So, about two months ago, I set up a new blog for notes associated with my presentations, as well as my reading notes and highlights. I did this in conjunction with the conferences I was participating in, but I also wanted to perform an (albeit crude) experiment on how to increase traffic to dark areas of the web, especially repositories of content. Any blog is, at a very high level, a repository of content and though I had an opinion on whether one could build traffic inorganically, I wanted to try and test a negative hypothesis.

I set up @aaronesilvers as a twitter account that is completely automated; I wanted to see what kind of traffic could be generated vs. organically driven — in other words, could I automate my way to building traffic to the site.

I activated ChartBeat, which is a real-time service that pings me when the site is down or when there’s real-time traffic to the site. I also activated Feedburner, Google Site Maps and Google Analytics to ensure that my RSS feeds were consumable and that the site itself was discoverable and optimized for Google’s crawlers.

Then I started populating The Beard’s Notebook with notes from stuff I was reading, slide notes from my presentations on The Architecture of Actualization, quotes I found interesting… etc.

It turns out that my presentation allowed for an interesting micro-experiment. If you google “metaparadata” my site, or citations about my presentation, seem to dominate the results. So that, by itself is interesting. But it’s not the whole story.

That first blip in traffic, on June 13, was the result of a RT of my automated @aaronesilvers tweet, here:

If you look at the top content in the same time period from May 23-July 23…

…the /archives/113 link with 19 page views? That’s the link in the RT.

Now back to the google search for “metaparadata” — it certainly isn’t a driver of traffic to the site, even though my site here is the first to come up in searches, whether it’s Google or Bing. The top searches that bring traffic to The Beard’s Notebook are (and I have to chuckle a little bit with #2):

I will readily concede that this isn’t a great experiment; some readers will likely just think to themselves that this is, in fact, a no-brainer conclusion. I am not an expert on Search Engine Optimization, and my example was overly simplistic with content plainly published on a blog or marginal (at best) interest to even as specific an audience as, say for example, #lrnchat participants and conference go-ers.

My point in sharing this is that there are many parts of the web that seem to share a common problem: how do we improve the discoverability of learning content. There are many people who believe that discoverability can be automated. My opinion before I started this was simply that I disagreed with the idea that this could all be automated, but I wanted to test my assertion in a way I could somewhat control. My conclusion from this (possibly first) experiment is that one cannot simply automate discoverability. There are many other factors — and my hypothesis remains that if you’re going to leverage a social platform like Twitter, only people who link to your content will assist in it being more discoverable through search engines like Google or Bing.

If you have five minutes, would you please help guide us in supporting you by filling out this survey?

Here’s what I presented at Innovations in eLearning and at Games + Learning + Society. Slides and discussions are already happening at http://notes.aaronsilvers.com/archives/tag/a-of-a

Who was at Innovations in Elearning, and what were their goals?

Like last year, the conference drew in about 250-300 professionals from academia and government with a host of vendors and learning professionals local to the DC area.  Given the restricted budgets of many training departments, this was the main professional development opportunity for many attendees. Judging by the conversations I took part of, they came to get their learn on.

How was Innovations in Elearning structured?

Like last year, the conference began with a full day of pre-conference workshops on Day One, with two keynotes daily and concurrent sessions on Days Two and Three.  A change from last year was the inclusion of a Social Learning Camp running throughout the conference, hosted by the venerable Mark Oehlert (@moehlert).

What were the big ideas you took from Innovations in Elearning?

Games are going change everything.

I was really happy to spend my morning of the pre-conference in the Game Design Workshop run by Brenda Brathwaite (@bbrathwaite).  She introduced game design in ways that were very accessible to instructional designers.  Organized and immersive, she provided the channeling needed to start designing and got groups of us to apply our imaginations to design games for difficult purposes.  If you want to follow up on the details of the session, I highly recommend Wendy Wickham’s (@wwickha1) blog post at http://in-the-middle-of-the-curve.blogspot.com/2010/06/iel2010-gaming-design-workshop-part-1.html. John Romero’s (@theromero) keynote was less convincing in the ties to learning, but he certainly made the case for how big social gaming is getting (more on this when I write on #gls2010). Still, if instructional designers could get immersive experience designing games, out of the subjects they normally design… I think game design is going to alter a lot of assumptions we have about how we teach and how we learn.

You can always create.

Dr. Alan Kay (not on Twitter that I can find) had a wonderful keynote. He talked about what it means to learn something new (that was in the title).  What I learned from Dr. Kay is that we do a lot more coping than we actually learn — that’s training. If we learned it, it might change our DNA about dealing with progress — have some permanence.  The reason why we end up coping, however, is because humans, as inherently as we cope vs. progress, we also create. That’s why despite our best plans, we never get our planning quite right. Kay talked about this in terms of the history of war, where throughout that progression and escalation of technologies, methods, etc, we got ourselves prepared for nuclear warfare, but ended up with terrorist/insurgent warfare.  Dr. Kay also talked about this in terms of the path of “teaching” from before the invention of the Gutenberg Press to today (and how the pictures of what instruction looks look eerily the same). There was something Dr. Kay did, though, that was really metaphoric of who he is and what he’s talking about.  He used EToys (http://squeakland.org/download/) as a visual medium for his keynote, which is a programming environment in the vein of LOGO, in that it’s very friendly for kids — so friendly, in fact, that there’s no typing involved — just clicking on the commands you want.  The thing is — it’s never in publish mode or presentation mode — it’s always in create mode, so he was changing his keynote on the fly, making bugs that crawled around the screen.

What surprised you from Innovations in Elearning?

I was surprised a bit by how much I’ve changed in the last year, to be candid.  A year ago, it was the first time I was asked to speak about anything beside SCORM.  I spoke about something really new, and it was the beginning of an idea that I’ve deepened and expanded since.  I was very nervous, inside, because my participation in Twitter (and acceptance by the learning community that’s grown from it) was still very new.  It was overwhelming to be invited to speak last year, and negotiating my role at Grainger (at the time) and this bit of recognition — it was all very new.

This year I felt a lot more comfortable and a lot more confident.  I was less nervous about my presentation, and maybe a little more nervous about what I was presenting.  Last year, I was reporting out on what I had done and what I planned to do next.  This year I was describing nuanced ideas with bold implications — what might amount to “my life’s work.” Outside of the nervousness that comes from deep sharing, I was extremely happy to be among my tribe (as Wendy put it so well).  I probably spend as much time exchanging knowledge with Wendy, Mark, Alicia Sanchez (@gamesczar), Clark Quinn (@quinnovator), Craig Wiggins (@oxala75), Stephen Martin (@smartinx), Rovy Brannon (@rovybrannon), Judy Brown (@judyb) and Brent Schlenker (@bschlenker) — just to name a few — as I spend with other co-workers.

What left you unsatisfied from Innovations in Elearning ?

I wouldn’t couch it as being unsatisfied, so much as a recognition after seeing Clark and Brent present masterfully that right now I’m not a someone with something to say to the masses.  Clark and Brent are really good at making hard ideas relevant to broad audiences, and both of them use humor really effectively, able to encapsulate their ideas with approachable examples and metaphors.  I thought Brent’s inclusion of the Journey video just hit his presentation out of the park.

I would say that most of the concurrent sessions didn’t seem as interesting to me as I’d like — but to be honest, I really like going deep, which is why I present the way I present.  The conversations I have with people at conferences are really what drives me to want to attend, because the conversations are where we can go deep.  I enjoy getting my mind blown when someone drops big ideas on me, and my conversations with Wendy, Clark, Alicia, Judy and Rovy at this conference certainly did that.

Unbelievably, I’m on the road the next three weeks in a row attending conferences, presenting, doing some carnival barking about future learning trends around mobile learning… It’s going to be an insane time, but a lot of “hard fun.”

If you want to catch me on tour, you’ll be able to find me over the next three weeks…

• Fairfax, VA – speaking at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium (June 1-3)
• Madison, WI – speaking at the AcademicFest connected to Games + Learning + Society Conference (June 9-11)
• San Diego, CA – hosting the Future Learning Zone within mLearnCon (June 15-17)
• Chicago, IL – Yeah, it’s home, but I’m running the Warrior Dash (June 19)

Now, for the Innovations in eLearning and GLS conferences, I’ll be talking about what I’ve been calling “the architecture of actualization.” My spin? Academia, training and education are converging — shifting our collective understanding of learning, intelligence, know-how and work. I will explain a problem space to the audience — one that very few people have been able to identify — in layman’s terms, with stories and metaphors for the audience to take with them into their own organizations and networks.

The big takeaway is this: the past 30 years of online network activity has been built around content. In our physical lives, we only rarely construct our understanding of the world around content. Most of our understanding is constructed around people, places and shared experiences. We are extending the Internet, and more specifically the standards and technologies that we employ, to accomodate this constructivist model and it has broad implications around learning, work, play and identity.

Here’s a Wordle to give you the teaser of what we’ll talk about.

I saw a lot of training professionals attend ASTD’s annual conference in Chicago last week.  By training professionals, I’m talking mainly classroom instructors and Instructional Designers.  Who wasn’t there? By and large I didn’t see a technical audience there — that’s not to say there weren’t technical people there.  I mean to say that given the conferences I normally go to, this was a different side of the training/learning world.

How was ASTD ICE 2010 structured?

I believe there were a number of multi-day pre-conference workshops, in which I didn’t participate.  There were three main days for the conference and exhibition, and on Monday and Tuesday there were stunning keynotes by Dan Pink (@danielpink) and Charlene Li (@charleneli), respectively.  Otherwise, there were a number of programming tracks with breakout sessions for each track, and an Exhibition Hall that filled up almost half of the available space in the west building of the McCormick Center (that’s a huge amount of space, larger than any exhibition hall I can remember being in — rivalling IITSEC).

What were the big ideas you took from ASTD ICE 2010 ?

David Allen signed my Moleskine, which makes me organized, nerdy and L33T.

“Social Media”

From the welcome speech by ASTD President Tony Bingham (@tonybingham) to the selection and actual content by the keynote speakers (@danielpink and @charleneli); the inclusion of so many sessions on social media; the fact that there was WiFi (albeit pretty crappy WiFi service, thanks McCormick Center) — you couldn’t swing the rhetorical dead cat at ASTD ICE 2010 and not hit some one talking about “Social Media.”  I remember reading the reflections and the few tweets from last year’s event, where there was barely a mention, let alone even a whisper.  This year it was in surround sound, metaphorically.

I use “Social Media” in quotes, because my takeaway from this experience was that it’s definitely being objectified; not internalized.  I think that’s true for many in attendance at the conference as well as ASTD itself.

What surprised you from ASTD ICE 2010 ?

Government at ASTD

I wouldn’t have known this on my own, but Jay Allen (@jay_a_allen) pointed out to me that this is the first year there’s been a US Government (and military) pavilion that offered specialized content and meet-up space for Government and Military personnel. As Jay wrote…

[The Government Pavilion was] sponsored by The Graduate School and The Center for Creative Leadership and was very well-received.  [Also,] The Public Manager journal is now a part of ASTD’s media offering.

So the new introduction of government and military as a specialization inside of ASTD is interesting to me.  It would seem that ASTD is recognizing that there are differentiators in different sectors that relate to training.  Jay introduced me to a USAF Colonel, Peter Marksteiner.  I’m historically a huge doubter on the ability of a training organization to prove ROI on anything it does, but Col. Marksteiner and I had a fantastic conversation on Wednesday that now makes me think that when organizations (not just the learning organization) care to measure, you can actually prove ROI.  This takes me to my second point.

No One Knows How to Measure Stuff

Funny little story: in preparing for our panel discussion with Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia), Dan Pontefract (@dpontefract) and I got into our ranting voices as we riffed off each other’s ideas about tracking informal learning, among other things, in the speaker ready room on Monday morning. As we got up to grab some coffee, I couldn’t help but notice the two older gentlemen sitting at our table, pouring over their presentation.  It was the actual Kirkpatricks.

I share this because there’s a lot of people still buying into Kirkpatrick, and that in and of itself is not bad — but apparently a lot of people I’ve seen in the world read Kirkpatrick and think that in and of itself is all you need to do to measure learners, measure effectiveness, etc.  News flash: reading a book is not applying the learning in the book (especially ironic when the book is related to measuring the effectiveness of learning by the performance of the learned skill).  Now, I’ve not read Kirkpatrick (ever).  I’ve seen my fair share of people talk about ROI and the reason why I’ve vouched, up until meeting Col. Marksteiner, that you can’t measure ROI was because I felt there were some things that were impossible to capture for an organization.

Now I see things a bit differently. Now I wonder if organizations are just too lazy to go an evaluation effort in the beginning of any project (not any learning project) to see if there’s a need to support the project with some training and, if so, if maybe they should include learning professionals at the onset?  I wonder if maybe organizations should think beyond milestone dates when they “plan” new projects, and think about what the net effects they want for their respective organizations and tie the training they’ll do to that change effort?

I don’t mean to be hyper-critical, but the big surprise to me, hearing people sitting around tables, walking through the conference sessions — the big surprise to me was that it wasn’t just the learning teams I belonged to that struggled with these concerns: every organization seems to be missing this. For all the measuring that companies are doing (and they are doing a lot of measuring, I’m sure of it), many seem to be missing the important measures: how do we define success? How will we know when we’ve been successful? What are the ways in which we can fail? How will we know we need to plan for some contingency?

What are things you learned from ASTD ICE 2010 ?

ASTD represents the world as it is.

For as long as I can remember, even in my first years as a classroom teacher, I’ve been way out in the bleeding edge of technology adoption, to the point now where I feel like I’m helping shape the constraints of emerging technologies.  My feet are always in the fresh trail of the future. ASTD and the audience it supports is very large, and they are the world as it is today.

This is uncomfortable ground for people like me.  I see a big population in a Rogers Diffusion of Innovations curve that are late adopters.  Embedded with this group of professionals (almost 8000 of them!) for a few days, I see that some are late adopters (or laggards) by choice — but the majority of these professionals have passion and talent, but their view of the possible is very much curtailed by the information they have access to through outlets like ASTD and what their own organizational leadership or IT tells them is possible.  Why? Because their main goal in life is not to be on the cutting edge — their main goal is to do the best they can with the means they have available to them.

ASTD just gave a whole bunch of professionals a ringing endorsement of social media for learning purposes.  I guess I’m surprised a little reflectively, because I never expected an endorsement before taking any action in previous positions. When you’re an early adopter, I think you tend to see the rest of the world like that, too.  Turns out, no matter how many times I’m reminded, that’s just not realistic.

What left you unsatisfied from ASTD ICE 2010 ?

Black Swans?

If only I had the time.  I’m seriously thinking of a complete relaunch and new approach to the Black Swan Society I started with others at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium last year.  It occurs to me that there are a lot of people who need help who can’t find it inside their organizations, but also can’t just go public with their specific needs.  They need someone to broker connecting them with others.  They need someone they can trust with their secrets to share only the important parts to find someone who can help them, learn together and grow. I could be that guy people could trust, but I couldn’t be that guy to everybody.  In my copious spare time, I would do this and set up a tiny seed garden online for other people to take connections, plant them where they need to and grow them on their own.

Social Learning: Real or Spin?

For all the talk about social media and “social learning,” I have to really ask if anybody really gets it, or if there’s so many voices shouting out the names of tools and services in an echo chamber that what it’s all about is getting drowned out?  @marciamarcia put out a definition of Social Learning in our presentation that looked like this:

Social learning is participating with others to make sense of new ideas.

I’ve been starting to throw out a definition that has been gaining traction from within ADL:

Social Learning is the learning evidenced from vicarious activity shared through “near-peer” relationships.

Now you can parse words between Marcia and I all you want (I think we’re poking at the same bear with a similar stick).  The thing is in neither of our definitions do we talk about microsharing or user-generated content or Twitter or Facebook or Yammer or… whatever.

We’re telling you what it is; we can define it.  I believe that if it can be defined than you can actually measure the impact of the learning that happens if you would choose to measure social learning. I’m not advocating measuring social learning; I’m advocating that there must be a definition for it, and the definition is not “learn stuff on Facebook.”

Anything Else?

I had the most wonderful time getting to see colleagues and peers and friends like @mbr1online, @marciamarcia, @cammybean, @randomdazzle, @stephaniedaul, @jay_a_allen, @terrencewing.  I especially  liked Cammy’s post wrapping up ASTD, which you can read here.

I really enjoyed getting to know a kindred spirit in @dpontefract and finally meeting @kkapp, @wadatripp, @GinaSchreck and @tomkuhlmann was a real thrill.  Likewise, @LandDDave, @InSyncEU, @lilred_apagog, @dbolen, @BloomFire, @trinarimmer, @mindflash, @TriciaRansom, @dougdevitre, @thomasstone, @rjfjrzax — I’m sure there are others, too (feel free to correct me if I didn’t catch your Twitter handle).

One more thing… I did get my Moleskine autographed by David Allen (@gtdguy), just like I said I would.  He didn’t seem too impressed with the request, but it’s cool.

Here are my screenshots, and I’ll share some overview of the apps I’m playing with at the moment.

My Home Screens

Screen 1

• Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Maps
• Photobucket, Videos, YoutTube, App Store
• Settings, Adobe Ideas, CourseNotes, Evernote
• GoodReader, iAnnotate PDF, iBooks, Kindle
• Pages, Numbers, Bento, Keynote

Screen 2

• Instapaper, Notes Pro, BBC News, Star Walk
• TweetDeck, The Weather Channel, WolframAlpha, WordPress
• WordBook XL, 1Password, WorldFactbook, GoToMeeting
• WebEx, Deliveries, Dictation, Corkulous
• Taska

Screen 3

• Magic Piano, Glee, iELECTRIBE, Harbor Master
• Marvel, Netflix, ABC Player, Pandora
• iTunes

Apps I’m Interested In…

Corkulous

The Corkulous desktop

I was very much looking for a GTD app that I could administer on the iPad.  I’ve been an avowed fan of Appigo’s ToDo app for iPhone and was hoping to find some news on their site of a version in development for iPad.  I couldn’t find any.  What I did find was a really sweet and easy-to-use idea board, much like what Mark Oehlert (@moehlert) used with Pimdax for the Social Learning Camp.  So… I’m giving this a try.  You can create labels (with the scotch tape), post-it notes, affix pictures, assign contacts to sections and create boards within boards.  This could prove to be really handy.

iWork (and Bento)

Keynote, one of the iWork apps for iPad

One thing I am going to do a lot of in my new role is give presentations. A LOT of presentations.  I’m also going to attend of a lot of meetings and conferences, so note-taking is really helpful.  One thing I did this last week at the ADL Registry & Repository Summit was generate a pie chart on the fly — iWork helps with all of that, and I’m hoping that the iPad proves to be a fairly efficient vehicle to do those things on the fly.  It is not as easy or as fast as a real keyboard, but it does take up a lot less space on a regular airline seat.  I would appreciate a less hinky way of getting documents on and off the iPad than mailing them to myself or syncing through iTunes… but it does work, so like other apps, I’ll be investigating over he next couple of months how useful this really is.

