I think it’s that persistent uncertainty in our professional (hell, even our personal) lives that drives so much demand for relevant and meaningful opportunities for people to learn from and share with each other. This is why I think the unconference scene is just going to continue to grow. Our own community gathering has been cited in a lot of ways; some people describe Up to All of Us as either 1) a conference; 2) an unconference; or 3) a retreat. I’ll go into deep dives on each of these some time in the future (or over a beer or a coffee), but suffice it to say, here are some quick descriptions of each:

A conference is a highly organized event, generally tied to a specific trade or association, with a set agenda. Speakers are lined up in advance, programs are made available and both attendees and speakers have pretty well-established roles by which they participate. The organizers, beyond being an emcee, facilitate the overall operation of the event, clearing the way for everyone else to fulfill their roles. The trade or association that is associated with the event operates mostly independently from the event itself. There are exceptions and they’re easy to cite, but even in many of the exceptions, the model for organization and interaction is largely top-down.

An unconference has several flavors and variants, arguably the most common is the BarCamp model. These can be organized by anyone for anyone (or everyone). There’s a lot to cover on BarCamps but the gist is that someone (or some group) convenes the unconference, quickly lays out the ground rules and the agenda is set largely ad-hoc and the participants themselves set and run the sessions or topics organically. There is a lot of work that goes into facilitating the emergent nature of such a conference. Some unconferences recur on a regular basis as a community develops around them.

A retreat has people co-locating together over a few days where they exchange, eat and sleep together (not like “sleep together” — get your heads out of the gutter, people) and this is often what Saul Kaplan might call “the random collision of unusual suspects.” Church organizations, work teams and some recognized professional groups gather together — generally they share some explicit reasons for gathering together and retreats are a vehicle for teams to bond more, work through sticky problems, etc.

As I’m sure people who are part of Up to All of Us (and everyone else) might gather… we’re borrowing a bit from all of these. We’re like a conference in that the attendees themselves don’t really set the agenda explicitly, even though there is an implicit design that is largely defined by the talents, skills and body of work by the participants, curated and encapsulated like “power pellets” that Megan and I think (hope) will nudge some conversations or ideas in some intentional ways. We’re like an unconference where we have structured holes to be filled by whatever emerges from the group convened, even though by the group we’ve gathered together, we somewhat stack the deck on what kinds of topics might emerge. We’re like a retreat in that we basically spend a solid couple of days living and learning together, though many of the people coming (especially this year) don’t really know each other all that well, but walk away knowing they want to.

That describes the moments we’re all gathered in the same place. To look at Up to All of Us with just this lens is to miss the bigger story: the community. The community that supports and drives these gatherings is a huge ingredient in many gathering-like events in a couple of different communities: the wonderfully energetic ORDCamp in Chicago has a community that is invisible to the outside, but once you’re part of it, you can appreciate how the dynamic nature of the community affects the gathering; the affirming and enlightening group that is The Overlap does this, too, with a diverse community of academics, entrepreneurs, technologists and designers across a variety of disciplines. These recurring gatherings (like the one Megan & I ran last year) use the events to feed their collective cultures with new people with their fresh perspectives, questions, insights and personalities.

Trade organizations that hold conferences bring together a lot of people from one discipline or another. Up to All of Us and the communities it draws from are multidisciplinary, in our case, spanning multiple approaches to design and a very large audience spanning professional learning, K-12 and higher education and training.

Retreats pull together a lot of the usual suspects you’d work with. Up to All of Us pulls together some usual suspects, as the disciplines, broad as they are, are somewhat focused – but hardly anyone who’s part of the community works with each other on a regular basis, lives near each other, etc. This is a community of shared interests and it manifests itself through a mailing list with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

There’s nudging, there’s moderation and there’s facilitation — mostly, though, such are groups that authentically provide personalized professional and personal development because with the intimacy of their events and the encouragement to own one’s own experience as part of the collective event… well, there are a lot of people who aren’t finding that nourishment elsewhere.

