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…

Related posts:

1. A Knowledge Exchange Strategy for Enterprise
2. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
3. Social Media and Military Security

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.

Related posts:

1. What Makes Great Apps

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).

Related posts:

1. What BAQON Enables: Public Services Applications
2. What BAQON Enables: Gaming
3. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem

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?

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Catching Up
2. To Write a Book About SCORM…
3. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem

"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.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Catching Up
2. What About BAQON?
3. How Change Changes You

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/

Related posts:

1. Curriculum is Not the (Whole) Problem
2. Catching Up
3. The End of Year Rant

You have to be a member to download it, but associate memberships are free, and the eLearning Guild is a great club to join in this space (*disclosure, I’m a member).

I did my best to be accurate, passionate yet objective — and I had a lot of help in fact-checking my accounting of history and in working to avoid the finger pointing and derision that usually accompanies the task of differentiating these organizations.   Obviously, as a member of LETSI I have a certain point of view.   I hope if it’s not an objective truth, it’s at least objectively truthy.

Thanks goes to Tom, Zoe, Ellen and Bill for their very constructive and informing feeback on earlier drafts.   If the article is any good at all, it’s a credit to my wife, Suzy, for doing a stellar job of helping me make more linear sense.

Related posts:

1. Why LETSI Matters
2. Shaping Future Learning, or Why You Should Be Writing a White Paper for SCORM 2.0
3. Standards Documents

Dennis then switches gears and gets me to go deeper into what I was presenting on.  Basically:

• I have a strategy for how knowledge flows through an organization, leveraging every channel for continuous improvement.
• This strategy involves a heavy leverage of social and community technologies, knowledge management principles and good analysis of the knowledge exchanges and requests taking place to place the best bets for formal learning’s impact on performance.

Thanks to Mark Friedman (@mkfrie) for the feedback on giving a better summary of the clip from our interview.

Related posts:

1. Reflections on #IeL09, Part 1
2. Reflections on #IeL09, Part 5
3. Reflections on #IeL09, Part 3