KORG iELECTRIBE

KORG iELECTRIBE

I’ve really enjoyed several of the synth apps on my iPhone, but they’re basically toys.  My fat fingers have never mistaken the phone for an instrument… but this beautiful app not only has rekindled the fourteen year-old that would spend nights and weekends programming his Casio CZ-1, it’s captivating my daughters as my five year-old is programming rhythms she wants to dance to.  This app is 100% win and probably the most dangerous force against my productivity.  I know to non-music people, this interface looks cramped and complicated, but even if you were never into synthesizers and drum machines, this is really easy to use.  The size is absolutely perfect. Do you sense that I’m gushing? Because I am.

Star Walk

Star Walk

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been back in parts of the country that have stars come out at night and you can see them ALL.  Can you guess which is the easiest constellation to find? The Little Dipper. You might think that the Big Dipper is the easiest constellation you can find, but Big Dipper is not even a constellation — it’s a part of Ursa Major (they’re not the same thing).  Little Dipper and Ursa Minor are the same thing.  If you can find Polaris, which is the North Star, and you can figure out the Little Dipper, then you can relate other constellations in relation to it, and spatially learn in proximity about all the constellations.

Notes Pro vs. CourseNotes

Notes Pro

CouseNotes

I grabbed CourseNotes first, and I think it has some very compelling uses as a general note-taking tool.  Many of the subjects I’m researching have vocabularies that are difficult to master (or keep straight), so the built-in ability to define and capture lexicon (taxonomy) got me thinking about organization and note-taking in a whole new way.  When a $2.99 app can do that to me, it’s definitely a win.  Because of that, I started using VoodooPad on my laptop for the same purpose (btw, if you ever wanted a desktop wiki, you should give it a look — nigh powerful, fast becoming the most-used app on my laptop).  In contrast, Notes Pro seems to have everything and the kitchen sink in the app and it’s free.  It’s a little unstructured for me.  CourseNotes might be a tad bit too rigid.  I’m hoping maturity and passionate users and developers cooperate and make use of feedback to improve both apps and thus affect all note-taking apps on the iPad.  I’m giving the edge to CourseNotes by a wide margin right now, but Notes Pro has one thing going for it that would make CourseNotes killer — that’s persistence, because it syncs via Twitter, Facebook or Google account with the cloud so you won’t lose your data.  CourseNotes needs this.

Taska

Taska

I wanted Appigo’s ToDo for iPad. It doesn’t exist.

I use Toodledo to sync my GTD in the cloud. I’m still stunned that seemingly none of the Mac apps (Things, The Hit List, OmniFocus) sync with the cloud (much less Google Tasks, even). But at least there’s a Toodledo app for iPad and there’s Taska.  The Toodledo native app looks well and good, but Taska looks pretty.  I like being aple to switch tabs between tags, contexts and lists. It supports projects like Appigo and the sync mostly works with Toodledo.  I’m still suspect about it, but we’ll see how this works out… maybe I won’t need another app for my GTD mojo.

It’s tough to ignore differences between generations.  It’s also generally poor form to generalize people lumped together by any one trait, like age.  Still, many of us (myself included) are guilty of doing so.

We generally describe Millenials, Generation Y, Generation Next, etc — anyone born past 1982 as “Digital Natives.” Our younger friends (some now approaching their 30s) are given this label because they grew up in the age of personal computers in their household (especially, I’d add, in the US).  For even younger set just approaching their 20s, they’ll find it harder to remember a time when there wasn’t a wireless phone of some kind, and kids in elementary schools today will have never known a time when their computer and phone had to be connected to a wall except to charge the battery, nor will they know a time when they needed an antenna to get a TV signal. Hence, they are digital natives.

Well, I am not a digital native.  I was lucky at the age of 6 to have an Apple ][+ with a green monitor, when high-res graphics were 320 x 200 pixels in four whole colors (which I couldn’t see because of the green monitor).  Many learning professionals lament the summoning of the “Digital Natives” by label, and many of us rush to assert that we lament it because we’d like to be counted in their group.

Not me, at least not anymore. It’s not that I don’t want to be youthful; frankly I appreciate the evolutions in technology in ways I don’t know if younger people do.

Because I can remember, quite vividly, a life before Twitter, before blogs, before Napster and internet music, before DVD players and web sites, before Internet and mobile phones and laptops, before cable or satellite television, before VCRs and computers were in your house.. because I can remember a life in the 70s without the tools of a modern life in the US, I cling a bit more tightly to the new shiny object than maybe the popular Digital Native does.

And then, being a learning “geek” on top of that technophilia, I obsess over my new coveted toy and its implications for how we all can/will learn.  Just wait. My iPad comes next week.  There will be coveting.

It’s not that I don’t use the same toys that they play with; I do.  It’s not that I don’t text or Tweet or update my status on Facebook; I certainly do.  It’s that, perhaps, your typical 20-something just doesn’t place the value in those activities that I do.  I may find Twitter or Facebook or my blog too important, too relevant, too useful so I feel compelled to apply them to the workplace.  I’d like to believe this is the right call.

For me, connectedness is explicit because I can remember being disconnected and still see all the needs for more to connect.  For someone who’s left college in the last year or two, it’s just implicit and maybe they’d assume that everyone who matters to them is connected; they don’t think twice about how many still need to connect. Everyone they need is already at their fingertips.

They’re agile.  My “need” to get everyone connected might be waterfall.  For me or any professional who looks to design learning experiences for Digital Natives for the tools they use, but discounts the bias we have in how we may use the same tools; well, we professionals do so at some peril of getting the whole mobility/social learning thing wrong.

My point is that in every aspect of working culture, people my age and older are building systems, processes, technologies, assumptions — all of which are meant to improve something from what we (my generation and older) experience right now.  Much of what we architect will result in some kind of progress… until we become glued to our designs because as people age and grow more powerful, we become stuck on our design as progress itself. We lose our grasp on the progress for which we started reaching.

That’s when we’ll end up screwing something up that you, the Digital Native, will one day have to fix (and then screw up something else for a generation younger than you).  Every generation deals with this.

I just hope if we as learning professionals are screwing something up, you young whippersnappers are telling us so — and I hope we hear you.

I’m leaving Grainger, where I’ve been very proud (albeit not very public) in serving as an internal consultant on learning technology since 2006. I’ve worked with a team of outstanding Instructional Design talents, all brilliant, clever and crafty in their own ways. Two managers, whom I’ve been very proud to work for, have had to endure the challenges that come with managing me. In the past year, I’ve received more support and more professional growth than I’ve encountered in all the years in my relatively short career preceding it. Their trust and their challenges have helped me to grow into a role I will soon assume.

This is more than a job change for me. This is career evolution. I am very humbled to know that I leave Grainger in a better place than where it found me, and that the organization and my leaders wouldn’t mind having me back. There are many success stories in Grainger, and I’m very lucky to have been there to share in them with people whom I know will be lifelong friends.

It has been a very deliberate and thorough consideration, and I am very excited (far more than such a small word like “very” conveys) to let you know that I’m going to join a team of friends, brilliant minds and kindred spirits at ADL, where starting in mid-April I will assume the role of ADL’s Community Manager. I will post more details about the job, the personal transitioning (in case you’re curious about becoming an evangelist/community manager) as I get more figured out.

Note: I know my blogging has been sporadic of late. It will get better, but it may be a few weeks until it does. Hang with me.

There are some big things about to happen. I’m beyond psyched to do something I care very deeply about — bridging lots of communities who care about learning and the technology that supports it. This is the right time to make a difference (it’s definitely due); ADL has the right team in place. I love the team, I care deeply about the direction and about the communities ADL needs to serve.

You’ve all helped me get to this point, both through our discussions and exchanges on many channels (especially Twitter). I hope you’re with me for the next leg on this journey.

I apologize if I’m rambling. This is one of those moments where I really can’t believe this is my life, because it’s awesomesauce.

I've been spending a lot of time in my office.

I’ve been keeping myself honest which is why it’s pretty quiet on the blog.  Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been up to that’s appropriate to share.

Conferences

June is going to be a hugely busy month. The following are (mostly) confirmed (and yes, I’m only talking June for now — there’s potentially more conferences this year):

• Innovations in eLearning Symposium – Fairfax, VA
  I’ll be presenting at a session on the Architecture of Actualization
• Games + Learning + Society – Madison, WI
  Rumor is I’m keynoting but it’s not posted yet (I did say *mostly* confirmed); this will be a speech focused on The Architecture of Actualization, but pointed more towards serious games and mobility — and probably more use-cases since that’s easier to (ahem) swallow… with a lunchtime keynote.
• mLearnCon - San Diego, CA
  Nothing is posted about this conference either, but if keynoting is an ante up from my usual participation, then this must be the double-down at mLearnCon.  I’m organizing/moderating a mLearning Future Camp and it will be exactly as awesome as that sounds.  More details forthcoming, but there’s a superstart line-up organizing as I type.

Internet Radio

Two very different things I have going so far. First, I’ve now been a panelist on a discussion that’s sponsored by The Gap called Connecting Inner Power with Global Change. Host Pravir Malik is the author of a book by the same name, Each week, there’s a core panel that discusses a chapter out of the book, and it’s getting out of the set-up which is very “heady” and starting to get into the practical examination and application of how you create the change you want to see in the world.  This book resonates a lot with me, and I’m fascinated by how Malik ties in Eastern and Western philosophies with Fractal geometry and economics.  There are great insights into leadership, so if you’re doing any kind of leadership training, even if this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, you might want to give the show a listen.

Far more approachable and hopefully as exciting is that my own longtime radio show Radio Gen1us has introduced a new format for music talk. We still have the mixtapes, but now we’re kicking out a Skypecast every two weeks, the first of which is available now.  They last an hour, they’re much easier to do (certainly easier to edit) and a lot of fun.

Reading

Since I can’t hear of late, I’ve been a rockstar reader, capturing copious notes at Readernaut.  If you haven’t joined Readernaut, check out the notes I’m taking on the books I’ve been reading and create an account, because every note is a post waiting for response in a discussion format.  When you follow people reading the same book as you, you get their notes in your feed, too.  That is some seriously interesting social reading.

Writing

Just for kicks, have you seen the lyrics for my rap, ADDIE’s a methodology (not design)?

As Jane Hart blogged, Jane (@c4lpt) and Neil Lasher (@neillasher) are leading the charge from the UK with Brent Shlenker(@bschlenker), Stephanie Daul (@stephaniedaul) and myself (@mrch0mp3rs) will be representing the US in moderating this early version of #lrnchat, weekly on Thursdays at 4.30 pm GMT (11.30 am EST). The weekly chat topic will be the same for both the early and later versions, and the topic for Thursday 25 February, 2010 is Training for the Masses:

• Q1) Why do we do one-size-fits-all solutions? #lrnchat
• Q2) How can we improve training for the masses (if/when it’s unavoidable)? #lrnchat
• Q3) What are some of the business realities we contend with at odds with doing training smart?
• Q4) What are some creative ways, in a mass approach, to make things stick? #lrnchat

I predict some very interesting discourse happening at two #lrnchat conversations on Thursday. I can’t wait!!!

“You hear that Mr. Anderson?… That is the sound of inevitability…”
- Agent Smith, The Matrix

I’ve talked at some length about my social workflow before.  I had a system that’s been working for me.  In the last 24 hours, it’s changed a bit and all I can do is, to summon REO Speedwagon, roll with the changes.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard about Google Buzz. If this is all new to you, here’s the video:

I jumped on this bandwagon right away because this is huge. This is Yammer for you — personal microsharing and exchange – and it’s right in your mailbox (if you’re already a Gmail user). It’s absorbing your streams that you elect to include from Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, etc… and it’s leveraging your contacts in your Google address book.

There’s a huge learning implication in what’s going on in a way that I think Bing is going to have a tough time dealing with. I had a very interesting conversation last night where the idea was proposed to me that eventually Google will be able to tell you search results not just in terms of web content that may answer your query, but in terms of people you’re connected to (or are connected through other people) who can answer your query.

Think about that for a second. There’s your expert system, boys and girls.

To make sense of the expert system, you’re going to need to engage it directly. That’s what Google is hoping you’ll do. I can’t say I blame them. It’s huge.

The question then becomes what about Twitter? Does it go away? I don’t think it does. I think its use becomes more defined over time (I’m not giving up on Twitter anytime soon). The way I’m going to use Buzz, at least initially, will be in use with yet ANOTHER tool, called Amplify. Thanks much to Paul Simbeck-Hampson and especially Sahana Chattopadhyay for making me aware of the value in this tool.

I’m an Evernote user. I use it, as I’ve discussed, to replace Delcious. Amplify allows me to highlight something I’m reading online that strikes me, allows me to tweet it, reflect a bit openly about it without blogging about it here (or in that Tumblr account I’m not using), and broadcast it. You could use Tumblr or Posterous to do the same thing, but I’m likely to stick with Amplify if only because… well, I’m already using it. If you’re using another aggregation stream tool, use that.

At any rate, I’m going to start using Amplify to kick off a conversation that I want to have with any willing takers in Twitter. In Twitter, the broad audience I can engage with can help scope the conversation quickly and with a great deal of agility, largely because the size of each interaction has to be small (the 140-character genius). When the scope is such that it’s time to dig deeper and have a full on threaded discussion about it, that’s where Buzz will kick in.

Now, we can take this to Wave, but Wave has a lot going against it at the moment – Wave works great as a more structured, co-authoring Wiki of sorts — but it’s inherent lack of structure is, imho, an obstacle for some people. If we’re keeping this in therms of having conversations that may turn into something useful, Buzz probably works better for that.

The workflow here is critical. You currently can’t reverse the stream to Buzz. Everything flows into it, but not from it. So… if there’s a bunch of us who are going to use Buzz, we need to think about the design of our conversations that flow into it. Amplify, like Tumblr and others, flows into Twitter and Facebook. Twitter (not Facebook, yet) flows into Buzz (as does Amplify directly).

If there’s only a few things you can gleam from my ideas here, it’s these I hope make the most sense:

1. Amplify a conversation topic.
2. Tweet the scope of the conversation.
3. Buzz through the discourse.

One day in the not too distant future, there will be ways for us to just free-flow our conversations across services and they’ll persist without the extra cognitive work of tying things together all on our own.  Until then, each of these tools (Amplify, Twitter, Buzz) does something wonderful in a really wonderful way and when we can use them together effectively, we can enjoy some really sophisticated emergent knowledge together.

Changing behaviors is tough even for change agents like me.  Choosing not to engage in Buzz doesn’t mean people aren’t pinging you or talking about you there, because Buzz is launching with a zillion users by default and they’re all, for the most part, in your inbox.  Use the tools wisely, develop your own governance model for what tool you want to use and when.

One thing is very clear to me: we’re not even close to being done with information innovation yet, and that’s very cool.

I happened upon a very engaging conversation with Paul Simbeck-Hampson (@simbeckhampson), and as we discussed and debated some of the merits of Google Wave, the use-case we referred back to, #lrnchat, highlighted something for Paul that he quickly took action on: organize a volunteer effort to produce weekly summaries of #lrnchat events.

In my opinion, this is a highly valuable opportunity for lurkers and observers of #lrnchat to participate and contribute to the community.  It’s definitely something that’s needed.  #lrnchat works great for contributors who participate in the moment, but it is often very difficult to make sense of the threads of conversation post-game — much less to put what you learned in a usable format to share with others in your organization.

If you love #lrnchat and you reslish the opportunity to really absorb what’s being discussed, the transfer from one format to another is a strong way to engrain that knowledge.

Paul has information on how to get started with this effort on the #lrnchat website.

UPDATE: The first summary is located here: http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/myths-truths/

Tune in or download the show. Here’s the details:

Pravir is the author of “Connecting Inner Power with Global Change: The Fractal Ladder” and while it’s a deep read, it’s a rewarding book for introducing the concept that there are emergent patterns that scale.  Sometimes they scale with consequences we don’t quite expect or necessarily want, but understanding how fractal patterns work (think floret to stalk of brocolli) we can scale the good we want to see in ourselves to the good we want to see in our workgroups (and beyond).

Now, you might be asking yourself, what the heck I’m doing on this panel for this topic.  Well, the main theme for tomorrow’s discussion is this:

• What shifts are you seeing in the environment or market within which your organization plays?
• Why do you think these shifts are occuring?
• How are you organizing to manage this?

Well, the market for learning technology, specifically in the area of “E-Learning” by its narrow definition, is rife with patterns of mediocrity such that a frightening majority of content — what’s supposed to develop employees in organizations around the world  – is nothing more than hour long PowerPoint slides, passively asking the user to click next to continue.  This isn’t every piece of content, but there’s an awful lot of it around.

Organizations continue to accept this because, quite frankly, there has been no other kernel presented to them in the same medium that would inspire duplication such that a new pattern would emerge.  How does this scale? Well, how engaged can an employee be when the official messages from their organization are so unfeeling, rote and lifeless as bad slide decks that are paced and required to be seen in full?

The thing is, imho, there are alternative patterns emerging in the field of adult learning that recognize value in community and, at the very least, interpersonal interaction.  Such organizations are moving away from the last ten years of design production practice and they are embracing more organic (to their organizations) approaches to developing employees, even letting employees coach each other and emerge as subject matter networks within communities of practice.

These have their own challenges. They’re not easy challenges to address, but they are very interesting challenges.  One such challenge? Keeping experts engaged in their communities, when they are most likely to approach a state of “disregard.”

How we develop our people affects the whole economy.  When we decide that cramming a couple slides with bullet points and charts is better than nothing — well, that may be true in the instance.  However, it reinforces a fractal pattern that translates when scaled to “we value cheaper and faster above anything else.”  That sounds harsh, but if we’re going to combat the bad with the good, we need to get comfortable with talking about what we don’t like and have the courage and perseverence to reinforce new patterns.

By now, even the disconnected bush people on remote islands have no doubt heard of the forthcoming iPad.  And, if they know a Flash developer or a Farmville addict, they’ve heard the siren cry foul “IT DOESN’T SUPPORT FLASH!”  This was a hot debate when the iPhone was first released almost three years ago and while it was a sore point, it never reached the volume and (almost) backlash across discussion groups and social networks that it has now.

The Flash Format Argument

There was a pretty good comment by Sean Foushee that Chad Udell (@visualrinse) pointed out to me yesterday on Twitter which highlighted what the Flash community (not old guys like me who don’t work with Flash much anymore) needs to reckon with:

Flash is in the middle of an identity crisis. It’s no longer the only tool that can accomplish interactive tasks or even deliver rich content to users. In some ways I feel today nearly the same as I did in 2002-2003 when I began to leave Director development. It was too costly for clients to pay for multimedia content developed by Director because of all the hot shot Flash gurus with their cheaper software and internet delivery. Now Flash developers are facing free alternatives in many of the various JavaScript libraries and of course the HTML5 spec. I’m not good at predicting the future, but I honestly believe that Flash needs something to properly differentiate itself from the rest of these alternatives, because saying you rock at producing internet games isn’t a solution.