Megan and I saw this need over a year ago and amazing things have happened — not because of anything we’re doing as facilitators or hosts — because really all we’re doing is summoning people together. I think we set a pretty good table for the metaphorical dinner party and do our best to bring together good people with a hunger, if not a comfort, for ambiguity and uncertainty… and we give people explicit permission with to be their authentic selves.

So what sets unconferences like what we’ve done with Up to All of Us apart is the intimacy that comes from putting some strong but permeable boundaries around the community so people can roam ideas with trust, and experiences that encourage autonomy, self-directed learning and autonomy. This can scale by growing it slowly and organically, giving people and their ideas time to rise and as the small cultures we create together within these trusted circles mature we knead the culture into other places and help everyone else find their way.

It starts with love.

Photo by Jay Cross

Last year, Up to All of Us was born out of a love for the people we know in learning, education and design and the mission Megan and I felt to enable the brightest minds, warmest hearts and gifted hands… to improve themselves and their craft.

Once we started working together towards the first Up to All of Us, our shared desire to help provide an opportunity for good people to come together and focus not only on their own development but on the bigger things they want to improve in the world, we found in and of ourselves something special — a shared desire to make ourselves and our world better. With the people we brought together and, removed us all from our normal context in beautiful Sedona, last year we touched on something rather epic and we practiced what we preached.

Willow Point Resort – Photo by Megan Bowe

This year was somewhat the same and somewhat different. Again we gathered incredibly bright lights — many of whom we didn’t know. We, as Megan blogged, ventured into the unknown with our friends and comrades. Having done a few of these types of experiences, we handled the logistics without any of the drama of having learned the hard way how to do it for the first time last year. Again, everyone found the opportunity to focus on their own development and align it to something bigger.

I was emotionally drained for a host of personal reasons during much of the design and planning for this year’s experience. Megan cared so much about what we were doing that she took the reins when I could not. That this was invisible to almost everyone is a testament to how wonderful and strong Megan is as a friend and a partner and how brilliant she is as an experience designer. It was not fair to her. It is something I aim to make right as my head, heart and hands get back in the game and we plan for the future.

I’m uncomfortable with the unknown.

I talk a good game and I talk it often enough I can convince myself that I’m good with the unknown, but like everyone, I get overwhelmed by the vastness of what is unclear to me. I shut down. In those moments, I’m thankful that I can intuit what’s good and right and have people to nudge me towards what I should be doing. I’m thankful that I can pay attention to the nudges (most times) and steer towards that intuition.

It took our weekend together (and this last week after it) for me to wake the hell up [note: this is what's on the coffee mugs we gave out last weekend) and realize that. To find my fucking way [note: this is on this year's flask ], we all have to start with love.

We can’t cling to the past. We can learn a lot from our choices; We can’t allow them to be the crutch we lean on expecting whatever we know and/or whatever we’ve done is somehow binding or permanent, lest it stunt “the possible.” What we know should be our rail against the storm of uncertainty. When we meet things as they are — bracing ourselves with what we know and then letting it go — it’s that moment when we learn.

Jay Cross in a cowboy hat, me in a pink shirt, grappling with complexity. – Photo by Megan Bowe

So, if we’re to improve — if we’re to navigate the uncertainty that comes from everything under the sun able to be connected — then the answers we seek are rarely going to be linear. There are going to be lots of paths and lots of obstacles to get wherever we want to go next.

So as I find myself lost in my thoughts — uncertain, scared, angry, confused — I realize today at this moment… whatever it is I’m to do, it has to start with love. I took that important reminder away from this weekend and it took everyone there to do it. I can’t thank you all enough for the gift you’ve given me — my soul.

Different as it should be.

Aisha Taylor sharing at Up to All of Us 2012 – Photo by Megan Bowe

Whatever the experience that is Up to All of Us… whatever it was a year ago, we’re all different now. The collective is different. The world is different. The wonder of this last weekend is that we met us all where we were at. Next year, it will be different again, and it will again be something unique and special… and wonderful… in a different way.

I’m really glad I have such an outstanding partner-in-crime to help keep things focused on what’s most important, because I wasn’t as ready for the unknown as she was. As the Avett Brothers sing, I had a head full of doubt — even while we were already on a road full of promise.

