal process and cannot be something that is done to us externally. And yes, I am also guilty of using the term learning inappropriately.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

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For several years I’ve believed that corporatism is one of the primary systemic problems that we need to change in order to address our challenges of global warming, political instability, fundamentalism, poverty, education or environmental degradation. One of the more astute business blogs that I read is Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab (BGSL), where umair says it like it is:

The real problem is that the firm – the corporation, as the fundamental institution of production – is deeply and irrevocably broken. It’s DNA is in shock. The corporation we’ve created is a monster; a form of organization growing more pathological by the day.

BGSL studies industries, markets, firms, and their economics. So those (really) are strong words.

But the evidence is, at this point, almost impossible to refute.

The good news is that there we have options and “the movement” is a source of many new models, whether it be micro-credit, community-supported agriculture,  natural enterprises, etc.

Information overload or just the wrong tools?

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Information overload is supposed to be the scourge of 2008, reports Ars Technica, and one way to address it, according to this news article referencing the same report, is to be smarter with our e-mail.

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E-mail is like cars in an urban metropolis; neither effective nor efficient due to the fact that there are just too many of them. Instead of optimizing an almost-dead technology, I’d suggest using better tools. Set up blogs for one-to-many communications; have wikis for projects, teams and departments; and use instant messaging for quick person-to-person communications. Then keep track of it all with a feed aggregator. With these tools and practices in place, e-mail can be reserved for more official traffic, like sending an invoice or a proposal.

The kids know this already. E-mail is only used to communicate with your parents.