Purpose and Affordance of the iPad

I have a theory on why Flash fans, be they developers or just gamers, are so upset.  It was easier to take the hit about Flash not being on the iPhone because, well, it was a phone. The options for mobile Flash haven’t been stellar, and Flash lite doesn’t work with lots of content already, so… you’d hear the griping, but we all lived with it.  Browsing on a phone is different in general.  Speed and performance on a phone, even the iPhone, one does so with a different set of expectations over general web content.  To the iPhone’s credit, it handles this extremely well considering it is, in fact, a phone.

Notice I talked about phones… not mobile devices. Up until last week, the two were synonymous (almost).  Now there is distinction, and it has people freaking out.

We as higher order mammals are still very used to dealing with things in absolutes.  Black or White; Team Edward or Team Jacob (apparently it’s a “Twilight” thing); Bears or Packers; Red Sox or Yankees; iPhone or Computer (lumping laptops and desktops into that term) is just another distinction we’ve made to categorize what “bucket” we get our context from.

The iPad messes with our heads.  It looks like an iPhone or an iPod Touch.  But it’s bigger, like a tablet, which up until this point really meant a clunky laptop with maybe a small tucked-away keyboard and a stylus running Windows.  This is Apple, but with the exception of the ModBooks, we have no basis of comparison for what to expect out of a tablet but our most vivid, personal dreams.  What bucket does it fall into?  Is it a computer? Is the iPad a mobile device?

Clearly it’s a mobile device… and a computer.  Just like the iPhone is a mobile device and a computer.  We need to look at the word “computer” and break ourselves from the direct association with laptops with a big honking Operating System (of whatever kind you subscribe to) and go a bit broader to challenge ourselves that all manner of diverse machines are computers.  The iPad/no-Flash drama is elevated because, in my opinion, we are looking at the iPad more like a MacBook with a simplified, touch-screen GUI than a heavy duty iPod Touch that allows for productivity and creation that are limiting on devices with smaller interfaces.  Basically, the argument boils down to this: if I can run Flash content on my MacBook, why the hell can’t I run Flash on the iPad?

The Standards Argument

For whatever reasons altruistic, best intentioned or veiled as such for proprietary lock-out motives, Apple has drawn the line in the sand with WebKit that they’re supporting web standards.  Flash may be a de facto standard plug-in, but it’s still a plug-in, and not an actual standard that’s part of HTML 5.  Apple is basically saying that it supports standards as they are.  They may be flipping the bird to Adobe in the process of taking a principled stand, but that’s what they’re doing.  John Gruber had an EXCELLENT post on the history of Flash on the Mac, and why it performs kinda weak even today.  I think that’s all fuel for the fire that is simply that Flash isn’t a standard.

That’s where this gets REALLY interesting if you can connect some dots.

What if Flash were to become a standard?  Adobe could still monetize the IDE, much like Microsoft does with Word (yes, I know that there are several flaws with the example, roll with me a bit here), while the format each tool produces could be an open standard.  Adobe, given it’s position with ECMA could, in fact, make the Flash format part of HTML5 or some ISO standard that HTML5 natively supports as a standalone standard.  Basically, to me, HTML5 roll-in is the key, because WebKit supports HTML5 — it’s banking on it.  If HTML 5 supports Flash natively, and WebKit supports HTML5 fully (as it maintains it will), then Apple will have Flash support on every device it makes because Safari is built on WebKit.  This is the magic door Apple is pushing.  They may be laying it down as a challenge that they know Adobe won’t take, but there’s a reason why Adobe should (and might be) pursuing this avenue: getting it into the standards forces everyone to support it, including Google.

Expand the Flash Metaphor to Learning Technology

The debate around Flash on the iPad, from a standards perspective, where it is a popular (very popular) proprietary technology that has near ubiquitous adoption… well, that debate is similar to a longstanding debate in the learning standards community about open standards.  Pardon me if I grab another third rail (as if the flaming about Flash and Apple won’t incur enough wrath), but what about IMS-Common Cartridge?  Here, on a much smaller scale but very impactful, you have a de facto standard for many institutions, but it’s proprietary.  You can’t openly participate in the standards process that revisions IMS.  I’m not ranking on IMS here, I’m just explaining how it works.  It’s not “just like Flash” but clearly you’re not marching into Adobe’s offices in (lovely) San Jose or email Mike Chambers about whatever change to the Flash plug-in you’re passionate about and want to work on (note: it’s not like we’re buddies or anything, but this is in no way ranking on Mike Chambers — there’s few people as awesome as Mike, whom I’ve been lucky to meet a few times over the past too many years).  The Flash plug-in and format is not something you or I are going to work on.  It’s not open for us to do so.  And neither is IMS Common Cartridge.

Now the big difference in my examples is that you CAN join IMS, get into the Common Cartridge Working Group, participate and evolve it.  You need to pay to get in (it’s nominal, but for me it’s been a barrier), but you can do that.

That said, the barrier prevents further adoption and unfettered inclusion or integration with other specs and standards.  Common Cartridge might be the best learning technology standard since sliced bread — but without it being open, it has very little chance of revolutionizing public education systems, because the barrier to entry is high.

We see the same thing with IEEE standards, too.  You need to pay to get those standards.  Sure, you can always find a way to read the standards, but to modify them? To use them? You need to pay.  Like with IMS, I agree that these organizations are doing good work and need to be supported and the value they provide is worthy of compensation — but the fact that there are more end users of the specs these bodies produce than the people who make them — and many of these end-users have needs for interoperability with other standards that are beyond the scope of bodies like IEEE or IMS… this is where the drama comes in.  Because without it being an open standard — by open, I mean unencumbered — you can’t even try to make these things work together.

The Owner’s Manifesto

I subscribe to Make Magazine, and one of the very first maxims they put out there to their audience was “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” If you can’t open these standards to mash them up, how are we going to create legitimate combinatorial innovations and mashups?

I think Avron Barr (@avron) put it best in his recent LETSI blog post on Content Interoperability is the Wrong Problem to Solve:

Innovation is key to realizing elearning’s true potential on the web – we have a long way to go. In various corners of the elearning world, teachers and content creators are exploring immersive learning environments, mobile platforms, multi-student collaboration activities, online tutoring, and intelligent tutoring systems. They are using online activities in constructive and discovery-based learning scenarios that fall outside of traditional computer-based instruction. However, to achieve portability, today’s content standards make 20-year-old assumptions about pedagogy, about the student experience, and about publishers’ business models that stem from a time before computers were connected by networks.

Walled gardens make it hard for the things inside them to grow and adapt.  Flash solved a content display problem for a very long time that was nigh impossible to achieve until browsers started really supporting W3C standards — and while IE 8, Mozilla, Opera and Webkit are each far from perfect, they’re a lot better at displaying HTML and CSS consistently than ever before.  The need for Flash to do this is fading, but the backlog of online content (especially “learning” content) that’s in Flash makes it impossible to edit, which everyone has complained about for years.  It’s not Flash’s fault, it’s not Adobe’s fault — it’s our fault for relying on a closed format for so long as for it to become burdensome to adapt the material to more open means.

The longer we depend on closed and rigid formats, the harder it will be to adapt and evolve what we do with them into whatever comes next.  This hinders evolution, innovation and future adoption when we need, more than ever before, to accelerate and lower the barriers to doing these very things.

One More Thing

There’s another message that Apple needs to hear from the Owner’s Manifesto.  One that as a fanboy it’s hard to process.  Ultimately, If I can’t be free to make bad decisions with my iPad, it’s not really my iPad, is it?

What I’d like to see is the removal of FUD and Draconian language in the terms of service so that there’s amnesty if we jailbreak our devices.  Let people play without fear, and marvel at what you empower them to create.

UPDATE:

It should be plenty obvious that I’m a big fan of Apple.  After receiving some comments about this post, I want to make it plain that I actually don’t have a particular beef with Flash; certainly not with Adobe.  Adobe has been a tireless sponsor of standards activity, actively participating and interested in standards discussions.  Plainly, they’ve championed ECMAscript.  They’ve been an ardent supporter of LETSI.  I’m just putting that out there.

What I tried to do (and probably failed at) is putting the Apple/Adobe debate over Flash as a metaphor for other debates that are generally less visible to a broad audience, and harder to follow with all the nuance, context and history needed.  Hence the title of this post “Popularizing a Standards Debate” because the waves of emotion around Flash and the forthcoming iPad are exposing the kinds of struggles the learning community still throws down over.  My hope is that in sharing my perspective with you, it helps you to view your position on these issues in a broader context.

“Experts don’t participate in communities anymore. Ten years ago, you could ask a question on any bulletin board and get answers, loads of answers, back. Now there are so many bulletin boards and lots of dead questions. If networking and community works so well, why aren’t the experts there?”

I contended that himself, as an expert, choosing not to engage or participate was the karmic part of his observation; that the notion of community is a virtuous circle. All these things I *assume* to be absolutely true.

But what if I’m wrong? As I hunted around, I started to find, alarmingly, that experts aren’t as easy to keep involved in community activity as everyone else. I have a few quick assumptions as to why (top of mind being that they find no WIIFM in staying involved).

How can we keep experts engaged, responsive and contributing to the greater network? Will a tie to some greater sense of “social responsibility” be enough? What intrinsic motivations keep them in the loop?

My initial thoughts around this subject are that we’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to “accelerate” access and delivery to expert knowledge — but what we’re really end up with is the ability to connect to an expert and query them for a response, like we do with Google or Bing. Experts (even engineers and computer scientists) have feelings. They’re not interested in a transaction with people who don’t know what they know because, quite frankly, there’s nothing to offer at that transaction that an expert may want or need. This goes at the very heart of building communities, which is to say, building *relationships*: empathy.

Friends, in the traditional sense, are probably far more likely to help you with the tough questions because when you ask them for help, they know by virtue of you being friends that you’ve explored other options and you’re not wasting their time.

I want to discuss this in our next Community Catch-up and anywhere else, because I’m wondering if this is the big chink in the armour? Your thoughts?

Dan Pink has written three books in a row that have had impact on my perspective.  Any regular follower of the blog knows how much I’ve been influenced by “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” or “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.”  Those texts highlighted to me where I needed to go next given the headspace I was in when I read them.  If there’s any big “a-ha” to me from Pink’s new book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” it’s that he’s writing about where I am now. If Dan Pink is ahead of the future curve, letting people know behind him what’s coming up ahead, maybe this means I’m catching up.  For me, that’s affirming and a little scary at the same time.

If you could even boil down the theme of the book to one central idea, it’s that of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations.  He frames this early on in the book in a number of ways.  First, by talking about the failures of Arthur Anderson, Enron, Wall Street and our financial institutions, he dispels the notions that focusing on the mushy stuff doesn’t affect the bottom line.  Clearly, by losing focus on things like greater purpose, ethics, the people we affect, the change we want to see in the world — losing that kind of focus and, instead, hyper-focusing on performance results (extrinsic motivators) affects material gains, at least in the short-term, but at the expense of losing those material games and wreaking unspeakable havoc on the lives of people far beyond the scope of your perceived impact.  Pink highlights a number of changes I didn’t know about that are starting to happen — for instance, in April 2008, Vermont became the first US state to allow a new type of business called an L3C (low-profit limited liability corporation).  It operates like a for-profit business but it’s primary aim is to offer significant social benefits. — an interesting alternative to a 503c corporation.

Second, Pink frames the praise of intrinsic motivation by highlighting, with multiple examples, that this isn’t new, it’s well researched and the evidence holds true in the face of how we think about rewards. He links the notion of how work can translate to play (or vice-versa) to the example of Tom Sawyer getting his friends to pay to paint his fence.  This “Sawyer Effect” was researched by behavioral scientists like Harlow (1940s), Maslow (1950s) and Deci (1960s), Lepper and Greene (1970s). There’s now seven decades of research on how people are actually motivated, and while you might not have heard of these names, if you’re in learning you’ve no doubt heard of  Abraham Maslow (also from University of Wiscons – Go Badgers!).  The theme of “the hidden costs of rewards” is recalled with several examples.

To be clear, Pink doesn’t admonish rewards or money or anything like that.  He’s making the case, very convincingly, that there’s something else, bigger than the material, that we need to focus on — that once we’ve met some very basic survival needs, we’re ultimately leading unsatisfying lives unless we’re working for something bigger than what’s immediately in front of us.  By tapping into that greater good, we unlock a lot more contribution, engagement and ultimately rewards of a virtuous cycle.  One method that’s needed to do this, Pink cites fairly early on, is identifying heuristics vs. algorithms. He writes,

“An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.  That is, there’s an algorithm for solving it.  A heuristic task is the opposite.  Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.”

I just had a conversation related to this last night.  My friend and I discussed workplace cultures where there are all these meetings, all the time, that everyone must participate in.  I mentioned to him that I out-of-hand decline any meeting request that doesn’t include an agenda, or at least a goal about what we’re supposed to accomplish in the meeting.  That clears out about 80% of my meeting invites (this is a page out of Lencioni and even Six Sigma).  For the meeting invites that are left, I’ll typically respond if it’s vague or I don’t immediately realize why I specifically need to be there — and I’ll respond by what they’re hoping I can add to the conversation.  If it’s a quick answer, I give it to them.  If it’s not, I know it’s a meeting I need to attend because there’s probably additional context required.

That’s my algorithm for reducing the amount of meetings I need to attend, and that affords me the kind of time needed to accomplish many of the novel things I do, like maintain relationships with really really smart people in the field so that when I have a question, I can get good answers.  How do I maintain those relationships? By helping others.  There’s no algorithm for how that all gets done — those are heuristics.

There are a number of people who talk about that very grey area of heuristics other than Pink, and if you want some quick reads to follow on the subject, I recommend Paula Thornton (@rotkapchen).

I don’t want to give too much more away on the book.  It’s a fast read.  It’s an easy read.  It’s an important read and it will open you up to some very interesting research and science behind motivation.  This impacts you; this impacts how you impact the people you work with and work for.

I’m looking forward to seeing Dan Pink tomorrow when he comes to Chicago at the Union Club. Admission is $35, which probably means it won’t be as cool as it was when I had coffee and interviewed him back in 2007, but it’s worth it because, quite frankly, he’s just that good.

Basically if you’re running a learning or knowledge community or are gearing up to design one, we use this discussion to share the goals for our communities, our approaches as far as tool and people resources AND the lessons we’re learning by doing (and thus, from each other).

We had about 8 people last time and that was pretty awesome.  We can probably make room for a few more so if you’re interested, comment below and I’ll handle the inviting.

This meeting, we’re hoping to follow up on a few threads from last time, including…

• How some people are using NewsGator as a way to drive community learning activity.
• How narrow or broad a focus does a community need to have to be effective.

And other key themes anyone wants to bring up before, during or after.

We have a small set of ground rules for these discussions if you’re interested in participating:

• This should be sacred ground among trusted peers and colleagues across organizations. Participation here is to improve all our organizations, not to gain some competitive advantage. In other words, please be cool.
• Don’t give away your super duper top secret sensitive company information. Please provide the context needed for us to help you and learn from your examples. Again, please be cool.
• Please don’t blog/tweet/socialize specifics about anyone’s projects shared here. EXCEPTION — Sharing these learnings with your team and your organization for learning purposes? Totally cool. I mean, that’s kinda the point, right?
• Conversely, PLEASE blog/tweet/socialize what you’re learning. If people resonate with what we’re learning, this community can grow.
• Embrace candor. We’re all here to grow, improve, trust and learn from each other. If you have an idea to make something better, share it! This includes suggestions to improve these ground rules and/or conventions.

We also used Google Wave in real time while we were on the phone with each other, and that seemed to turn out pretty well.  We’ll likely continue.

Our results are not open to the public, because most of us are informally benchmarking for our organizations.  If you’re interested in learning what’s going on, you need to participate and share.

With all that said, I hope we see you next Friday for another awesome discussion!

After several pings by people encouraging me on some recent success with weight loss, I want to post how I’m doing it. Please know this: it’s only been two weeks, and it’s a far cry from what I’d consider a success. That said, I have lost ten pounds in two weeks and there’s a learning nerd spin to this.

Eat Right

First, it’s all about increasing awareness and engagement. If I’m aware of what I’m eating and can stay aware of how it measures against what I’m supposed to eat, I can adjust and learn to plan my eating. I’m using DailyBurn to do this, and they have two iPhone apps that really help: Foodscanner and DailyBurn.

Foodscanner allows me to simply scan in the barcodes for any packaged food or search by name for the food in their database. All the nutrition guide information is there, and if you can’t find the food, you can create it in the app and anyone can find it afterwards. Foodscanner is how I get data in about what I’m eating.  The simplicity of scanning barcodes with the app and it basically auto-filling the information, and then the occasional manual search or manual entry has reduced the time and effort for me to record what I eat, and so I’m doing it.

The recording of what I’m eating is one thing, as it keeps me actively engaged in one kind of activity (recording).  It’s the monitoring (awareness) that really has made the difference for me so far.  The DailyBurn app is how I can monitor how I’m doing. It’d be really nice if both the collection and scanning of what I’m eating and the monitoring of how it adds up, nutrition-wise, was all in one app.  At least the two apps work well together thanks to the web application.  The important “awareness” part for me is monitoring not just how many calories I’ve taken in compared to what I’m supposed to consume, but how that’s broken down.  That bagel with peanut butter I ate this morning? Seriously took a chunk out of what I’m supposed to do for Carbs and Fat.  Meanwhile, I need to load up on lean protein to balance it out.  Keeping aware of the realtime shift in my eating until I have a better handle on planning is the key for my success so far.

I can also keep track of my exercise, which I’ve started doing again right after New Year’s.   I do this to be consistent in my reporting in DailyBurn, but I’m actually using iMapMyFitness to concentrate and socialize my exercise progress.  More on that in the next section.

The DailyBurn app gives me a nice overview of where I’m at for the week.  The iPhone app displays it very well for the small format, but I want to show you what the web portal looks like.  It’s a nice dashboard.

Basically, by keeping it easy to enter and easy to monitor information wherever I am (// mobility), DailyBurn is working where WeightWatchers’ PointTracker web application never did (although WW does have an iPhone app now).  Best part, for everything I’m doing, DailyBurn is mostly free (I spent $1.99 on Foodscanner).  Years ago, when I was on WeightWatchers, dutifully filling out my slips and entering my information online, this was the kind of application I was hoping for.  Moving it to the phone which is also my iPod is the right move.

Speaking of moving…

Exercise

When I signed up for DailyBurn, I asked a few others to join me and they did… but they haven’t tracked anything yet.  I don’t want to razz them.  Some people are already finding success with their routines, others are comfortable about sharing their weightloss experience in different ways than me; it’s cool.  My buddy Will signed on to DailyBurn (he came back) and encouraged me to try MapMyFitness which is where he’s active about his exercise.  This gets me to what Steve Howard broached me about — finding others to work out with.  For me, it’s about sharing the experience — a two-way street.  I don’t want to feel like I’m alone in doing this.  I also want the people I’m going through this ordeal with to hold me accountable to committing, sticking with and executing on my goals.

So Will has egged me on to workout and I have.  And he’s been very supportive (considering Will is… Will). 