Video: Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise by the Avett Brothers

Up to All of Us as both community and experience was summoned out of love so that those of us who can’t find what we need elsewhere have a place where we can get what we need from each other. Marcia Conner, speaking at DevLearn years ago, had almost 2000 people chanting “together we’ll be better.” If we’re honest with ourselves about how much we want to make shit better, we need to be the change we each want to see in the world and face the challenges and the vastness of what we don’t know. It’s up to all of us to make that happen.

Megan stepped up huge to make that happen this year. Brian stepped up to make that happen, as did Jason Early, Jay Cross, Adam Menter, Julie Dirksen and a host of people in attendance and not. They did amazing things for this weekend to happen and if I’m to be completely honest, what makes this year special, like last year was special, is that people always step up to make each other better, through their heads, their hands and their hearts. There was no requirement for our friends to do so. Yet they needed to, as we all need to in the quest to achieve something bigger than ourselves.

Megan Bowe, Mike Hruska and Brian Dusablon as we landed in Austin and headed for a food truck.

If you’re trying to figure out how to make that happen… it starts with love.

I’m growing really fond of coffee — not just for the caffeine (though I really like that part). I love the way a perfect cup of great coffee explodes in my mouth, filling that space with flavor. The esters giving a “big mouth” feel that hits you immediately with some acidic, citrus tone and finishes as you swallow with a resonant sweetness that is really clean. Coffee has 800 flavor components to it — 400 of them are aromatics. This is the stuff I learned.

Making a good espresso is an exercise in playing within constraints. The water should be right around 200º F. Shot out of a machine at about 600 lbs/sq. in., you will force that water through 18 grams of ground coffee tamped into a typical American filter basket (probably around 14 grams if you’re in Europe) to make a double espresso. You’ll have that water going from anywhere between 23-28 seconds. More than that and the espresso turns to crap. Less than that and the espresso tastes really acidic with none of the sweetness because there isn’t enough heat or time to dissipate the sugars in the coffee grind (acid dissipates faster, so it dissipates first).

The amount of coffee grind to water is important, and there are recognized ratios, where weight is your guide to how well you’re doing at making the espresso:

• Normale ratio is 1:2 – 18g coffee grind, 4oz water leads to 36g coffee.
• Ristretto ratio is 1:1.55 – 18g coffee grind and enough water to lead you to 28g coffee.
• There’s no recognized name for the ratio that Intelligentsia uses (and I liked), but let’s call it Mezzo — this is 1:1.8 – 18g coffee and enough water to get you 32g coffee.

After making probably 15 shots of espresso in a three hour time span that it takes a lot of work and it’s the give in these constraints that, when you play with them, gives you the variation that often leads to crap espresso and, when intuition and competence work together, can lead to mastery. You see, what we look for in the creation of espresso is the weight. If it takes more than 28 seconds to get to that weight, it’s already wrong, and you need to start over. If you get to the desired weight before 23 seconds, it’s already wrong and you need to start over. You need to clean the filter basket well every time you make an espresso. You may need to adjust the grind, even using the same coffee beans from the same lot, brewing one hour to the next. So many other factors in the temperature, the air pressure, the humidity in the room, the heat of the burrs in the grinder, the heat from the espresso machine… these seemingly intangible elements come into play which make automating great espresso impossible.

Craighton Berman (@craightonberman) and Chris McAvoy (@chmcavoy) led a fantastic session on The Craft of Coffee at #ORDcamp, capping off a week of awesome deep dives into this growing hobby of mine.

Now… read what I wrote just now. It’s not that you can’t fully automate making espresso. Clearly one can. I’m going to tell you that having had many a machine-crafted espresso and many a hand-crafted espresso, while the machine will go through the same motions with precision, it will never yield a perfect cup. Humans are prone to fail at that, too… but given competence strengthened by a developed intuition, humans can rock an espresso that is perfection, and when so much coffee is built on getting espresso right, as much as we can allow people to do that well, we have to, but it’s not about the tools — at the end of the day, it’s about the craft.