Seriously, MapMyFitness is an interesting tool.  Not as pretty an iPhone app or a website as DailyBurn and it has some annoying usability quirks.  But the integrated GPS tracking of my walks, bike rides (if I was riding right now), etc is pretty key, especially given how easy it is to record, report and share what I’m doing.

What to Learn

Again, I’m two weeks in.  I don’t have it all figured out and I can’t say with any certainty that I’ll be able to stick with it.  As a learning person, awareness and engagement such that I’m called to participate are vital things for me in any endeavor.  DailyBurn has me figured out as far as awareness — it’s not perfect but it’s darn close.  MapMyFitness, as a tool being used by active participants in my network of trust, is working.  Partly because I’m engaged, and partly because I don’t want Will giving me crap about not doing it.  The social accountability piece is absolutely crucial to affecting change in myself — which is why I decided to socialize this to begin with.  I know me.  I know that I won’t hold myself accountable.  I know which friends will hound me if I fall off the wagon.

Abundance is great… but sometimes scarcity works, too.

The session I care most about is 100 Walls to Knock Down For Enterprise Renovation. Here’s the description, and who’s signed on to present with me.

There’s no sledgehammer to renovate an Enterprise into an Enterprise 2.0, but there are signals and patterns that let you know the shift is going well. Our panel of practitioners, technologists and anthropologists will share their first hand experiences of organizations finding their Feng Shui through the messes. Panelists include Dennis Schleicher (@dennisschleiche) Director User Experience Architecture for Sears Holdings Corp., Mark Oehlhert (@moehlert) Innovation Evangelist for Defense Aquisition University, and Aaron Silvers (@mrch0mp3rs) Learning Architect.

If you’re only going to vote for one of my sessions (maybe you’re more about scarcity than abundance), that’s the one I’d like you to vote on.  You combine Dennis’ ideation and Mark’s laser-focused wit, their combined anthropologic toolset and my own secret sauce… wow.  This could be a great session.

If you’re into abundance, here are my other proposed sessions: Massively Distributed Problem Solving and Make the Business Case: 1.0-to-2.0 From the Bottom-Up.

I want to highlight some other sessions that I’m interested in seeing, and they feature such cool people as Marcia Conner, Kris Rockwell, Stowe Boyd, Koreen Olbrish, Gina Minks and Paula Thornton (among many others).  Please vote up these sessions, too:

• Social Plumbing: Enabling Federated Social Services across your WHOLE intranet
• Community Management Best Practices: From the Mouths of Practitioners
• What Enterprise 2.0 Can Learn from Knowledge Management
• Using Alternate Reality Games (ARG) for Training
• Year Three of a Ten Year Journey to Mastery
• 5 Lessons in Building a Community from….a Community
• The Human API, integrating with your customers through social media.
• Driving Adoption is anti-2.0
• Microsharing: It is all about the tools. It is not about the tools.
• Capturing the Collective Web Intelligence of your Enterprise
• Lessons from Religion about Evangelizing Enterprise 2.0
• 10 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds Should Be Part of Your Enterprise 2.0 Strategy
• Using Cross-Functional Language to Move Execs: Deconstructing a Real Presentation that Built an Understanding of Social Media from Two Different World Views
• Social Learning 2.0

Based on traffic from Google Analytics, here are the ten most popular posts from this last year (at least, what brought you to the site):

1. Adventures in ActionScript 3.0: Building an iTunes-like Browser With Flash and XML
2. Balancing Social Capital and Expectation Management
3. Adventures in ActionScript 3.0: Making the Data Available to Flash from an Access Database
4. Adventures in ActionScript 3.0: Working With Microsoft Access
5. The Star Wars Management Guide
6. The DevLearn 2009 Write-up
7. LETSI and the Past and Future of Interoperability
8. Curriculum is Not the Whole Problem
9. How I Got Through 2009
10. Narratives, Learning, The Holodeck and Hyperspace

Seems like it’s been forever since I blogged about Flash (and… it has been about a year).  What was your favorite?

1. Capture (almost) everything.

It looks incredibly nerdy, but I always have a Moleskine cahier pocket-sized notebook in my front left pocket. If I’m wearing a shirt that doesn’t have a pocket, I put it in my front jeans pocket with the iPhone. I almost always have a nice Cross ballpoint pen with me, too. Once a list goes past two items, or anytime the lightning of insight strikes — I write it down. Capturing it, even if I don’t do anything with it, keeps me from spending energy and time trying to remember what it was that got me thinking earlier.

I usually have a larger Moleskine with me for meetings and I use that to write things down when a laptop isn’t possible. When a laptop is avalable, I use OmniOutliner, Twitter or Google Wave to annotate things even while I facilitate online events. I use a Moleskine of some kind just about everyday, multiple times a day.

I started using Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPhone this year, and as they’ve released features like highlighting and annotation, I’ve been using it. I’ve also transferred my reading notes (started to, anyway) to Readernaut — that way I have a way of sharing what I find interesting in the published literature I’m looking at. My hope has been (and still is) that if it encourages even one other person to read what I’m reading and start sharing what they find interesting, the value I get from the practice and exchange is worth far more than the little bit of effort it takes me to actually enter my notes. I generally use Redernaut about once a month. Generally.

When permissible and appropriate, I use the voice memo feature on the iPhone or use Audio Hijack Pro (or ScreenFlow or Jing) to capture phone calls and web meetings. Audio Hijack Pro is my tool of choice for SkypeCasting, and I have a dial-in number for my Skype account to make sure I can record a call when necessary (helps for call forwarding from my cell phone, home phone or even Google Voice). I’ve used Google Voice to record a call once, but it’s kinda hinky — I hope it gets better over time (or a dedicated app to make using it easier).

I can also record a Skype call with ScreenFlow, but it’s pretty heavy powered for a phone call by itself; that said, if you’re recording a web meeting or webinar, ScreenFlow is awesome for capturing your video, your mic, all the system sounds and your screen capture. I like Jing for static screenshots and for really quick and dirty how-to’s. Screenr is my next alternative, but I’ve had mixed results on my work computer with Screenr (Java issues) whereas Jing’s been just wonderful. I use some kind of audio/screen capture mechanism several times a week (usually Jing).

When you start getting into the digital recording of audio and/or video, care must be taken to make sure everyone is aware of what you’re doing (I’m not the best at asking at the onset, but I’ve improved greatly with practice and self-coaching), but these recordings can be very very useful when you tie things together — a point I’ll explore next.

2. Organize your resources often

Above, I mentioned I use Readernaut to share my annotations of the books I’m reading.

I use Evernote as my general capture mechanism now — it replaced Delicious which I used to use for bookmarks all the time. Frankly, the ability to upload documents and PDFs directly to Evernote, tag them and have them available on my phone or any computer I’m on, while being able to control with whom I share a notebook — it’s invaluable to me now.

I tag everything. I tag my blog posts in WordPress. I tag everything I put into Evernote — anywhere from 2-5 tags as a rule.

I’m in Evernote just about everyday, and add to it 2-3 times a week.

To quickly access applications on my Mac, I use Quicksilver. I’m also heavily reliant on Spotlight on the Mac; not so much on the iPhone.

Speaking of the Mac, I have spent a great deal of effort in the last year trying to keep my calendar and contacts synced with Google. For a while, I was rocking with the Google Sync using their Exchange services to push everything to the iPhone (and thus the Mac). Once I got hooked into my work’s Exchange account, I had to switch back to IMAP for Google. I was, for a very long time, using SpanningSync — but that predicated that I would keep my iPhone synchronized solely by docking it and doing a tethered sync. Sticking solely with Google’s direct services, I’m pretty squarely lined up now between iPhone, laptop and Google. I haven’t used SpanningSync in months.

I switched this year from Remember The Milk to Toodledo for a cloud task service. In the end, it doesn’t make much difference, but Toodledo just seems so much more robust in terms of project planning. I still use Appigo’s ToDo; despite some very pretty Task Managers on the iPhone, none seem to really have the power and simplicity that Appigo still has going for it. It actually upsets me that it’s easier for me to manage my tasks with Moleskines or Appigo than it is on the desktop. Why won’t any of the desktop task managment programs synch with an online service? Forget the Mac tasks (i’ve given up on those) but Things? The Hit List? The big guns in the space don’t sync with anybody. That’s a shame.

3. Stop doing what isn’t working.

I quit using Delicious because Evernote did what Delicious did for me, but more.

I quit Flickr because paying another $59 to Yahoo to get through their blackmail of my older pictures was insane to me.

I quit Aviary, Twine, Boingo, MyBlogLog and a bunch of other services I guess I had accounts for because, quite frankly, I wasn’t using them at all.

I cut back my Basecamp account because no one on my project teams but me was actively using it. I love Jason Fried, but there’s no sense in spending $49 a month on something no one’s using.

I unsubscribed to junk mail instead of just flagging it as junk.

I couldn’t stand spending 10.5% sales tax in Chicago/Cook County, so we started making a lot more purchases (even dry goods) from Amazon, which is tax free. With Amazon Prime, the $50 a year gets us two-day shipping automatically, and other deals, too. On a Friday night, I needed a Zi-8 for Saturday afternoon — $6.99 got it to my door by 10:30am.

4. Periodically re-evaluate what is working and seek out opportunities to improve

I’ve gone through Twittellator Pro, Twitteriffic, Tweetie, Tweetie 2 and TweetDeck on the iPhone. I use Tweetie 2 now. Did I waste all that money on the other apps? No. With the amont that I’m using Twitter both to scan/read and to share/post, until Tweetie 2 so dominated the iPhone apps, others had various stengths for certain types of activity.

Tweetie 2 just happens to be so good that I don’t need the other apps now.

I switched at the end of last year from QuickBooks Online to Freshbooks to a desktop app called Billings to handle my invoicing of clients for my consulting practice — it fit into my workflow with much better results.

Goals for 2010?

• Shrinking: While some people would think 210 pounds is overweight, I’m still 40 pounds above that number.  With my oldest readying for kindergarten, a full roster of projects, presentations and opportunities ready to hit as soon as January — I really can’t stress enough (to myself) how vital it is that I get in shape.  Can I shed 40 pounds in a year? Frankly, I’d be pleased to be able to run without feeling like my lungs hold no air.  This will be painfully difficult, but I’m running out of opportunities to put this off.
• Growing: I’ve been part of too many conversations in the last three months where author after author is cited and I don’t know the literature.  I’m a bright guy and I’ve made it incredibly far on a broad understanding of multiple domains combined with a talent for identifying patterns and synthesizing ideas… but I feel kinda like a savant in conversations when it gets deeper than the pop-psychology/sociology authors (Gladwell, Pink, etc).  Hence I’ve started reading Wegner, Maslow, Hall and the dissertations of people I know (and their references).  I will never know everything, but I want to be able to talk more than tech, even though I’m beginning to accept that the tech is truly my domain.
• Expanding: I’ve spent the last six months doing a very concentrated dive into the mobile and AR space.  I need to get seriously comfortable with Virtual Worlds.   I also need to get comfortable with conversations happening outside of learning and training — I want to dip my toes more into other parts of an organization.  The borders around “training” and “peformance” are eroding and I’m very interested in how we bridge knowledge work with other types of work.

As the year now winds down to a close, it’s hard for me to focus on the best of anything in 2009 because so much and so many were so wonderful me.  It’s also hard to write what’s going to sound like a love letter to Twitter, but credit must be given where due.  So as much as I’m saying thank you, I’m laying the foundation for whatever comes next in 2010.  Because in spite of how trying this year has been with the economic downturn… this may have been the best year of my adult life and it’s about to get a whole lot better in 2010.

Twitter is a transformational medium that has changed my life completely from before its presence in my everyday.

There is absolutely no way I could have the voice I have, had the ideas I’ve generated this year, made the friends I’ve made and actualized in so many parts of my “real” life had there been no efficient and truly effective means of “jacking in” to such wonderfully bright, funny and caring people around the world.

You know who you are.  Thank you.  THANK YOU.  With all of my heart, soul and faculties, thank you.

You encourage me when I need empathy.  You challenge me when I need growth.  You focus me when I’m too broad and electrify me when I need to move out of stasis.  My friends — my personal learning network (PLN) — you’ve done far more than help my career path or teach me something new or distract me with new shiny objects to turn a sour hour around — you’ve helped me become an actualized person.

Not fully-actualized (I need to do something about getting my pauch in shape); but confident, comfortable and intellectually restless and honestly humbled to an extent simply not possible without you being part of my day, everyday.

It’s hard for me to separate the professional from the personal growth this year, because they have truly been one and the same.  I found a public presence that is in harmony with a private identity, not distinct from it.  I grew beyond being an E-Learning developer into an architect of strategy.  I took risks — big career risks that could’ve devoured me — and things worked out.  I began to learn how to collaborate, what it means to truly lead by serving others, how to consult and how to have fun doing it.

I hope it’s fairly transparent to you all, but through your feedback and enthusiasm and support, I’m learning humility.  I’m learning to ask for help when I need it.  I’m learning that helping others is not separate from helping oneself.

The last six months of 2009, especially, have quite possibly been the most profound six months of my life.  Engaging in the pursuit of a path to an experiential web has made me grow intellectually, and the more I’ve invested in this pursuit, the more all parts of my life have come into a sense of “flow.”

I’m holding back on the specifics like names and keyframes for this year.  Look at what I’ve blogged about.  Look at what I’ve tweeted about.

There are significant shifts on my horizon in 2010.  Things are lining up professionally and personally that blow my mind.  Dare I say I get a little misty-eyed.  What is to come could not have been imagined without you.

I only hope that in 2010, I make being connected as valuable for you as you’ve been for me.

It’s not entirely true for us.  Many people in my org, including myself, are part of all sorts of knowledge communities.  Now that we’re going to try and do it all official like, I figured if I could use this information, maybe others could as well.

The whole idea is still relatively young in terms of facilitating and tacitly encouraging communities of practice, especially in non-tech organizations.  People above me trust that we’ll figure it out.  I feel comfortable heading into uncharted territory and trusting that we’ll figure it out.  We start small and move fast.

But knowing what mistakes others have made might help me (and you) make fantastic new mistakes — or maybe, just maybe, find some early successes to build on.  That’d be nice, too.  Right?

So here’s what I’m thinking.  I’ve had a couple of get-togethers over WebEx with Michael Palko, Brian Dusablon and Craig (Ender) Wiggins this last year that set me, and my org, on the right path. Back in March of this year, Michael led a great initiative on Sharepoint in Corporate Learning (notes, btw, are here from that session).

I’d like to have another one with a slightly larger audience of people already doing communities in their org, and people who are thinking about doing it, to do some level setting on our various goals for communities, approaches as far as tool and people resources AND lessons learned so far.

I’ll share what I’m doing in this space and I hope you can share what you’re up to, also.  If you want to make sure we cover something in the meeting, make sure you comment on this post so as this rapidly comes together, we don’t miss anything vital. Example: I’m interested in what kind of time commitment is needed to facilitate a community tied to an organizational curriculum, like developing leadership skills.  I’m also interested in exercises that help the community become self-sustaining.

I’ll capture the session and share it with you afterwards.  Please participate and select the best dates/times to participate using Doodle.  We’ll go with the most popular time. NOTE: In the Doodle, I’m asking you for your email address when you sign up so that I can send out invites without having to hunt you down

UPDATE: The majority elected Friday, December 18 at 2pm CST to participate.  If you’re in the community-making mindset and you’d like to participate, we can accommodate 1-2 more people (we already have ~10).  We’ll be moderating a back-channel before, during and after this session in Google Wave.  Comment below if you’re interested in participating this week or, potentially in the future.  And if you need a Google Wave account, comment below, also.  We’ll get you hooked up.

Marcia Conner…

Incentives that http://sn.im/dont-cost money any better? @mrch0mp3rs has me wondering. Constructivists+ ready to weigh in?

Koreen Olbrish…

@marciamarcia @mrch0mp3rs incentives work based on the individual’s motivators; for some, recognition or sense of purpose much more powerful

Mark Oehlert…

@marciamarcia @KoreenOlbrish @mrch0mp3rs Two classes of incentives: Want To & Have To

There are, in my understanding, a variety of reasons why people are motivated and thusly a number of ways we can influence others.  I posited that while needs and fear are certainly motivators, there are others like rewards, beliefs and plain ol’ fashioned ego.

There are a lot of ontologies you can apply to describe what motivates people.  The key to influencing people, as individuals or as a facilitator in a group, is not just recognizing what actually paves the way to action: we need to be careful to recognize what does not motivate people.

When we attempt to motivate with a method that doesn’t apply, that mismatch is immediately recognized as something akin to attempting manipulation — and then you’ve lost the person or group.  You’ve turned them off completely.

Marcia asked above if an economic motivator is any better than a financial one.  I think that question speaks to organizational or even individual values.  I don’t know that I’m the right judge of whether it’s better or not.  What I believe is that, as Andrew McAfee addressed in his keynote at DevLearn, people are motivated by a weird assortment of things.  I’m pragmatic: I don’t want to question it;  I want to use what works in accordance with what “we” value.

What say you?

How is that even possible?

Scoreboards, titles, designations and certificates are all forms of recognition, right?  Points, credits earned — some form of scarcity can be quantified and recognized in an organizational system.  The ability to earn some kind of points or credits to earn designations, or to recognize upper levels of accomplishment in other ways are part of an economy an organization can create around attributes, individual and group behaviors that it values.

So if an organization truly recognizes/values participation, contribution and leadership — these are attributes that can be rewarded in ways that aren’t financial but may turn out to be as meaningful or even more meaningful than throwing money at people.

What can it look like? There are lots of models (again), but a quick idea I had at Koreen and Kris’ review of the Zombie Apocalypse Augmented Reality Game revolved around recognizing contribution as a team in the discovery of content.  Many players would get upset that no matter how fast they responded to entering a discovered code in the game, while they could earn the points for themselves, there was no reward to the team for their effort.

Not that I’m a game designer, but I imagine a points system that rewards:

• Individual accomplishment – x points for individual score
• Posting for the team – (# of team members) minus (# of team members who’ve already found it)

Why would this second rule be important?  A couple of reasons, imho:

• Recognizes an impact of being the first to post for the team (who’s your “scout?”).
• Encourages team behavior (to maximize team points, everyone must get in to enter the code)
• Encourages distribution of content, given the focus of this particular ARG (players must self-organize to get the word out)

Now you can add more incentive by rewarding connector roles, leader roles, etc.

What do you think?

[We ALWAYS interact] with information resources in some social context. The application of community to content, in terms of discussion, recommendation, reviews, ratings and so on, is evident in many of the services we use, and in some form in most of the major network services we use (Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, …). Indeed, this is now so much a part of our experience that sites without this experience can seem bleached somehow, like black and white TV in a color world.

In a reductive view, here are three types of social experience, which may be present singly or in combination in these sites: Conversation, Connection and Context.

• Conversation. Conversation about services is a natural part of our experience of them. Amazon and eBay leverage this fact and exploit it to financial gain. But it also helps the other buyers, looking for feedback prior to their purchase!
• Connection. We connect with others by sharing information about ourselves. Networks form around ‘social objects’, the focus of these shared interests
• Context. We leave traces everywhere. We click, buy, rate, follow pathways, add to playlists. We also create collections, lists, and playlists, which disclose our interests and can be compared to make connections or to generate recommendations, or to seed other lists. Services use this subterranean data not only to make connections with other users but to create context, to configure resources by patterns of relations created by shared user interests and choices, and to use these patterns to broaden the experience of their users.

A question that comes to my mind in thinking about this: How might this affect SCORM?

It seems to me that when it comes to networked learning activity, we want to be able to capture something about it — maybe it’s the exchange in pursuit of a learning objective or performance outcome or just a “goal” — but most everyone wants to capture the important nugget, right?  What is that nugget that we want to capture?  And is that then “content?”

If we’re shying away from the notion of “content” and focusing on the “community,” then what about community can we measure?  While I’m sure there’s a lot of people who would contend you can’t measure community, I know some sociologists who’d argue that anything of value can be measured.

If you value a community at all, you can measure all sorts of things, in my opinion:

• You can measure who’s making a contribution.
• You can measure what kind of contribution they’re making…
  • You can measure if they’re a leader.
  • You can measure if they’re a coordinator.
  • You can measure if they’re a connector.
  • You can measure if they’re an aggregator.
  • You can measure if they’re a disaggregator or filterer.
  • You can measure if they’re a worker or researcher or writer.
• You can measure a person’s impact
  • The “retweet” factor.
  • The ensuing conversations spiraling as fractals from someone’s post (how many people start talking about a subject planted by your contributor).

This is just a small handful of what can be measured in community activity if we were interested in measuring it.  What else would you add? What would you take away?

*Note: I’m not advocating that we necessarily should measure these things (or anything) about communities.  I’m recognizing that while lots of people have a picture in their heads about what “social learning” is, we all have trouble describing what it looks like.  I’m putting out some ideas on just what kinds of things we can measure to help generate some discussion about what we might actually want to measure. I want to get us to the question of “why do we want to measure it?” but that’s a subject for a different post.

There were about 1,200 people at DevLearn (guesstimate) with a large majority interested in doing better E-Learning, interest in serious games and social learning with a subset of that group, maybe 200 people, very plugged into the Twitter community and interested in networking with each other face-to-face.

How was DevLearn 2009 structured?

On Monday, there was an Adobe Software Summit showcasing what’s latest and greatest in their E-Learning development tools, with reception following (which I crashed).  On Tuesday were a number of concurrent all-day certificate sessions.  I attended the track on Virtual Worlds.  Wednesday through Friday held concurrent sessions with breakfast bite sessions, keynote speakers and then sessions running parallel to non-stop tracks on Serious Games (hosted by Alicia Sanchez) and Social Learning (hosted by Mark Oehlert).

As an aside, I sat as a panelist for Mark’s Social Learning Camp on Wednesday afternoon and hosted a Breakfast Bite on “Overcoming Objections to E-Learning” in addition to my scheduled speaking obligation on “Enterprise Knowledge Exchange.”

What were the big ideas I took from DevLearn 2009?

I had several “a-has” from the conference experience. Here’s a couple at the top of mind…

Twitter is the new email.

I have to thank Kris Rockwell of Hybrid Learning for this gem of insight, offered at O’Flaherty’s on the last night of the conference.  “If you think about it, 140 characters is all you need.  If you can’t get a message down to that, then I’ll just delete it, because that’s all I have time for.”

Kris also noted that if it’s really going to be a big message that requires back and forth, why not just pick up a phone and call.  Engagement, using the right medium for the job, is the key learning here.  I think this is a reason why many Twitter users are using their blogs less and why I delete more and more email.

Subject Matter Networks are more important than Subject Matter Experts.

This idea may be penultimate Mark Oehlert wisdom.  Everyone from Andy McAfee (Enterprise 2.0, #andyasks) to Eric Zimmerman (whose site is actually blocked by my work’s firewall GRRRRRRRRR) is talking about how when you throw enough eyeballs on a problem, all bugs are shallow.  What this means is that while the training industry is fixated on a single Subject Matter Expert, we may do well to remember that asking a diverse audience, even in absence of credentials, may produce better answers to our questions.  Sure, there are domain experts – but if you ask the right networks, they’re already there, eager to answer the question no one else in the network can.  Meanwhile, you can get richer, fuller answers to your lower-level questions by hitting the network.

Why does the Intranet suck?

It’s not just my company.  It’s all companies.  Pick one.  Andy McAfee asked it: What’s easier to navigate? The Internet, or your company’s Intranet?  The same organization that puts out a healthy, lively E-Commerce site that puts money in your company’s pocket is also the same organization that tolerates an Intranet that drives people away to outside the firewall to find information.  People are naturally altruistic, especially inside the firewall.  People want to help.

Organizations need to recognize this and lower the barrier for employees to connect and help each other.

What surprised me from DevLearn 2009?

Instructional Design still lives!

I had the great pleasure of meeting Neil Lasher on Tuesday in an opportunity to catch some air.  I’d only been following him on Twitter over the past few weeks as a fellow traveler, but I have found him to be one of the keenest minds on instructional design I’ve ever met.  His ability to tell a story is pretty much tops, but his laser-sharp insight in drawing you in and associating something known with something new was continuously brilliant.  Considering Neil’s pragmatic approach to design, in the same venue as Clark Quinn and Jay Cross – I mean, we’re talking about people who are very much on top of their game and despite the reports I’ve made to the contrary – ISD lives.

People want standardized Social Learning, but no one knows what it is.

I was pretty surprised by the attendance and engagement at the Tuesday session on SCORM and Social Learning.  I wasn’t too surprised by the initial questions — people want to combine things like Twitter NOW with their LMS.  We quickly got past it (hint: use cmi.comments_from_learner or cmi.suspend_data to store whatever it is you want from these feeds).  But that opened up the bigger and more important question: why?  The audience couldn’t articulate what social learning looks like; and imho if it looks like Twitter (as just one example) how would anyone want to track it — what part do track?  Let alone the “why?”  My suspicion is that even though people may not be aware of what social learning looks like, they may have an easier time selling it if it can be back-doored into an LMS that would need to be adopted to keep current with standards, and thereby “bless” social networking inside an organization because it’s a function of the learning.  There’s a post coming in this topic, because my guess is that a straw man needs to be put out there.

I feel very strongly that this approach is a mistake, but I’m reading tea leaves — I don’t know for certain that’s what people are thinking.

What are three new things I learned from DevLearn 2009?

Impact of Twitter as a Trust Ladder

I expected to meet the bulk of my personal learning network this week. What I did not expect was exactly how deep our bonds grow, and even though this has happened before (like when I got to #iel09), the assembly of 50-60 people that I *regularly* interact with, converging all in one place at one time — some people like Brian and Philip whom I’ve corresponded with for years — it’s wonderful to the point of being jarring.  Being recognized from afar by people I’ve never met, the little side-jokes that only friends would know about, the instant warmth and camraderie: there was so much joy and laughter at this event.  I truly felt I was among friends everywhere, with every minute literally filled with learning, conversation and just plain fun.

I spend everyday with my learning network.  To actually share the same physical space at the same time? Might be a life-changing event for me to recognize how many people help me do what I do and that I, with humility, have some impact on their work, their lives, their days.

Systemic/Epistemic Thinking is In

Both McAfee and Eric Zimmerman spoke about thinking systemically about problems; that tactics can’t solve for strategic.  While just about everyone loved McAfee’s keynote, Zimmerman got mixed reviews because of his presenting style.  Personally? I thought he dropped some very important nuggets of knowledge.  Example? Emergence.  Four years ago, I was in San Jose and heard Tim O’Reilly speak about “Emergence.” Zimmerman continues. Emergence refers to simple rules that produce a pattern highlighting group behavior from personal behaviors.  There are some who might look at this as a “fractal ladder” (read Pravir Malik’s mindblowing book “Connecting Inner Power to Global Change”).  In systems, you havea set of parts that interrelates to create meaning.  In these systems, our forms of communicating with each other have a certain meaning that, out of the systemic context, may mean something else.  That meaning is relevant to literacy and learning.

What this means is that if I want to talk about the transfer of knowledge from one person or source to another, it must be situated where the learners are in a greater hierarchy.  This also, isn’t so much new, but affirming and highlighted.

The Only Way Out is Through

Zimmerman and just about every encounter I had talking about knowledge exchange in organizations reaffirmed with alarming clarity: to use a system, you must participate in it.  Take system very figuratively here — we can apply this to networks of people in real life or in virtual social networks, tools, services, etc.  If you’re interested in using Twitter or Facebook for learning, you can’t wait for someone to say OK — you need to start using these tools on your own.  If you want to figure out what the “ROI” is for virtual worlds, you need to sign up for Second Life and explore it with people until you can figure out what the “Evidence of Value” is.  These tools aren’t difficult to use.  They don’t need to be used for everything under the sun, but these are transformational tools because they attack hierarchies (that’s Mark’s line).

You can choose to wait them out, but you’ll be waiting a long time.  Organizations (be they people or working groups) are unlocking a whole lot of power and growth by leveraging social tools.

What are you going to do now because of this conference?

I started blogging again after #iel09 because I realized that however infrequent, there’s a lot in my head that I can’t just meter out with Twitter alone.  Now that #dl09 is done, I’m going to plunge into targeting my blogging in my key categories for Social Learning and standards.  I’m also going to prepare some differentiated discussions and/or presentations for next year.  Read next to understand how and why.

What left you unsatisfied from the conference?

Granted, we presented on Knowledge Exchange Strategy against Google Wave — hard to compete with Google and B.J. Schone’s presenting on Yammer. B.J., especially, has some good stories to tell.  I realized after my presentation that DevLearn, like any industry conference, is drawing a wide swath of people.  The majority of these people are so struggling in the mire of how to use their tools effectively to do their jobs and create better learning materials; they’re not armed to deal with how to change their organizations systemically — not just their functional department inside an organization, but the whole thing.  I need to pare my ideas down into more digestible chunks; or write the book.  I’m not committing here and now on writing a book on transformational organizational strategy, but it’s a story that needs to be told and have a lot of sequels if we really want our economy to grow healthy and our work to be something we love.

It bothers me that while I reached a LOT of people, there’s so much left to share.

What are YOUR thoughts?

So the thought that occurred to me is… what if we’re not putting it in a proper context? Maybe Robert’s Rules are more about collaboration than we realize at first blush. More on this in a second. Bookmark this idea:

Goal: Conventions are needed in virtual collaborations.

Now this might or might not be very controversial, but I want to try and use a model that most people are familiar with (Robert’s Rules) and apply it to something that for most people is going to be very foreign: Google Wave.

So let me offer a rhetorical question…

If Google Wave is the next big thing in virtual collaboration, what do the collaborations look like?

If you’ve already received an invite and launched Google Wave, you probably went into it the first time a lot more excited than you walked away from it. Why? Because of one of a handful of reasons. My guess that some or all of these apply to you:

• You had no one to talk to
• You couldn’t find a public wave to jump into
• It was generally buggy or crashed a lot
• You found a Wave to participate in, but over time it’s nothing really new (except for some stuff like real-time typing). Even that is more of a distractor.
• You started a public Wave and it got so huge as to lose meaning, crash your browser, crash Wave, etc.
• The playback feature is buggy, or I’m still not following what’s going on.

Whatever the reason is, there’s a lot of people using Wave right now who are noticing that while there’s a lot of potential in the tool, we’re either a) not sure of what that potential really is; or b) it’s got a long way to go to be useful.

I’ve started a few public waves that picked up traffic. Two in particular (launch them as you will, beware that the Waves are big) include the LrnWave, which became more of a playground for #lrnchat people on Wave and their friends (and general public) and the DevLearn 2009 Public Wave, also public, and meant primarily for DevLearn attendees.

The LrnWave, becoming a playground, is perfectly understandable — I mean, everyone needs a place to play that’s safe so we can learn the tool. It’s not exactly spelled out for you on how to use it, much less get started.

The DevLearn Wave kinda started as a playground, also, but there are some useful things emerging. Example, we started listing our arrival times by airport and time, and that may hopefully allow people to figure out how to rideshare to the hotel (especially from San Francisco). That was a useful first collaboration experiment.

Also in the DevLearn Wave, there’s a couple of Yes/No/Maybe polls that demonstrate some utility of the widgets for Wave. In a synchronous exercise, I think it has a lot of use. It’s useful asynchronously too, but it loses a bit of the impact over the longer term.

Now, Google Wave is in an alpha state — an “early preview” and anyone using it is still getting used to it, so there’s a lot of caveats here. There’s not an established community, even if you think of #lrnchat folks rolling into a new tool — it’s a new thing and no one is an expert at it (which is saying something when no one is an “expert” Twitter user either). All that considered, at a second blush, my observation across several public waves is this: where there’s a structure for people to work within, the wave (or parts of a wave) has been pretty useful/productive (given how it’s been employed). Where there’s no identifiable structure or context, the wave is usually a fancier but buggy BBS.

Supporting Question: Why aren’t we collaborating on something bigger?

IMHO there’s a couple of reasons why we’re not all working on climate change, improving health care in the US, curing cancer, revamping our energy system, tackling rampant obesity and replacing ADDIE with a better workflow for Instructional Design (snark intended). Incomplete, my list of reasons why include:

1. These are big honking issues that no sub-group of us can just fix for the rest of us.
2. We mere mortals don’t communicate in ways that easily translate across languages, capabilities, geography, contexts, etc.
3. Our means of talking to (let alone *with*) each other don’t scale.

Google Wave is a step in the right direction. The tools is pretty much a blank slate when it comes to conventions. Most public waves I’ve seen have little to know organizational model; my guess is the participants aren’t thinking about it (so it’s like a chat to them or a BBS — anything but an actual “Wave”) OR they’re waiting for the organizational model to emerge organically from the users who continue to habit a particular Wave. All fine and good.

But if you want to use Wave right now… and by “use” I mean leverage the tool to accomplish something with a group… you need to have common expectations of how you’re going to work together, just like you’d have to have if you were working with people in a conference room, synchronously face-to-face. There are two waves that have been brought to my attention that seek to at least identify standards for moderation of Waves (from a facilitation perspective) and etiquette (what’s expected behavior).

I won’t repeat what’s on those waves. If you have an account you can go yourself. What I’d point out is that a very high level, if you moderate a group in the real world with rational, exptected behaviors and you’re working with any real community (maybe we’re talking about your colleagues at work, peers at a conference, #lrnchat folks, etc) where there are social mores and customs — there are conventions for how you behave in those communities, whether you readily acknowledge them or not.

#lrnchat does it all the time in terms of etiquette. The rules shared at the beginning of every session include the litany:

1. Introduce yourself. (We do this again at the end). Location? Focus? Fave topics?
2. [try to] stay on the #lrnchat topic. A new question will be asked every 20 min or so. If you can, include Q# in related responses.
3. When writing, complete thoughts help followers outside chat learn from you.
4. on #lrnchat we aim to play nice. Sarcasm, welcome tho.
5. Periodically RT questions so others outside #lrnchat know what you’re talking about so they can chime in.
6. Remember to include the #lrnchat in all posts. http://tweetchat.com, http://tweetgrid.com & http://twubs.com/lrnchat work well.
7. 10 min before end, tell us if you need anything from the other #lrnchat participants. Time to reintroduce yourself, too. Links welcome.
8. Please RT important points and vital questions asked for clarification, so we don’t miss them amid the lively and fast-paced #lrnchat

The format of every #lrnchat follows a model, or pattern that is predictable, so the community can immediately conduct itself even in absence of some of the facilitators. The model for #lrnchat, as an example, is:

Introductions -> Deep Question -> Practical Question -> Out-of-the-box Question -> Reintroduce & Cleanup

Pretty much every #lrnchat follows this model. The simple, predictable structure is, I’m convinced, a major reason why it is gaining in strength instead of devolution. Even in an open medium like Twitter, to accomplish certain types of collaborative goals, there must be an adopted structure that the community accepts: an “order” if you will.

Hence the tie-in to Robert’s Rules of Order. They’re adopted by a community (be they legislators in government, executive boards, community groups, 4H, whatever) so that groups that convene regularly to accomplish something can get things done in ways that are acceptable and desireable by the community. From the history of Robert’s Rules itself…

“Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the regular Army. Without warning he was asked to preside over a public meeting being held in a church in his community and realized that he did not know how. He tried anyway and his embarrassment was supreme. This event, which may seem familiar to many readers, left him determined never to attend another meeting until he knew something of parliamentary law.”

Why would he need to preside over a meeting in his community? Anyone? My guess is that the group that was meeting didn’t know how to get anything done, and even with his own set of assumptions, he couldn’t get the group to adopt any framework to have a productive discussion without a model that everyone could understand. It’s my guess. If you actually geek out on this stuff and know more, please share in the comments below.

Anyway, if you can accept that shared adopted models for collaboration help (not necessarily agree or subscribe to that idea), here’s another

Supporting Question: What models might work for virtual collaborations to build/share learning?

Let’s take a look at the meta of this post. Because, in fact, I’ve been modeling a model for you already.

Up towards the top, there’s an H1 to define our Goal. This could be our theme, focus, idea, whatever — it’s the way in which we’re going to categorize our shared conversations and collaborations. It’s what we’re working toward; what we’re talking about.

Now to meet a Goal, we need to generate as much focused discussion as we can WITHOUT telling ourselves what to say. What we want to do is create channels for discussion. I’m using H2 Questions (only one here so far) to help define some context with plenty of room for discussion, debate, disagreement and hopefully new perspectives.

These bigger questions, however, are likely too big in and of themselves to draw meaningful, actionable takeaways in a group. That’s why we need H3 Supporting Questions. They might help draw out some granular points of discussion that might be actionable.

This model I’m using in this post is just an idea. I’m trying to organize a public Wave discussion that I’d facilitate using this model. I’m also planning on using it in my session at DevLearn so that people who join in virtually might be able to follow better in real-time and after the event. Rather than just one linear flow of information (like a presentation), I want to have a discussion and try and maintain it both in the physical space and time we’ll share at DevLearn AND virtual, synchronously and then structured for asynchronously post-game.

Anyway, I know this is a long post. I hope this engages you and I hope you’ll comment with your own goals and questions for us to continue this discussion.

If you’re connected to me in any way, already in Google Wave, have invitations you can share, please leave a reply for who you’re inviting, starting from the top of the list on down.  No need to double-invite anyone.

Thanks!

Before Twitter, I was a pretty successful learning technologist.  I used and evangelized Flash. In a time before you could make a career in ActionScript, my career was ActionScript.

I liked social media.  I thought a lot about the implications social media could have on a broader definition of E-Learning.  I blogged a lot.  I tried lots of betas.  If you asked any peers of mine to describe me, they would probably tell you that I was a talented content developer.  I never felt comfortable with the designation, but it made sense.  I developed content. Lots of content.  I was good at it: I had efficiency and preternatural talent for architecture of static and dynamic content.  I could focus my attention and teach myself new tools, languages, technologies at lighting pace.

What am I now, after Twitter? Am I still a developer? I don’t write code with any frequency, so much as manipulate code as a need arises.  I don’t coach best practices in authoring tools much, even though there’s much I could share.  All the things I’ve been known and notable for are not the things I do now.  I don’t manage people.  I don’t formally lead people.