There are three focus areas to preparing that espresso: dose, tamp and the insert. The dose is how much coffee grind you’ll use, which is 18g. The real coarseness of the grind is adjustable, but the total weight of that coffee grind is consistent.

If you don’t tamp the grind into the filter basket correctly, it’s going to affect how the water hits and works through the filter to make the coffee. With that tamper as an extension of your wrist and thumb, straight through your forearm, you’re going to press the tamper into the basket straight, feeling the pressure into your shoulder and then give a slight twist. Get this wrong and the water won’t distribute evenly.

Coffee beans that are ground for espresso are ground very fine — and that much surface area being exposed to the air — you have very little time to convert that grind into great coffee before the grind itself goes stale. Coffee ground for espresso goes stale in less than 60 seconds. In that time you need to get 18g into the filter basket, tamp it and insert that basket into the machine starting the water not more than two seconds before the residual water in the machine starts to cook the coffee. You start your timer and the water pressure at the same time.

Now… about that cup of coffee I need to make

• I helped lead the charge on moving “Project Tin Can” into a full-on specification called Experience API with a whole bunch of people.
• I founded a new community (and a retreat) called Up to All of Us, organized with newfound partner-in-crime, Megan Bowe (@meganbowe) and a whole lot of help from those in attendance.
• We organized a second retreat for the Overlap community, paying forward the incredible amount of experience I had at Overlap ’11
• I keynoted a few conferences, ran some workshops, disrupted organizations with permission.
• I wrote magazine articles.
• I actually did some UI/UX and designed a web app.
• I made a lot of new friends.
• I made a lot of new local friends.
• I helped a lot of people figure out what they need/want to do and, some, figure out how to do it.
• I became closer with my kids.
• I dropped 50 pounds.
• I took to the law of two feet and made some changes to help me and others find our own happy.
• I co-worked with incredible people.
• I started liking me a lot more.

Yes, I made awesome happen. More realistically, I took on a lot of shit this year that I just had to take on.

I’m actualizing. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy. I’m not even going to tell you (yet) that I’ll be better off as a result of what I’ve taken on and how I’ve done it, or because of what the feedback is now.

I’ll tell you that I feel better for it, because there are things I wanted to see in the world and by sharing them with others they became real. Sharing is more than just telling people what these things are; rather, it’s that I let people in to own the ideas with me.

I’m becoming much more the cause, and much less the effect. This doesn’t always make me happy, in a unicorn-filled-rainbow way. Doing so helps me sleep better and lose weight.

So, what have I learned?

I’ve learned that when you surround yourself with really good people with bright minds, big hearts and steady hands you can do amazing things. When you can share those things because they’re bigger than anything you can do on your own, you can share the dents you want to put in the universe. Such dents tend to be so big that there’s plenty of room to share, for each to claim a piece of it as their own, and to collectively look at what you’ve done as a collaborative work.

That’s what Up to All of Us was for me. It was only special when other people believed it to be so. The Experience API became special when other could dive in, own it with others and make it their own.

I’ve been learning, finally, how to collaborate. I’ve been learning, finally, how to lead. What works for moving people and our big rocks is also a good set of mantras to help move life… mostly, it comes down to communicating often: truthfully, honestly, openly and candidly – especially when it’s hard.

The only thing I can possibly add to that is to focus on what actually has to be done, instead of how it has to be done, and open yourself to all the ways in which it might get done. Then? Ready yourself to be wrong about everything. Avoid using “no,” “can’t,” “won’t” and  ”don’t.” At the risk of inciting a riot, work your ass off to say “yes, and…” to the hard stuff.

I’m putting a small dent in the universe. You can make bigger ones, too.

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back.” – Michael Caine as ‘Cutter’ in “The Prestige” (2006)

When I and many others leading the charge describe the Experience API, this year we talked about it in terms of problems it immediately solves given the state of standards in learning technology today: we enable tracking of learning experiences via mobile devices, native applications, games and simulations; we allow for the tracking of individuals and groups of people; we account for different roles and responsibilities in a given learning experience, such as facilitators or teachers as well as “learners.”