What Twitter has singularly enabled for me, that no other tool before it has done quite so well, is firstly to connect me to people — lots of people — very much like me in life experiences, professional drive, sense of purpose, sense of humor, etc.  That awareness changed me — because before when faced with a challenge, I’d have no recourse but to tackle some kinds of challenges by myself.  Once I had a network aligned by multiple shared affinities, I could crowdsource challenge analyis, collect insights and respond with multiple levels of next-actions rather than tackle everything head-on by myself.  I became a networked thinker.

Since Twitter, I hardly use Google Reader or any other RSS aggregator to find links worth knowing.  I now solely rely on my networks to supply me with the information that relevant, and since my networks are pretty tightly aligned to my collective interests, my information is filtered with an appropriate mix tailored to me: news, a lot of learning information, some general design discoveries and a dash here and there of irreverent humor, with suggestions for new music worth checking out.  I have a personalized web.

I’ve sat in now on probably 80 different conferences in the last year.  I physically attended less than ten.  The context generated by my network as they tweet their conference activities has accelerated my professional growth.  I don’t pretend to have a mastery of virtual world creation, user experience design, government transparency efforts or even Flash and Flex anymore — but I have a really good bead on what the buzz is, what the issues are, why things that are going on in these areas are relevant to my work and my life and who I can reach out to if I need more information — not just who I can email; who will reply back with the exact piece of information I need.  I can situate myself anywhere.

Twitter was a change for me.  As a result of having taken to the tool, I am now changed as a professional.  I am changed in how I think.  I am changed in how I work.  I am changed in how I seek, absorb and process many kinds of information.

There will be another new tool, probably sometime soon given how rapidly things change.  I wonder how I will change as a result.  I wonder about how people collaborating together, becoming aware of one another, witnessing each other’s changes can accerlate their alignment, share their goals and produce — even innovate — more richly; with more acceleration; with more impact.

That’s my musing for today…

At work, our team once had no skills or capability to produce media.  For less than $100, we were able to produce video and audio.  We’ve taken that train as far as it goes, and leaders grew discontent with the quality of the audio and video we could produce.  Still, we kept doing it.  Why? Because they didn’t care enough to want to pay for something better.

I’ve spent the better part of two days re-evaluating the tools we have and what capabilities they provide for our team, in terms of media production.  When we began building E-Learning content ourselves, there was no budget and no appreciation for media, so everything had to be guerilla-style.

What is guerilla-style multimedia? It’s multimedia production on the cheap. I selected a small, $40 FlexMic (from MacMice) that was a USB condenser microphone, which provides better audio quality than the unpowered microphones that plug into your Audio-In port on your computer.  We put a pop-screen together out of a coat hanger and panty hose (I read that one online a few years back). For video, I picked up a Flip Camera (which ended up getting adopted throughout the organization where people wanted to do video).

When we had no media capability and no business case to make, this gave us a set of tools which enabled only so much.  I’m now proud to say that our leadership is demanding better quality audio and better quality video, and that after two years we’re now easily making the business case it will take to significantly advance our ability to produce such multimedia in-house.

Sometimes to please people, you have to make them aware of the pain their own lack of investment causes.  You must withstand the countless retakes someone will make you do before a leader realizes that it’s the quality of the tools you’re using that prevents desired results. You must be ready with a plan to improve (and you must deliver on that plan).

Many organizations tend to value the diving catch; they should be valuing the people who prevent the need for diving catches but it’s largely not in our nature.  Designers, by definition of wanting to design the “right” experiences, tend to fight this head-on.  As a disruptive practice, I advise leveraging this cultural moray. Do the best job you can with the tools you have and continue to work on the plan to level up.  That way when the idea to improve becomes a leader’s idea, you have a solid plan to help that leader execute flawlessly.  You can make the diving catch.

The problem I run into more often than anything is that I don’t seem to have a lot of friends.  More to the point, despite how many hundreds of actual friends I have, we never seem to be online, playing the same game at the same time and aware of each other so we can play together.  The exchange of friend codes on the Wii is so ridiculously complicated, I imagine that it is so much better on XBox because of all the Microsoft integration, allowing you to port friends lists in and out of the platform.  I love the Wii for so many things, but the amount of work some of my friends put into manually managing their friends in each game, and scheduling times to play with each other online… it seems like a lot of work and I wonder how often it actually does work.

While there’s no consistent friend management on the iPhone, most online multiplayers I’ve installed hook up with Facebook Connect to put you in league with friends.

That still is a limiter, however.  Case in point? Scrabble, which has a pretty clean and obvious multiplayer component using Facebook.  You can play Scrabble on the web, through Facebook, or on the iPhone; both methods are portals to the same game which is what I’d expect to happen.  Compare this setup to Mafia Wars, which has a web-based portal outside of Facebook, a web-based portal in Facebook and the iPhone application — at least the iPhone and the Facebook portals have no means of playing the same game.  So my 147th level Mogul? Completely inaccessible to me on the iPhone, where I needed to start from scratch — which is why I uninstalled Mafia Wars not two seconds after figuring that out.

Unfortunately, even though I know a lot of Scrabble players, we’re never playing together at the same time.  Scrabble at least can hook me up with someone on Facebook that *is* playing when I’m playing (at the moment of starting a game), but that’s the only point of shared awareness.  If my opponent makes her move, I still need to either launch Scrabble to find out about it or launch Facebook to get the alert (or get the alert texted to my phone, etc). Unless there are several of us playing the same game on the same WiFi network, Scrabble can’t find anyone playing right nearby me, which is something I might prefer.

I deconstruct this part of the multiplayer experience in games to highlight one common gap that BAQON is intended to solve.  Gamers benefit from having location-aware and situation-aware services that connect them to their friends or potential friends nearby them, regardless of how they’re accessing the same (or similar) game.  It seems to me that if I’m limited only to playing with people on my wifi network OR people with Facebook accounts OR people playing on iPhones — that’s still not nearly as many candidates for meaningful connection or competition as ALL of those people, plus people who are playing the same game in the same place but through their cell service AND people who are playing the game who don’t belong to Facebook AND people playing the game on anything but an iPhone.

So, it’s not obvious for people who know me now as opposed to 9-10 years ago, but I used to build web-based games for kids 6-12.  I was producing them (writing up proposals, managing the project) and developing them (coding in ActionScript, programatic animations, architecture in Flash).  I worked with a team that produced the media and handled the server-side code and database layers.  This was my first job after teaching, and I loved it.  Making games was fun and I was very good at it.

There are many ways in which developing games is easier now.  For one thing developers now have frameworks to employ, like OpenFeint to handle high score boards, username, in-game purchases, unlockable items, etc.  On the other hand, games are so much more complicated now.  There’s more competition, your user base is savvier and likely more casual and definitely more interested in connecting with their friends and competition — all things you need to design and develop for.  You’re still largely responsible for maintaining or paying someone to maintain a backend to the game you want to build and that takes a huge chunk of resources to accomplish.  You’re nailed if you build a game no one wants to play, and you’re doubly nailed if you build a game that becomes so hot that you can’t handle the scale of adoption.

If you’re going to be building a game that touches the internet, I think you’re going to be interested in BAQON.  BAQON will provide your players with the ability to connect with each other based on location.  The intention is that BAQON will work with identity services like Facebook Connect or Google or MSN or… pick a service.  What we’re hoping you won’t need to do anymore is deal with is all the effort it takes to deal with your own backend for highscores and multiplayer awareness.  BAQON is not a socket server, but it should make it much easier to create interoperable real-time gaming experiences.  In that respect, I think it’s going to accelerate a lot of game development.

For one thing, if you’re a game developer and you don’t have to worry about maintaining a back-end system to mitigate your high scoreboards, even that by itself, probably saves you a huge boatload of time, money and resources.  This allows you, as a developer of a small game to focus on the actual game — not the servicing of things that aren’t the game.

If you’re a game developer with multiple titles, the ability to create an entry parlour where players can get line of sight into who’s playing what games of yours locally should help to expose new players to your other titles.  After all, as gamers are becoming more social, gamers will want more gaming experiences they can actually share with each other — almost impossible to do that right now, even with the emergence of location-aware gaming devices.  Now, people playing a game in one location may have line of sight into all the games being played in the same location.

By abstracting out persistent gaming information, you can enable multiple points of entry into shared game experiences.  This means you can potentially build games on multiple platforms and it’s all the same game.  When World of Warcraft launched, it was revolutionary because Macs and PCs could play with each other.  How many of the thousands of game titles around allow users to play with each other across platforms? It feels like it’s mainly the web-based titles, and as I use the iPhone I see that the stovepipes are still around. I believe we’ll help solve for it.

My question for you: if you’re building games and/or are gaming actively, what am I missing?

First, a little background.  When I was just the content specialist for ADL back in 2003-2006, Dennis worked for the same firm on completely different projects.  We got along, but it’s fair to say we weren’t close.  We had very little professional contact and I lacked some maturity, perspective and exposure that comes with experience.  Our families got together, but we didn’t bond much.

Now over the past year or so, Dennis has popped up on my radar through LinkedIn and Twitter.  Specifically through Twitter’s lens, we’ve noticed something interesting in what each other is into.  Through the relationships forged over the past couple of years with usability honchos like Brian Dusablon (@briandusablon) and anthropologists like Mark Oehlert (@moehlert), my appreciation for all the pieces of the puzzle I haven’t worked with myself has opened up.  As my understanding of what I don’t know grows, I appreciate Dennis’ gifts for user experience and intepretation more.

But still… it’s not like we hang out much.  So Dennis, being in-town, meets me for dinner.  It could be a cordial affair among acquaintances, but that’s not how it goes down.  He starts out the conversation with a simple enough question: “what are you up to?” and I start to describe BAQON — which he instantly gets.  He’s clued in by some professional experiences in similar circles that help him bridge the gaps in my flow of tweets.  Sprinkle that with some in-person delivery of information, giving him additional context and voila. He gets what I’m doing.

But more importantly, after about an hour of riffing ideas off each other in a frenzied rush of cerebral adrenaline, we finish our appetizers and drinks and he asks me, “So how did we get here?” What he continues to ask me is how did we establish this level of very close, very personal exchange of ideas?  Because we’re going deep, readers.  He’s got me thinking about ontologies and you know from reading this blog that’s not a road I go down on my own normally.  But yet we’re in a very concentrated state of some serious idea flow.  And let me just say, for the record, that if you’re going to ideate with Dennis, you need to have your A-game, because he’s a master.

So I respond to Dennis and simply state that I can connect with him at this level because I know he’s been paying attention to what I’m doing.  I know he’s doing some pretty interesting things in other places I don’t know much about, but aren’t completely unrelated.  I haven’t had time to follow his blog, but because he’s tweeting about his blog I have some idea about what he’s blogging about and as I can, I catch up.  I haven’t had time this week to catch up with everything, but I’ve been following his thread about bodystorming, because I can see its potential in helping me to express my ideas in ways that others might understand more fully.

He jumped at the chance to debrief me from the Innovations in E-Learning conference.  He’s been witness to my change, even from a distance; even at 140 characters at a time.

And that’s when it visibly hit Dennis: Twitter is a “Trust Ladder.”  To follow a blog takes time to read, time to absorb — but a tweet? That’s a very easy morsel to digest, and you can digest a lot of them.  So even though he probably doesn’t read every blog post of mine (and I, his) we have a way of knowing through the preponderance of messages what each other are doing — because we elect to pay attention to each other’s tweets.  And that… that is what builds the trust.

That must be what Chris Brogan talks about in “Trust Agents.”

So the lesson for leaders of organizations is this: stop fearing social networks.  Embrace them.  The people in your company networks who share openly — I mean, those are the people you want on every project, on every team.  They are the people who are connecting your organizational silos together.  They’re the conduit that keeps the current of information and knowledge circulating in the body of your organization.  You want all the flow you can get if you care about revenue, profit, reducing expenses, innovation, agility, etc.  You don’t turn on the social networking pipes for the entire organization to share information — awesome if they’ll do it, but they won’t.  Most people are afraid of change: multiply that fear by technology and you get… well, Dennis and I couldn’t come up with that answer of what you get, but I think you get laggards on Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations curve.

You don’t turn on the social networking pipes for everyone: you do it for the 1% of the organization that is connecting all your disparate pieces together, and potentially the 10% of the organization that is paying attention to what that 1% is doing.

If you want to break down walls that divide people, individually or as groups, just let people talk to each other, and engineer it in a way so that you have influencers talking with other influencers who have slightly different experiences — the gaps they’ll fill in will lead to the change and growth.  When the parties can identify the gap in their understanding of a shared concept, that’s the opportunity for both to create a new alignment.  That’s not something you can mandate top-down, and it’s far more powerful than anything you’d try to push that way.

So the bottom line is this: I came home with my head spinning with incredibly rich ideas that expand my knowledge in new ways.  Could a total stranger have the same conversation with me? No.  Could a best friend have that effect on me? Maybe, but people who fit the “best friend” camp are probably so aligned with you anyway that there’s little sunlight between your divergent ideas.  No… if you want to think new thoughts, you need to find people you can trust to bring out the best in your thinking who you know don’t look at things the way you do.

I find those people on Twitter — even, sometimes, if I already knew them.

P.S.: What’s with Dennis and Mark both from Baltimore? Is that some anthropologist hideout?

P.P.S: I’m sure I swiped a blogging idea from Dennis, but no doubt he can riff off this one and beat it silly with something much more awesome. That’s not a challenge to call him out. I’m citing he’s got some really good mental tools to write with.

Thesis:

• Identity is vital for people to participate in social activities.  For good or bad, people tend to participate within a discourse when they will be identified for their contribution (or lack thereof).
• The participation within a discourse breeds trust, and within a discourse of trust, people tend to share “personal” information to elevate context.
• Sharing sensitive information honestly across discourses as an anonymous agent is different from disclosing such information within a discourse.  Within discourse, trust in others is key.  Inter-discourse sharing requires something else.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve dabbled here and there with experiments in social activity and community building online.  The Star Wars Management Guide was the most recent experiment, but I’ve tried it before with the notion of authoring a SCORM book, group blogs, group podcasts, family blogs… I’ll freely admit I’m not the best guy to lead such community efforts because I just don’t have the time and resources to do the heavy lifting all by myself.  With each fizzled out idea, I’m learning a bit more about how people behave in groups, and how its different when that behavior is exposeable.

When my first daughter was born, I attempted to start up a family-wide blog as a means to collectively capture narratives from around the whole family.  Once a week I’d send out a question to the family and ask my parents and my wife’s parents to respond.  We were geographically dispersed and WordPress required far less maintenance on my part than assembling together a word document.  At the time, there was no Google Docs (this was in 2004-2005).

Eventually, this kinda hit a wall.  Some members of the family just didn’t participate past a first post.  We’re not a huge family, so there was very little readership, and almost no commenting — which meant no visible feedback.  Then there was the fact that it was a blog — so family posting personal anecdotes about growing up was a layer of personal identification that everyone ultimately felt uncomfortable with.  In hindsight, blogging was the wrong tool for this exercise — but there’s something like a contradiction here that we can learn from and it’s evidenced by the misapplication of technical means and what it affords.

Radio Gen1us is hands-down my most successful social effort to-date.  Even though almost no one from the outside comments, we know that there are over 500 downloads a week.  That’s feedback enough.  To participate in Radio Gen1us, you need to record a podcast of yourself dj’ing a mixtape you put together.  You need to upload it to a webserver. You need to post the entry.  It’s a high barrier to entry, and that’s why we’ve only had six people including myself ever DJ, three with any consistency.  But it’s been in existence since June 2007.  Participants are identifiable, but the sensitivity of what they’re sharing (by and large) is pretty low (music preferences are not as risky to share as, say, political leanings). That said, some members who’ve hosted shows repeatedly share more and more, as identity manifests itself through repeated contribution (the Whuffie factor).

Juxtapose that with the Star Wars Management Guide.  I had the idea to put it in a wiki, because I wanted to open up the authoring to “anyone.”  Even though there seemed to be considerable interest in participation — it hasn’t gone anywhere.  As I stated even at the initial post, I’m not making this my life’s work, and that has considerable effect on the success of the project.  Look at what happened as the chapter ideas came in.  First, people wanted to claim chapters to write.  This pre-supposes the idea that authors would “own” the chapters, but the means to author them get in the way.  To author a work in a wiki means that while there’s a history of what you’ve contributed to any one page, someone else may add to that work, edit that work — diminish your writing.  The wiki sits out there right now.  Anyone can go in and write, but they’re not.  I’m not admonishing the lack of participation. I’m hoping we’re learning from that fact.

To participate in a social activity as an individual participant, there’s got to be something in it for you as a participant; generally referred to as the What’s In It For Me (WIIFM).  For me, as a participant, to engage with YOU, as another participant, I need some trust that you are who you appear to be, and that you’re going to respect our shared ground rules of participation (Whuffie).  Without both WIIFM and Whuffie, a social effort tends to falter at the start.  But there’s one more abstraction we need to deal with, and that’s what our interaction looks like from the outside.

There are exchanges that happen within one discourse, like #lrnchat which happens on Twitter every Thursday evening, and because the participants exchange within a certain discourse, and with regularity there’s a high degree of Whuffie factor there among the participants.  Because the chats are enjoyable, reliable and generally thought provoking, there’s also a high factor of WIIFM for each participant.  Twitter, as a means for communication, is widely open — that’s the intent, so participants have no illusions that what they contribute may be seen from outside their discourse.  I should posit that participants “should have” no illusions about this.  I don’t know for certain that they consider that #lrnchat is collected weekly and posted to the #lrnchat blog, which allows the contents of the exchange to be aggregated far beyond Twitter and the blog’s site itself.  For all we know, the #lrnchat gang is being cited in someone’s doctoral thesis across the world (yay) or being co-opted in someone’s for-profit book on E-Learning Best Practices (boo).  In either case, if anyone had the gumption to track down who I am (and judging by blog traffic recently from Twitter, that’s happening), it’s pretty easy to figure out who any of the participants are.  In the case of #lrnchat, on Twitter, everyone’s sharing the kind of information they wish to be known for, so the sharing of information outside of the discourse is something people are hoping for.

This leaves a question in my head: are there examples of social activity we want to share within a discourse but don’t want to share across discourses?  Let me posit a hypothetical.  Imagine you worked for a pharmaceutical company as a sales representative but you have some very strong beliefs in support of holistic medicine.  Chances are if you’re networking with anyone in a professional (“day job”) sense, you’re not talking about your interest or experience with energy healing.  With the risk of discovery by your employer, you either don’t network at all online with other healers, or you do so as anonymously as you can.  I mention this because I know people who are into holistic medicine as practitioners (not just subscribers).  Some of them work at pharmaceutical companies and of the twelve people I’m talking about, none of them participate in a community of practice or even network around holistic medicine.  Why?  It might be that the field itself just doesn’t draw a crowd that thinks about networking.  But it might also be because there’s a contradiction at play that makes it impossible to network and learn from each other.