I couldn’t be happier that the greater community has embraced this with as much enthusiasm and momentum as we have today. 2012 has been an incredible year. This was our pledge — Experience API is something very much like you’ve seen before with SCORM, but it allows for more.

I’ve presented it like this over the last year because I’ve come to believe, very strongly, in something Jane Jacobs wrote many years ago in her seminal work, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs wrote about new ideas.

“As for really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

To introduce something as new as what Experience API portends for the greater Training & Learning Architecture now being realized, it had to be introduced in the context of what people in our community already know and understand. It has to enable all the things that one currently does with SCORM, lest it be rejected simply because it doesn’t do that which you already know, but better/easier/faster/more awesome.

So… this is where things now turn.

Like a magician, this is where I’m going to move the learning, education and training out of the picture for the moment and tell you that Experience API is really not about learning, training or education as you know it. Yes, it enables all those things you’re already doing. No, it’s not really about those things at all.

In this last year we’ve talked a little bit about the need for people to own their own data. There are many practical reasons for this. One reason is that for a lot of people 30ish years-old, the only way to move ahead in the workplace is to keep moving. Most people don’t have employment in one organization that will span their career. Most people entering the workplace will have many different jobs, even different careers, and they’ll be working well into a different kind of retirement as we think about it today.

There’s no need for people to own their data if they can’t learn from it or use it to inform, change and/or improve themselves. Among the few criticisms that have pointed to what we’re doing with the Experience API, there is one that itches at me. The field of Instructional Design, as it is practiced today, is prone to track everything with the Experience API, and the critical question asked is, “what good will come of that?”

I’ll tell you straight up: no good will come of tracking everything.

I think what people need for themselves, what managers and business leaders and teachers and leaders and coaches of every stripe want is useful information about performance. Performance is largely not about creating content at all; it’s about making meaning out of what people do and using that knowledge to help people do better.

Here’s an anecdote: Big networks like Google and Facebook track lots and lots of information about what we do online. When I talked to people who invest a lot of money in online campaigns that involve either, I’m told that neither organization can easily share much about even the demographics of the audiences that respond to the campaigns. Given how much data they have available, it surprised me.

My hypothesis is that large networks can track every interaction, and I think because they track do track so much, they know very little about who is doing what, in what context, towards a particular goal. By being first to make it easy to track everything, they have a mountain of data, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack without knowing what the needle looks like. Such data infrastructure is built for general purposes (and, um… to sell us stuff).

If we want to find useful information about performance — the kind of information that helps us learn about what we do as individuals and teams and, further, help us improve, we start with the tools and media people use in a given activity with an assumption of what’s people are supposed to do with them. We describe this in terms of what are the interactions in which one would participate, given the designed activity/activities. We then design an experience that captures specific information that supports that hypothesis of what’s supposed to happen.

This isn’t a one-and-done process… it has to spiral — it must be tweaked and iterated. As a designer and as an analyst, we’re interested in the truth: are our assumptions about what’s supposed to happen correct? If so, if we track some more things, will those also prove correct? If what we expect to happen doesn’t happen, what does that mean? Perhaps we need to look at other information; perhaps we need to design a different set of activities (or redesign the existing activities differently) to create the desired experience.

The breadcrumbs we create by doing this tell a particular story. It is up to us, before all the data is even collected, to define what it all should mean, in terms of some competency or goal. What we do then is more like matching a particular needle while the haystack of information builds — very different from what Facebook and Google do, and I think this is a very different approach from what higher-education does with learning analytics today.

This is how we need to think about the consulting practice of the learning professional, the educator and the trainer — the value we add to our organizations, be they schools, hospitals, small businesses, large businesses, militaries or governments.

The value of what we as professionals can do with the Experience API is going to be realized by others: the business analysts, the managers and the mentoring figures and coaches in our concerns. We’re harnessing this technology for them.

As professionals we tend to talk about the value we add to an organization in terms we’ve been conditioned to use: “how do we help people learn?” I hear the lamentations of instructional designers everywhere. For ten years, I’ve been part of this field of work, and the complaints about this have grown louder.