Clay Shirky talks about, in Here Comes Everybody, that the transaction costs for all sorts of groups to network and collaborate together has become exceedingly low — to the point that anyone can network about anything — but it pre-supposes that you don’t care who knows who you are.  Certainly, people doing nefarious things don’t want anyone to know what they’re doing, but there are a host of reasons why you might wish to network and not be identifiable outside of the group you’re networking with.  I don’t know that I have a solution for that, but it’s something we should be talking about as learning professionals.

As I wrote last week, the first way in which we want to help organize experiences is around fixed physical locations: things in physical space that don’t move (much).

Let me start with a potential application for public service.

We know going back the last several years that there’s a huge need in the US for infrastructure improvement.  This means fixing bridges, filling potholes, greening our tall buildings, expanding pedways to be more accessible.  Local, State and even Federal municipalities are responsible for this, in partnership with private citizens, small and large companies – but the resources to apply to the myriad of problems are scarce (like lots of resources these days).  One way we all could save money, accelerate improvements and help allocate proper resources scaled to critical needs is by opening up the information gathering and helping organize user-identified issues through aggregation means we already know how to employ.  Then, municipalities could apply experts in architecture, civil engineering and/or environmental science to determine a course of action instead of expend resources in just finding out where the problems are to begin with.

Ideally, mobile phone users could take pictures or video encoded with geo-location metadata of visible issues on their streets, bridges, buildings, etc into a shared repository on the Internet.  That repository could be made publicly available for a number of different purposes:

• Mapping services (like Google Maps, Yahoo, etc) could use the information to provide some visual information on where clusters of issues might be.
• Color-coding and shading to identify types and severity of issues, which might help identify related concerns.
• An application could export tagged structures and descriptive data related to them into a variety of formats (RSS, MS Project, ???) to aggregate that information into something else.
• Watchdog groups could use the same data set that Local, State and Federal resources use cross-agency to monitor the status of improvement efforts, promoting transparency and reducing wasteful redundancies that come from multiple data stores.
• Mashups with other available datastores (perhaps a visual mashup to highlight to what extent identified infrastructure needs may correlate with degrees of air quality, water quality, etc)

What the services on the back-end would help with would be in terms of:

• Organizing the information in terms of proximal location and granular details within a fixed location (what building, which floor of a building, what room, where in a room, etc).
• Make the data available and interoperable.
• Support the need to aggregate and filter all that user-generated metadata.
• Enable multiple points of entry to the data pool.

That last point is really important – not necessarily more important than the others, but pretty huge.  In my mind, we don’t want one application for mobile or web-enabled users to enter such information – we want to cast a wider net to empower more end-users to easily support and accelerate data collection and, thusly, infrastructure improvement.  Building a straight-up tagging application is one use, but what if someone wanted to create a scavenger hunt game to flesh out details about infrastructure improvement?  What if yet another game was a massively multiplayer game where discovery of infrastructure defects acted as multipliers or Mana in-game?

By abstracting the data collection aspect from the application, but making that data set widely available across applications, you enable more than one type of user activity while solving a larger problem.

In the case of collecting information for infrastructure improvements, it’s not that there aren’t people trying to do this already, or that there aren’t pockets of applications to help make this easier for our municipalities – it’s that many of the data stores aren’t well known, widely available and more critically shared.  By opening up the collection, filtering and aggregation of the data, we hopefully save time and money to accelerate solving a very big issue.

This is one way in which BAQON can be used.  In the coming weeks, I’ll highlight many more.

• Influence comes from sharing ideas or modeling behaviors, but the person influencing others does so without a vested interest in the change of the influenced. That’s not to say influencers don’t care or are amoral; it’s simply an objective fact.  Influencers may not even need to know who they’re influencing.
• Coaching involves some kind of social contract where the coach has a vested interest in a change or growth within a limited scope.  This could be a skill or a behavior; it might be a set of skills or a set of behaviors.  Coaches are often role models, so they may have a wide degree of influence, but a coach’s primary investment in the coached is through the lens of the skill(s) and/or behavior(s) they signed on with.
• Mentorship involves a deeper social contract.  A mentor has a vested interest in the mentee‘s change or growth as a person, which infers there’s really no limit to the behaviors or skills involved.  A mentor may coach to certain things, but they are invested in the person he/she is mentoring; not the skill for which they can coach.

Each of the above generally (but not always) involves increasing time and effort commitments.  I throw myself under the bus as an example.  I blog and tweet.  Sometimes, people take an idea I float out on the internets and they run with it as their own.  This pleases me a great deal, and I’m very interested to see how he/she takes it to another level — but I do this without regard for any one person or group’s particular change in thinking or behavior.  Many times, it’s completely opaque as to what, if any influence I have on others — but certainly people are influenced by what I blog and tweet.

As a side note, we can even talk about the technicalities of measuring influence virtually, because we have things like retweets and pingbacks and comments, etc.  But that’s not where I’m going…

In my day job, I was brought into the organization a few years ago to help consult on a specific set of problems: namely, getting the learning function to design, develop and manage E-leanring “better.”  This involved me coaching a large but pretty well defined set of skills to a set of Instructional Designers, and it involved me coaching a set of skills to project managers within the organization.  I also needed to coach people managers and IT engineers with some skills, too.  Now, I obviously care about people, so I became interested in the lives of those I work with — but as a coach, I was not interested (nor would I be welcomed) in coaching aspects of their job (or life) that had nothing to do with E-Learning.  In addition to the work agreement that brought me in the door, there was a social contract that was established.

Now over time, working with people, I’ve helped develop long-term relationships with individuals that I’ve signed on as a mentor.  I’m not a great mentor, but I do try to be better at it with every exchange.  I currently have one person whom I’m invested in her success; there’s no tangible reward in it for me other than the satisfaction I get from marveling in her achievements.  Kelly (no last names) is a brilliant multimedia producer who took an opportunity to pursue a Master’s abroad, and is coming back to the States.  Now she’s ready to consult on information design.  Even writing about her growth brings a smile to my face, because I remember meeting her two-months after she graduated college where she was a multimedia producer at an E-learning company, and I was hired in to be her boss — but I could tell she didn’t need someone to manage her work or time; she needed someone to remove obstacles for her.  I bore witness to her growth on the job, and even when I left that gig, I remained invested in her growth.

Side note: I say I’m not a great mentor, and that’s because I’m not as available as I’d like to be as a mentor.

Back to the first question, at first during #lrnchat I had a very difficult time identifying my mentors.  But clearly I’ve had mentors in the past.

Scouting (Boy Scouts of America, at least back in my day) is probably where my models of mentoring come from.  My dad mentored me.  I can say that up until high school (yes, I was still in Scouting in high school) my scouting leaders were all very vested in my growth as a person, in addition to coaching specific skills.

My first master teacher in student teaching was very vested in my development.  It wasn’t just coaching — she provided the constructive feedback I needed to thrive in education, beyond the classroom.

I’ve been blessed to have a lot of coaches who have had a lot of influence on me as a professional.  There may be mentors emerging for me even now, but the whole Jedi Master/Padawan thing is still too informal (for me).  As a mentor, with Kelly, she knows that I’m invested in her growth.  All she owes me in return is that she grows

What we’re looking to do is to accelerate development of a new generation of applications for collaboration, communication, information exchange, learning and gaming where experiences can be persistent, interoperable and still contextualized (// vision). Our plan is to enable such development through a well documented and open (// free) set of web services or APIs that can be replicated on any server (// mision).

Making this functionality available as a set of web services enables the kinds of “combinatorial” innovations that can only happen when you mash things up.  Take for example the LETSI Run-Time Web Services. From a learning perspective, the ability to create an AR app that also can be tracked in an academic or corporate LMS?  I think that’d be pretty sweet, as well as the converse: making performance support content available through Augmented or VW space.

Our total scope is very bold, but we’re starting with a practical set of services that will support location-based experiences.  The goal for our initial set of services is to accelerate development of a variety of Augmented Reality (AR) applications, collaboration tools, learning transfer mechanisms, games, and the like. When the community organizes to help us improve and extend it, we’ll do it together as the source will be shared and open.

There’s probably some questions of timetables, so let me try and address that now. We’ve locked down our initial requirements set and begin development of the web services this weekend. The plan is to have a stable public release of the web services in December (if it’s clicking along, we’ll release it sooner).

BAQON in its first incarnation

As the idea guy and the evangelist for BAQON, I’m getting ready to architect out the website (baqon.org). I need your help. What do you want to know? What would help you prepare to build a web or native mobile or desktop applications (heck, even embedded applications)? How can I connect you to the people or resources you’d need to make your application idea happen?

Please use the comments below, but obviously feel free to contact me or hit me on Twitter (@mrch0mp3rs).

This last week, I’ve received a number of different forms of feedback and it seems that now is as good a time as ever to post a bit about staying balanced.  Since launching this blog over a year ago, I threw away the notion that I could keep my online personal life a separate entity from my professional life (or even lives), embraced transparency and have rolled with it ever since; mostly for the better.

I received a very nice email from a friend who noticed that of late I am more productive (at least visible to him — not sure if my wife would agree).  I also had a very, very unexpected and appreciated phone conversation with a friend who asked me about the chapter I started for the Star Wars Management Guide: mainly, he wanted to know if I actually do the breathing exercise I advocated with its inclusion (the source is here, in case you’re curious).  As I was driving around endlessly on errands on Sunday, NPR had a terrific story with Seane Corn, who said something to me that really urged me to write about this topic.  She said something that struck me:

“I believe culturally we’re addicted to our tension, and we use it as a way to control our big feelings. So if I can put a block of energy around me, I don’t have to deal with my rage or my fear… My feelings were because of the chaos in my world. I was scared. I was angry. I was fearful. And I had to create order and control in order to not deal with those bigger emotions.”

The key phrase in that is “we’re addicted to our tension.”  Think about that for a second. It certainly applies to me.  What enables my addicition?

Well, I feel like a driver for my successes is how I overcompensate for some negatives: let’s face it, there was a long period of time in the 80s where being a nerd/geek was NOT cool. This has been a pretty good tool at my disposal, though  Converting those negative feelings into something positive has been very productive and useful for me.  I’ve been doing the conversion of negatives “thing” for a good couple of years.  I simply found a flow and stuck with it.

As I kept relying on doing this, this year I started to realize I wasn’t getting as far on that as I used to.  Like a reusable battery that doesn’t hold as much of a charge anymore, my tools for dealing with the world started to burn through.  I didn’t diversify my toolset enough. I didn’t ever switch off.  The result of which was that every couple of months, I’d crash and reboot.  It’s not the worst thing, probably — but as I get older, earn more and more responsibilities and become accountable for so much more than I may immediately understand, there’s very little time for crashing and rebooting.

The thing I’ve started to realize is that to find a sense of flow, I need to invest my time and energy into the things I truly care about. Everything else, I can let go.  Even if the day job is a drag, my whole identity is not based on the outcomes of my work there.

This is where I get to the point.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I realized that I could no longer maintain a personal life and a professional life separate from each other.  That’s kind of ambiguous.  If I think of my all things about me that make up “me,” There are some things about me that are constants whether I’m at work or I’m at home with the kids or geeking out with friends and colleagues… my name, as an example, is Aaron no matter who I’m talking to (unless you know me as Eric Stratton, and that is a long story, not for the blog).

There are some elements of my persona that I choose not to make available to work.  My political leanings and religious views, for example, are things I keep out of my “profile” that my day job sees.  I have other “profiles” that face publicly in different contexts. Thinking of how I show up to different places or people in terms of profiles helps me be consistent about who I am (my profiles are always me, but they are “views” of me the way you might have a “view” of a file library in Sharepoint).  It may sound too OCD for me, but my goal is not to control information — I mean, that’s happening to a degree — but it’s more about identifying where I need to set some boundaries for myself and operating well within them.

It probably sounds like a lot of organization and structure to do this, and I have to say that this way of dealing with things has come about pretty organically, so I haven’t noticed the difficulty in it.

I just wish having online profiles that abstracted from the whole of my personal information were as easy to have and reinforce…

“You tell ‘em I’m coming… and hell’s coming with me!”  - Wyatt Earp, Tombstone

I have a pretty sweet gig for a day job.  My work has me learning arguably more than I’m crafting how others learn.  When I think of who helps me develop as a learner (let alone an employee), who would really want the unenviable task of developing me? Sure, there’s any number of soft skills one could mentor or coach me on; when it comes to growing me as a person, the ability to navigate within a corporate environment is not to be overlooked.  I’d posit that learning only how to navigate is about on par with learning how to swim.  Eventually, you’re going to want to walk around or even fly.  Swimming will only get you so far on that journey.  Who in my organization can really develop me? Only I can.

And me, learning in a vacuum? That wouldn’t work.  The key to my professional development over the last two years is my network.  It was probably always like this, but it’s clearly how I learn, now.  Three years ago, I was leveraging my network to perform my job at a higher level — the ability to pull in answers at the moment of need.  GoogleTalk? Excellent transmission vehicle because of its browser-based chat client going over port 80 — almost nobody blocked it, so I could have line-of-sight access to information sources.  That instant access to answers allowed me to perform at a higher level, because I could learn “at the time of need.”

There came a time, though, where learning at the time of need wasn’t enough. Operating at a performance level, even a high one, is treading water as opposed to swimming.  You need to tread water in order to stay afloat.  You need to consistently perform well to stay employed — but that doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere as an employee.  If you ever want to walk on land or fly, once you figure out how to swim to dry land, you need to learn something new.

When my colleagues at work re-talked me into using Twitter in 2007, I did not know the cabal I associate with online today (everyday).  I knew some names (mostly from their books) but I really never expected that these thought leaders would be the people who have such profound impact on my development.  I considered myself very lucky, two years ago, to have such a wide personal network that I could perform at levels that others simply couldn’t because they didn’t know how to stay connected.

Now I consider myself lucky because I can connect at levels others find difficult because they can’t handle the cognitive leap needed to use a tool like Twitter (or LinkedIn or Facebook) to connect, inquire, share and grow [this is fodder for a whole separate post]. I think there’s something to using social networking for learning in this way, because even a learner’s questions force knowledge sharers to bridge newly discovered gaps in their understanding, so learning in a networked sense isn’t that we’re all learning the same things at the same time.  Rather, we’re all learning at different levels as we engage each other and bridge our cognitive gaps.

My point being that when I’m learning, my network is learning with me.

I spent a decent amount of time this afternoon drafting out a chapter of the Star Wars Management Guide.  I’m hoping by having something up there for people to poke a stick at, it encourages the dozens interested in contributing to start fleshing it out some more.

To read what’s in this chapter, take a look here.

The basic structure of this chapter and any chapter written like it will look something like this:

• Background – this is situating the reader to the part of the movie in which the quote is pulled from. This is the context.
• Lesson(s) –  There must be one lesson as a takeaway from this background scenario, but there may be more than one lesson to be drawn, or the context that the lesson is addressing may be different as well.  This is the fun part, where several people have eyed up the same quote — one way you can approach it is to build out your own lessons (each); the other is to actually write collaboratively.
  • Each Lesson should have one or more Activity(ies).  These will direct the reader to the actions they must take to reinforce the learning.

You should not feel constrained to the structure I’ve put in place (okay, the Background is necessary, but this is a work that will be authored by multiple people).  In fact, I would like to ask you to take a stab at improving this first chapter so it can be a model to base the other chapters off of.

If you want to drum up support for the chapter you’re specifically interested in, by all means, blog or tweet away about it.  This effort is just as much yours as it is mine.  It’s your party.  I’m just the host.

Please use the comments and let’s get some questions out of the way!

The banquet I attended was filled to the brim with CIOs and technologists from around the Chicago area.  Thing that surprised me? The real innovators were i.c. stars themselves.  I admit I went into the banquet with no grounding or expectations.  I was invited about two days before and didn’t have a guide to situate me on what I was doing there, what the group was about, etc.  But there were a couple of takeaways I didn’t expect out of this conference:

• Culture is a process; the filter through which you see the world.
• A “Community Leader” is someone who creates sustainable opportunities for others.
• Who is witnessing your change? If you’re a tree, who is noticing your bark? Those are the people you need to keep close to you, as they’re your guides.

My first thought about some of the people attending the event were: these aren’t particularly innovative people.  I typically think of innovators along Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation curve:

Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation

Most people reading this blog are in the Innovator/Early Adopter camp.  We seem to reinforce each other (you and I).  I have a hard time considering myself an Innovator, because in my mental model of innovation, it requires Bloom’s “Synthesis” and for all the ideas I can generate, I wonder how many of them are truly original.  Maybe that’s too high a standard; we can discuss it.

To be clear, Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations Theory isn’t about making vs adopting — it’s all about adopting.  You can tell who the innovators are if they’re first.  Period; as Wikipedia defines:

Innovators are the first individuals to adopt an innovation. Innovators are willing to take risks, youngest in age, have the highest social class, have great financial lucidity, very social and have closest contact to scientific sources and interaction with other innovators.

If you and I are innovators in learning technology, chances are we have our fair share of challenges getting the buy-in.  That’s why we have our communities of practice (#lrnchat is a CoP); some of us have our quasi-secret -societies.

What was interesting to me about the i.c.stars event was more to the point of how many people are buying into how the group was innovating.  Although the attendees I met were pretty distributed in age, they met all the other qualifiers, handily (though my own financial lucidity and wealth aren’t exactly present). The i.c.stars approach at innovation is an inclusive one; very key to adoption.  There were a few attendees and volunteers in the organization that I was able to connect with (note: I wish I knew more about telecommunications for broader conversation opportunities); the graduates from the i.c. stars program had a real light inside.

Every graduate I met from the program, working as webmasters or founding interactive startups — these guys were really interesting people.  They are bringing something new to the idea landscape.  Their experiences and backgrounds are just different from the Innovators, as wikipedia defines.  I met at least four graduates of the i.c.stars program, and each one of them were the kind of person I’d want on my team to start cranking out code, content and ideas.  Why? Two reasons: a) They show up; b) They’re different from me and everyone I work with.

Each graduate had someone who pulled them into this program from an environment where their out-of-school earnings would be 25% of what they were making after leaving i.c.stars — a 4-fold difference in income changes lives and the lives that surround them.  They had to show-up every day to stay in the program (not just “attend” but be “present”), but each participant in i.c. stars has literally a community around them to support and encourage them on their journey through the program.  They have people who are appreciating their change; supporting it.

So, my brothers and sisters who are innovating for your organizations today, I want you to think about this… who’s noticing your evolution?  If you’re leading, how are you creating sustainable opportunities for the people around you?

An example effective of top-down alignment.

I think the rage about competencies has gone dead, and it’s too bad.  I think the imagineering around competencies held the most promise for enabling new forms of community within organizations and I would’ve liked to have seen that play through.  Talent Management folks, I think, had the gem of a great idea.

What intrigues me about the idea of Talent Management in an enterprise is that it enables profiling of employees.  The idea being if you’re a burgeoning project manager looking for someone in your organization to look at your Request For Proposal (RFP) because you’re dealing with a huge business system like PeopleSoft and you don’t know anything about it — right now you need to network your way socially through friend-of-a-friend means to find someone with those skills.  It’d be a lot faster if you could look it up, which is the promise I hear about from the HR tech side (yes, there’s more than just learning technology in HR, friends).