“They come to us with the courseware already decided as a solution.” Well, we as a field haven’t offered much else to change that presumption. Start doing something different, which is easy for me to write and very hard to do… the world is changing and we must change a bit with it, realizing our value by the contribution we make to a bigger, shared goal instead of our value being realized simply by the objects we make. Our jobs are to help people improve so that as organizations or communities, we improve. Building courseware is not our job; it’s a by-product.

“We don’t have a seat at the table.” Well, kick down the door to whatever meeting is going on and bring a business analyst with you, and show your C-level person what you can demonstrate about how people are doing their work that would make your company more money.

That is a conversation your business partners want to have.

Working hand-in-hand with your business analysts, your enterprise architects, your accounting department… working with these people capture relevant information about what happens before, during and after a customer encounter is but one tool you have in your arsenal that is really relevant to the organization.

Working as a multi-disciplinary team, you can still make use of the foundations of instructional design (even ADDIE), designing interactions that collect evidence of performance — helping the individuals, teams and organizations make informed decisions instead of designing/developing content not knowing how it’s really helping.

My pledge to you was that Experience API would be able to do everything SCORM does, but better. That is still absolutely true. The turn is that doing this isn’t so much a benefit in and of itself — the benefit to the organization is different than you’ve been able to realize with the tools most of us use today.

You’re not going to cheer for this yet because you’re cheering will happen when learning comes back to the front again — real, honest-to-goodness learning (and it will — believe me).

Make no mistake, though — this is where the ordinary service you’ve provided to your organization can become something vital and extraordinary. It’s not going to be a turn-key solution — not for a long time.

It’s going to be the hardest thing our communities have ever done, but we have an economy to rebuild and a whole bunch of people we can enable to develop themselves. If we’re to be relevant at all, we need to be working toward much bigger goals. The information will come from data we design; exchanged and expressed with the help of the Experience API.

We’re going to make it happen.

Adam Bockler from Float Learning already wrote a great blog post on it, so I won’t add to that, but I will put the videos here in case you’re interested in me talking about something related to, but not necessarily, the Experience API (“Tin Can“).

The “quick” interview:

The presentation and sketching:

Writing

I just got done with a series of posts for ASTD’s Learning Technologies Blog of which I’m really quite proud.

• We’re All New at This
• Roll With It
• Design with Service in Mind
• On Templates

There are also two articles currently in the works for Training Magazine and T+D Magazine. Writing comes easy enough but edits and approvals always take time.

Speaking

I recently spoke at the US Coast Guard’s Human Performance Technology Workshop with the wonderful Steve Flowers (@xpconcept) about how the Experience API fit with the goals of Human Performance Technology. I love hanging with Steve. He totally gets it. The fact that Brian Dusablon (@briandusablon) and I got to hang out so much during that trip was just bonus (more on Brian below).

There’s a bunch of fun stuff coming up:

Megan Bowe (@meganbowe) and I are doing a road show of sorts talking about Experience Design. Over the last year, with Up to All of Us and Overlap12, we’ve built a toolbox for designing and facilitating experiences that meet at the intersections of data and community, making use of the Experience API (“Tin Can”). We’re doing this workshop three times over the next couple of months, with slight changes in focus:

• EPIC 2012 (3 hours) – October 14, 2012 – Savannah, GA
• DevLearn 2012 (8 hours) – October 30, 2012 – Las Vegas, NV
• ASTD TechKnowledge 2013 (8 hours) – January 29, 2013 – San Jose, CA

DevLearn 2012 has some particularly interesting things popping that I’m involved with. Along with Up to All of Us and Overlap12, Megan and I are running the DevLearn Junto this year, basically disrupting the conference officially and from within (which, as you know with me, is among my favorite things to do in the world). We also have the Tin Can Alley going on (with large thanks Rustici Software and the entire Experience API Community) where I am really excited to see showcased in one place all the different ways Experience API is being used. It’s been an amazing year and with version 0.95 of the spec just being released, I’m excited to see how it’s being put to use. DevLearn is going on from October 31 – November 2 in Las Vegas, NV. You need to be a registered participant or speaker or vendor to participate in the Junto, but an Expo Pass is free and is all you need to check out and play in Tin Can Alley.