As learning people, we’ve kinda given up on competencies, but the backdoor might be some other metaphor (I’m betting on “skills” but we can conjecture all day long).  The question is: will everybody have access to that data when your Talent Management system gets turned on, or will it be kept to people managers and need-to-know people in Human Resources?  That’s the part that has me concerned, because there’s huge value in that data for the entire workforce, if a company cares about agility and alignment.

But I also suspect there’s still a lot of old-world thinking in the “protection” of the data, even though it’s, for the most part, user-generated.  Think about that for a second.  Most of the data that’s in a company’s talent management system is the data you, yourself, put in there as an employee.  What’s your return on investment (ROI) for the effort?  I’d argue that you can get a lot of good information to help you perform better as an employee.  What I don’t know is if you have access to a broader set of data to augment your decision making.

I’d love for others to weigh in here so I can get smarter about Talent Management systems, but it seems to me these systems are adopted (not necessarily “designed for”) for top-down management of data, but if an organization exposes pieces of that data — not the sensitive personal data, but make the skills or talents (// competencies) parts with names and FACES (of huge importance in workplace networking) — you can enable employees to find people who share the same goals.  They can collaborate with each other to work on their shared goals.  This does a couple of things senior leaders seem to like: getting people across functions to work together as one whole company, and enable employees to help develop themselves.  Senior leaders also really like the notion of alignment.  In a socially-aware world, the top-down definitions of alignment just aren’t enough.

Most every organization has vision and mission statements, but aligning thousands and thousands of people to even a well-written, concise mission is difficult unless you can distribute the message and localize it.  There’s usually a host of goals to support a mission, and those goals can probably be broken down into smaller goals that small groups can work with.  Organizations do this, but how many of them reinforce it daily, even hourly?  And if your company tried it, could they avoid feeling like Big Brother in the process?

I’m in the midst of an exchange with Kris Rockwell (@hybridkris) about a Patrick Dunn’s post ranting that rapid tools do not stimulate more creative E-Learning.  I couldn’t agree more.  That’s not me hating on rapid development tools — I think Articulate, in particular, is a GREAT tool.  You can do a lot with it and what the team did with Ariculate 09 is a whole delta better than Ariculate 5.

But like any system, it has its boundaries, and to leverage it for something that it’s not designed for… well, you’re kinda on your own.  In the ensuing discussion, Kris advocates…

…I think companies should hire firms to build their elearning. Good firms. Good small firms that love their customers.

And he’s right.  They should.  I’d caveat though, that companies should hire firms to build their elearning if companies know what they want, or at least what they don’t want.

Having worked both sides of these transactions, I can tell you that being an E-Learning vendor can be a tough gig.  You’re an independent consultant.  You’re competing against local competitors as hungry and probably committed in their way to rocking out their customers as you.  You’re competing against offshore vendors who, because of their overhead, can compete on price and increasingly on quality.  And you’re competing with your last job for  your client, because you need to both one-up the last job you did for them while slashing your pricing.

And… you have to manage your client’s expectations.  In some organizations, that’s an impossible task, because, quite frankly, your client just doesn’t know much about E-Learning, even though they’re neck deep in it.  I think outsiders would be surprised (and I expect some head nodding while reading this from insiders) that there are so many companies who are banking on E-Learning who, even at just the technical perspective, have varying degrees of understanding (let alone expertise) about the systems they’ve invested in.  When the conversation turns to why doesn’t a particular E-learning content work, there’s two routes it goes in: one is the design, and one is the tech.  Let’s take the tech off the table, first.

I recently rifled off a litany of misconceptions clients have about SCORM systems, and for the sake of argument let’s just assume that much of the technical squabbling over E-Learning has something to do with SCORM.  The objections/misconceptions I’ve experienced working on all sides of the E-Learning trade include:

• Folks don’t understand there are differences in versions of SCORM, and what that means for any content they have/will build.
• Folks aren’t aware of the capabilities in any given version of SCORM, let alone SCORM in general (ex: run-time tracking).
• Folks don’t understand what the pain points are of an integration, and what that means in terms of level of effort.
• Folks sincerely believe (long for/hope for) buying their way out of having a quality process for integration.
• Folks balk at the expense of implementation without having a clear benefits case for doing it to begin with (shifting blame).
• Folks put together RFPs laden with buzzwords (“SCORM” “Sequencing”) without a real assessment of needs and/or an understanding of what they’re asking for.
• RFPs without an end in mind never result with intended consequences, because there’s no picture of what’s right to compare with.
• Vendors assume that the client knows what they’re after. Not always the case, even if they sound like it.

Of the eight litanies I just mentioned, how many of them must be in the vendor’s domain of accountability?  Not how many ARE there — but how many SHOULD BE there?  (The answer, to me, is #8).

Now take the “design” track of where a client/vendor relationship can go south.  How many of the above, if you swap out the word “SCORM” with the word “Design” or even “User Experience” — how many of the above should be in the vendor’s domain of accountability?  (Again, my answer is #8).

Now on either side of the design/tech coin, the vendor is completely accountable for helping me identify my needs, reconciling those needs with what I want and delivering on the hard deck requirements that whatever you build needs to work in my system — “I” being a client.

Now, me as Aaron, working in an organization that builds or buys E-Learning, I want to have really good relationships with my vendors.  I know the trade.  I know who’s good.  I know whom I want to work with.  If the budget allows me (assuming I’m a decision maker instead of a translator) to work with vendors for a project, I’m going to guys like Kris or Stephen Martin (@smartinx).  I’ve not even seen their work, but because they’re bringing their A-game into EVERY EXCHANGE I HAVE WITH THEM, I’m talking to them.  There’s at least three other companies I like (but can’t disclose) because everytime I talk with THEIR people, not even related to actual work, they bring their A-game.  I know that they’re going to give my company the best learning it can get, because I know who these people are and they’re not putting up a front.  They’ve built estimable social capital with me.

But… even when an insider knows know the vendors are legit and are commited to knocking down any barrier to a “loving” relationship, if the client can’t get on the same page — and more problematic: stay on the same page… Well, there’s little hope for a vendor to survive in that kind of relationship.

Now admittedly — maybe I’m jilted after having seen vendor relationships turn sour, both as the client and as the vendor.  Regardless, that’s why I advocate to companies to use Rapid Tools first.  Get a feel for what you don’t like about E-Learning; discover the full extent of what your capabilities are.  And then, when you’ve defined what the next level has to be for your project, engage in a vendor who will love you.

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops..."

Going back to 1997, when I was at the beginning of my Master’s program at UW, my advisor sensing early on my comfort with the “technology” side of the EdTech program I was in, suggested Janet Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” to me.  It was my first truly academic read and, while I understood what I was reading back then, only in the past few years has it begun to reveal its impact.

She writes,

We return to the question raised by Aldous Huxley at the moment movies began to speak: Will the stories brought to us by the new representational technologies “mean anything” in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays mean something, or will they be “told by an idiot”?

In context, Murray was talking specifically about cybernarratives which she argues must establish their own conventions in order to be appreciated, much in the same way that printed narratives developed conventions that built expectations around structure, plot, character development, etc.  Stories, in a traditional sense, have conventions so well established that we all revel when something succeeds in breaking that convention — as long as it retains enough of the form for us to recognize.

There’s no established form for social media — certainly not in the same way in which a child could describe a book, a film — heck, even a website.  So while media progressives embrace social media and imagine, if not entirely realize, its impacts on learning, we’re dealing with a whole lot of people for whom social learning, let alone social media in general, has no form they can discern. It may as well be babble.

Wholly unprepared for emerging forms of media, how do we situate our friends, families and co-workers to learn at the speed of our business and our play?  Because communications outside of education are happening, increasingly, in hyperspace (or folded space, if you want to go all Dune), but our preferred methods for learning are still long-held narrative forms.

Told another way, learning is stuck at the pace of snail mail (old convention) but a learner’s role in the world is responding to situations as they occur (hyperspace).  And what do we know about hyperspace?  We know this:

“Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?” – Han Solo, Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope

Without accelerating the proper context, people do fly right through the learning or bounce too close to failure that ends their journey.

When the desktop application for Tweetie came out, I was extremely impressed with the simplicity of the design, and when I was researching how Tweetie came about, I came across the atebits website, which was elegantly designed by Tim Van Damme.  I dug down into Tim’s site which was a business card and was really blown away with his whole aesthetic.  Clean, but not sterile — Tim’s designs offer a certain blend of sophistication and play that really appeals to me.  I signed up for Readernaut, which is the kind of social networking site for reading I’d imagined wanting to join — another plus.

The New Look

When I found out a few months ago that Tim was working on developing a lifestream-style theme for WordPress through Woo themes, I all but vowed I’d switch to it.  Once the screenshots were available, I knew I would.  And when I Logan and Evie woke me up this morning at an ungodly hour, I couldn’t fall back asleep.  Happily, I discovered in my 4am browsing that Woo Themes had finally released the Antisocial theme, and I didn’t hesitate for a second.

Harold’s thesis, to me, at its core is one of how to manage the knowledge. He’s throwing it all in the same sink, which is fine at a high level, but when you get down to it there are deeper dives. Harold’s right on the money with how to deal with the challenge; I posit that the deeper dives are where we find bigger, fundamental challenges.

“Content” is one of those closest to the surface, and it’s the most obvious way we can talk about what’s not right with our struggles with the abundance of knowledge in the world; we all have the most experience and comfort with content. The last ten years have made it faster, cheaper and easier to creating good content. Filtering content is improving, and that’s in large part because aggregating relevant content before/after filtering is solid.

As one large human network, we’ve developed better-than-primitive tools (like sticks and stones turning into hatchets) to do these things for us (there’s my shout out to @moehlert, @dennisschleiche and other cultural anthropologists).

“Content” only presents one perspective. What about “community?”

We have constructed only primitive tools when it comes to managing knowledge, in terms of our relationships with people and the communities that form out of disparate (or even conjoined) networks of people.

We’re definitely aglow with the egalitarian nature of 140-character limits because it gives us a common perspective with which to observe the merits of connecting to other people, but Twitter is still about the content at least as much as it is about the people.

Facebook can connect you to your first kiss back in Kindergarten (Holly Konopka, btw) — but Facebook can’t connect me to sociologists who happen to have experience turning big-picture visions in my head into business capabilities (as an–ahem–example). To find such a person, he/she needs to be a friend of a friend (community) or they need to have published (content) stuff that would identify them through search engines.

We have workarounds, which may eventually help us in solving this problem, but these indirect means bypass people who don’t publish much (so SEO never picks them up–BRITNEY NAKED), or are otherwise inaccessible to me because I only know academics and nerds who have no business sense (present company excluded, of course).

We have primitive means of filtering and almost no means of aggregation of people.

So even with content and community, there’s potentially still ANOTHER view of the problem with “curriculum” Harold identified, which is that in addition to not being able to handle all the content and communities that exist, we also have no way of dealing with all the “context” needed to situate an understanding, individual or communal.

I mean, we don’t even have the primitive tools for this yet. Take for example this very thread of discussion: Harold presents one point of view regarding what he sees as a root cause to a problem (I’m paraphrasing here):

“Curriculum, as a concept feels outdated… why?”

I’m now presenting a potentially more complex point of view on the issue.

There are derivatives to be drawn from even what I’m presenting to you (remove comma?) as a reader and possible participant; yet you must manage all these perspectives, including Koreen Olbrish‘s and Mark Oehlert‘s and Clark Quinn‘s perspectives on this same issue. There are some tweets on this topic, and you can throw those in the mix.

You might be reading this and have the full advantage of being situated already in this discussion with an ample handle on context. What if this post is where you first jump in? What does anyone need to do to catch up to the discussion if you want to make sense of what Harold, Koreen, Mark, Clark and now I are all talking about?

Now go a step beyond: what would someone else, other than you, need to do in order to get themselves to a point where he or she could take these ideas and run with them?

We have difficulty in making context sharable in and of itself. Because of that we have almost no way of aggregating contexts let alone filtering them. We can only imagine what that would be like. Science Fiction (or even the last ten years of online search capability) models that if we can capture things, we can make them available in lots of ways. I can recall movies like Dreamscape and Brainstorm that deal with capturing and sharing experiences, but we’re a ways away from the Matrix style of downloading that degree of context.

Besides, the hard-line transfer mechanisms are awkward or look damn uncomfortable in The Matrix.

So this brings me back to the wall Harold alludes to. I believe the scope of the problem is more dense than just that there’s so much more to “know” than we can possibly ever learn. These statements are, if you connect the same dots I’m connecting, supported by Harold himself (thanks for the link, Harold!) in “What is Weighing Down Learning“:

• There are so many more people to get to know than we can possibly ever build a relationship with;
• There are so many more experiences happening in a single day than any one of us can possibly participate in, given a lifetime!

Our notion of connecting to each other is rooted in metaphors based on connecting to content. We need to flip this on its head. So what do we do about THAT?

Well… I had an idea (// @z_rose @timpmartin).

One possible solution that some friends and I are actively working on is, at a very high level, to use the Internet itself as a giant database (rather than putting data in stovepipes like actual databases) to assign data to people, instead of digital artifacts. We think we’ve found a way to enable more complex social networking than we can currently accomplish under the conditions that networks are based solely on who you currently know and by extension through friend-of-a-friend relationships. If we get that right, we think we’ll be able to enable sharing contexts.

For future reference, we’re calling our solution a Brokered Anonymous acQuaintance Open Network, or BAQON for short.

So, now I’m thinking a bit more broadly and openly.  What if a broader community of geeks, engineers, MBAs and the like were to put together a business book based on lessons learned from Star Wars?  Call it a management guide — heck, even an instruction manual for socially awkward nerds in a non-nerd workspace.

Context

A few weeks ago, I tweeted the idea and was immediately presented with enough response to outline thirteen possible chapters (all from the original trilogy, I’d add).  I’m not the purest I once was, though I would be surprised to mine wisdom out of the prequels.  At any rate, here’s a list of the chapters suggested almost entirely from the feedback in the beginning of August:

• Chapter 1: “Stay on Target”
• Chapter 2: “Watch for Enemy Fighters”
• Chapter 3: “There Will Be No Bargain”
• Chapter 4: “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing”
• Chapter 5: “Do or do not. There is no try.” chapter on increasing productivity?
• Chapter 6: “A Small, One-Man Fighter Should be able to Penetrate the Outer Defenses”
• Chapter 7: “These Aren’t The Droids You’re Looking For”
• Chapter 8: “Never Tell Me The Odds”
• Chapter 9: “Search Your Feelings; You Know it To Be True.”
• Chapter 10: “IT’S A TRAP!”
• Chapter 11: “What I told you was true… from a certain point of view.”
• Chapter 12: “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy”
• Chapter 13, “I Know.”

Additions…

• Chapter 14, “This deal is getting worse all the time.”
• Chapter 15, “He’s no good to me dead.”

Plan

If there is some initial interest, I’ll set up a wiki on my gen1.us domain to let a first set of writers in, and then open it up/expand.

Not that I want to force a hand in the communal/creative process, but I’m trying to put enough boundaries to help move ideas forward and eliminate distractions.  I’m completely open to doing this in different ways.

Example: if I was writing a chapter myself, I’d expect the structure to look somewhat like this:

• Title of the chapter is the pull quote.
• First section of the chapter describes the scene in which the quote takes place.
• Next section of the chapter relates it to one or more workplace scenarios where the scene in Star Wars is a metaphor (or an anti-model)
• Pepper this with citations from other literature, preferrably non-fiction experts like Covey, Collins, Pink, etc, but not exclusively non-fiction experts.  Any relevant genre to enlighten the point you’re trying to make with the quote would be fine.  Point being: I don’t want to illustrate lessons from Star Wars with lessons from Star Trek.  I’d rather use lessons from Senge than Ferengi (har har).

…but I’m also flexible on this, too.

Goals

I have very few goals I want to get out of this, for me.

1. Have fun without working too hard (*critical success factor).
2. Build relationships beyond my normal network (*big personal win here).
3. Have a site that actually has to go down for maintenance (*still nostalgic for an organic Digg effect).
4. Get it done 100% community effort (*I don’t write more than one “chapter” worth of material, if that much)

Next Steps

If you’re in, comment below.  If I get more than six comments expressing interest (from six different people), I’ll set up the wiki and we’ll go from there.

This week, I’m honored to have suggested the topic centered around what’s valuable about E-Learning today that was valuable ten years ago.

Even if you don’t want to actively participate, you can follow along without a Twitter account here.

The questions that will be addressed on Thursday, starting at 7:30-9pm are as follows:

• Q1: What was the value of E-Learning 10yrs ago that’s still valuable today?
• Q2: What makes great elearning today?
• Q3: Can rapid elearning be good learning? (and if so, how?)

More information on #lrnchat:
http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/about/

“The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users. It’s just a fact of life,” says a source at Stratcom, which is responsible for securing the military’s “global information grid.

Price Floyd, the military’s new social-networking czar, said no final decision has been made yet regarding a Web 2.0 block. “An analysis is being conducted,” Floyd told Danger Room. (Source: Milblogging)

I really don’t think “malicious code” has anything to do with this. I think the issue is much more nuanced and highly more politicized.

I’ve heard stories (I wish I could find them in the small time I have to research this) that the problem isn’t so much the blogging or microblogging by individual soldiers… most of our uniformed bloggers are following the rules. There is a set of rules, or Operations Security (OPSEC) instructions that guide what soldiers are allowed to share.

Interesting thing (at least as of 2007), these OPSEC rules are (or at least were) on the Army’s restricted knowledge base on their intranet — meaning contractors and family members would have no access to the file. Truth be told, I’m not a person who reads such rules if they don’t apply to me, and I’d guess that even given the opportunity to review the document, there’s really very little that the military can do to stop Army spouses and family members from blogging whatever they want to blog about.

So…. the story I heard is that there’s this base in the Field that was kind of an ad hoc base — a small security force to guard the base because its security was that no one knew it was there. Soldiers on the base would blog about their daily activities, being fairly mindful of their OPSEC instructions. Their spouses, being somewhat in the dark about what their soldiers were doing and where they actually were, started co-blogging to exchange information and piece together where the soliders were, what they were doing, etc. And they figured it out, which then freaked the DoD out.

With the traceability of information known to link back to the sources — the soldiers on that base — the community around them was able to aggregate and piece together some critical information intended to be kept a secret.

Now that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know how true it is, but since I haven’t seen this discussed elsewhere, it makes me at least assume it’s truthy. It’s highly contentious to point the finger at military family, which I can see why the DoD would go out of their way to not bring that into their argument for blocking social media.

It would also make sense that with this “warning order” a whole other part of the DoD, starting with Price Floyd, is looking to collect opinions on this. Because it’s a double-edged sword. The military is going to have a hard time recruiting soldiers if they can’t use the tools they want to use in communicating with friends and family abroad. We’re not writing a lot of paper-based letters anymore, where it was easy to monitor what was being said — and because it was paper-based, it was at least another step more difficult to share that information in a globally-viewable way.

I welcome any thoughts or expansions to validate or dispute this post in the comments.