I’ll be at I/ITSEC in Orlando, FL December 3-6, working in the ADL booth, talking up some Experience API.

I’m concluding my tenure on the Planning Committee for ASTD TechKnowledge in San Jose, CA. In addition to the workshop above, I’ll be speaking with Tim Martin (@timpmartin) on case studies that make use of Experience API. While I’m not speaking on this, one of the sessions I’m most excited about is Kevin Thorn (@learnnuggets) and David Kelly (@lnddave) explaining from the implementer and newbie’s perspectives, what the heck is the Experience API?

While it remains to be seen if our entries for SxSW are approved, from March 1-4 outside of Austin, TX on beautiful Lake Buchanan, Up to All of Us (2) is happening. Registrations will be opening up soon (feel free to email or comment below for details).

Other Happenings

There are a few changes in the works web-wise. For starters, Brian Dusablon has been doing more and more solid work as an independent consultant since he went solo last month. So much so that I did not hesitate to hand him the reins to all my websites and, in the next few weeks, you probably won’t notice downtime (because he’s that good), but Brian will be handling all my web hosting, including some site development with Up to All of Us and, you know, some odds and ends that pop up.

Additionally, if you’ve been following what’s been going on with Emergent Radio, The Toolbar with Brian and Judy Unrein (@jkunrein) is doing great. Designing Opinion with Jason Early (@jason_early) is starting to pick up a lot of steam. Radio Gen1us as a website will be closing down but the podcast will have new life as another podcast on Emergent Radio. Jim Behymer (@jimthebeerguy) and I will resume talking (and drinking as is the norm on Emergent Radio) about music, making playlists. Hopefully the whole gang (Kevin, Scott, Justine) and more fresh voices will join the party, too.

There’s another podcast that may find its legs with a second try: Overcast. More on that as it develops.

Did I miss something? Probably. Freely jog my memory with a comment..

Chang’s Bird of Prey fires when cloaked.

Spock and McCoy figure out a way to attack a ship they can’t see: they hook up gas sensors to a torpedo because even while invisible, all ships have exhaust, even if you can’t see it. Kirk yells “Fire” in his awesome Shatner way and you see the torpedo locking in on the invisible Klingon ship, and inside the ship, the Klingons know they are done for as the torpedo approaches closer and closer.

FIRE!

There’s a whole lot of learning happening that is largely invisible to ourselves and our organizations. So much of what we read, scan, review, comment on, share, talk about — both online and offline — goes unnoticed. We know what we’re doing in the moment, but unless we’re super motivated to reflect (or we’re just super reflective) it’s difficult to make sense of all the things we’re doing — how they might connect and make sense, what our activities reveal about ourselves and our organizations, etc.

In Bruce Sterling’s book, Shaping Things, he talks about spimes as objects that share all sorts of information about itself and its use. This is more and more what our world is like. As a result, we’re becoming overloaded with information with no easy ways to manage the entirety of it, let alone make some higher-order meaning out of it.

One of the things that we’re trying to do with the “Tin Can” API, both from the design of it and in its implementation as a spec, is to generate a recognizable vapor trail so that we can each make sense of what we do and wrangle all this information that could be accessible to us if we just knew where/how to look for it. By creating a common format to express all the information about what we’re doing, we make it easier to look at all of the information.

That makes it easier for us to have apps and tools that will help us find a greater meaning in what we’re doing. That helps us make more informed choices about what we’re doing in connection with what we might want to do.

Sure, I think the next big things in technology are going to be about working smarter. I think helping us lock-in on what we’re doing, as gestalt, is about living smarter.

“Gold Star” by katherine.a

One of the participants, Ellen Mendlow, suggested that we consider a game.As soon as she said that, I knew of only two people who could really help make that happen: Kris and Alicia. We all talked and they listened to me, as they would a client — intently. They asked lots of questions. Some of their questions were “annoying” — they were hard, necessary and revealed uncomfortable holes in what I thought was an easy and simple idea.Alicia came back a week later with the idea of everyone having a report card in which peers would provide “Gold Stars” (literally) to each other based on how a given person inspired, persuaded, helped, encouraged, etc. Additionally, there were spaces for notes that you could write to the intended receiver of your gold star sticker.  I’ll admit that it took me a while to get it. Once I got it, though, it was so very clearly the perfect approach.When this was put into practice at Up to All of Us, it was really special to see how it caught on.  Not everyone was doing it, but those who were took it very seriously.After Up to All of Us, I was neck deep into both the launch of “Tin Can” API at mLearnCon and the planning of Overlap12. I wanted to use Gold Stars for Overlap, and I also really wanted to make something, so I asked Kris if it was okay if I designed Gold Stars, translated into a web app, and we agreed provided that we make it open source. The team at Problem Solutionsdid that and we received some great advice on the formatting of our activity statements into rom David Ells and Megan Bowe at Rustici Software.As everyone left Chicago to make the road trip to western Michigan for Overlap12, goldstars.me was working — and, it was making Tin Can API statements.

In the implementation of Gold Stars for that weekend, not only were you encouraged to give out a star and pick out one of the chosen verbs, but a rationale for awarding the star. This, to me, is where the learning geekiness came into play: choosing a particular verb is interesting, but the rationale behind it spurred on higher-order cognition.

See, each gold star that’s given, on its own merits, is laughably banal. Overall, though, as a data set, depending on the buy-in for the tool (and the access to the internet, connection speed, etc)… it paints a seriously interesting picture in its own right of the dynamics that are made explicit. It isn’t an unbiased picture of what’s really going on in some given context, nor is it a complete picture — but it is a rich picture that connects people and their actions together in ways that can be measured; ways that can be analyzed.

One more little a-ha here: Gold Stars are sometimes given after-the-fact. Maybe it’s when some people reflect on who really made an impact. Maybe they saw that someone gave them a gold star and they feel like they must reciprocate out of some social order. Or maybe some people just save up their time to check things out at a later date. Either way, this clearly works as a summative means of information gathering. What I love seeing is when Gold Stars are given “in the moment,” as a means of formative information gathering.

It’s how people can “like” a conversation happening right in front of you, and how by “liking” that conversation, you’re allowing a lens into what might be so interesting that it should be remembered for later, even if the nature of the conversation is so serendipitous that it’s not easily captured.

Try it out. And, if you think it can/should be improved, let someone know… and/or fork it from GitHub and roll your own.

Supply chain organizations concern themselves with sourcing products from all over the world to get anywhere else in the world. Supply chain organizations adopt these massive systems is to gain all the efficiency and performance they can out of their organizations. With the kind of data an organization like Walmart collects, they can tell you how sales of Strawberry Yogurt go up 14% after a tornado in Kansas and Iowa.

Strawberry Frozen Yogurt by TheBittenWord.com located on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/galant/2552806737/

By the way, that tidbit isn’t fact, but it’s probably closer to true than you’d think, and you’d best believe that Walmart, Sears Holdings Corporation, Grainger, Roundy’s, Safeway and other supply chain organizations battle for their share of the retail markets because they can act on such moments — because of their rich ability to make meaning out of all their data.

This is the realm of “business intelligence” and most people involved in organizational learning remain immune to such discussions because SCORM courseware doesn’t generate a lot of interesting information to be pulled into other technologies in these bigger enterprise systems.

And that brings us to today’s post. The “Tin Can” API enables courseware (and a bunch of other things) to generate activity data, which is much more interesting to mash up with data generated from the rest of your organization’s systems. Potentially big platforms like SAP and Oracle can adopt the Experience API. Truth be told, they already have LMS offerings and Content Management functionality that is completely seamless with the rest of their platform.

Your organization might not be so big. You may have your own needs. And for you, an open format to mash-up data across your organization might be really helpful in figuring out how to help people learn to do better in their roles, and prepare for the roles they need to take on. Since “Tin Can” works with just about every programming language, chances are you can extend your existing products to talk with one tongue.

Then, right when your metaphorical tornado hits, you’ll have all the strawberry yogurt you’ll need.