Entries Tagged 'Informal Learning' ↓
June 30th, 2008 — Informal Learning, The Learning Business
Effectiveness Column in June 2008 CLO magazine
Malleability, multimedia, and more
CLOs know that extracting meaning from growing mountains of information is tougher than ever before. The walls between disciplines are falling. Specialization, knowing more and more about less and less, is no longer an option. Everything is connected to everything else.
Reality is an endless stream of knowledge, culture and ideas that flows faster and faster. Traditional books are snapshots of that stream. The swifter the stream, the shorter the life of the book. A book is an event. We need a process that outlasts the moment — a movie in place of a photograph.
“I AM OUT OF TIME. You bought the beta edition of this book. Things change so fast that all books are dated by the time they are published. The world is moving too fast for closure. Our lives are in beta.”
So began my 2006 book, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. The day it was published, my ideas were frozen in time, inert and unyielding to change. My author journey from outline to printed book took the better part of a year.
Something’s wrong here.
Books have been a mainstay of self-directed learning for centuries. CLOs may not break out the cost of books in the budget, but they assuredly invest heavily in them.
Books are not the ideal way to present subjects that change rapidly. Before I’m accused of calling for the death of books, permit me to say that works of art are timeless. Books such as Moby Dick, The Little Engine That Could, Catcher in the Rye, and David Copperfield are unbeatable. These novels and stories are whole unto themselves. That’s not the case for most nonfiction.
Wake-up call to the publishing industry: Why don’t you produce books that are current? Where are the pictures and maps? Why is the text all one size and color? Why don’t you provide updates on the Web? Why does it take a year to turn out a book? Why do most books come out as if one size fits all? Why don’t you encourage conversation with authors? How long do you expect to remain in business if you continue to act like fossils?
The publishing industry hardly has changed at all since the first paperback was printed in Venice. A page from the 1493 edition of Virgil’s Aeneid looks very similar to a page from The Social Life of Information printed 500 years later: rectangles of monochromatic text, no illustrations, page numbers in the corner and 1-inch margins all around.
A study by the Jenkins Group, a custom book publishing firm, found that:
• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.
• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
Increasingly, people hunt and gather what they want to read. Today’s activist readers pluck information from the blogosphere and YouTube and their friends on Facebook and MySpace.
To prosper in times ahead, we need to re-conceptualize our relationship with books, the role of authors and how to make books better. The shorthand for what I have in mind is the “un-book.” Here are some of the characteristics of un-books:
• Un-books are guidebooks for knowledge explorers navigating the flow of the news, information, sound bites, observations, debate, hacks, diatribes and memes that are the Web. Un-books invite participation. Participants choose how deeply they want to explore a topic and can remix content to create the learning experience they seek. Un-books link to the flow of knowledge, not sanctified facts. Treat that knowledge as community property, and the community will maintain and improve it. Many authors may write guidebooks to the same stream of knowledge, and a single author may create many un-books from a single stream.
• Un-books are inherently multimedia. One of those media is paper. Paper is portable, familiar and easy to annotate. A hard-copy book conveys authority.
A spokesman for Alpo dog food long ago said the product was so good that he fed it to his own dogs. Using one’s own products is known as “eating the dog food.” In lieu of writing a book, I am going on the dog-food diet. Any CLOs want to join me?
May 9th, 2008 — Informal Learning
I’m going to this. Anyone need a ride from Berkeley?
From Collaboratories to Public Space: Bringing the World to Students and Putting Classrooms in the Wild
From science to social studies, from math to music, students are finding new ways to engage the real world. At the same time, online opportunities — such as datasets and museums, remote observatories, public art displays, wiki sites, and collaborative research environments–are expanding access to resources, thereby increasing opportunities for faculty, teachers and students to collaborate with and learn from practitioners.
This EdForum, through its lively discussion format, will shed light on this new wave of collaborations.
April 25th, 2008 — Informal Learning, Just Jay, Management innovation, The Future, Web 2.0
Yesterday in the “Blogtropolis” room at Web 2.0 Expo, Chris Heuer signaled me to take a seat in the director’s chair alongside his for a chat.
Here’s a podcast of our chat. We spent twenty minutes talking about building on-line communities, enterprise 2.0, coping with mind-blowing change, the relationship with informal learning, un-meetings, redefining the meaning of conference, and what I plan to discuss with corporate clients in the next two months.
The divide separating the old way of looking at the world and the new, networked vision is so wide that, like the issue of abortion, you’re on one side or the other; no one’s in between, and you’re not going to change the way someone else sees it.
You either believe the net changes everything or you think it’s a passing fad. You believe augmenting humankind’s collective intelligence will change the world forever or you consider this virtual stuff bunk. If you’re one of the people on the side of tradition, my advice is to skip this recording altogether. You’ll think we’re raving mad.
April 14th, 2008 — Informal Learning
Listen to this 8-minute update if you want to know about the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook.
Books are an increasingly obsolete medium. My book on informal learning froze my thoughts as it came off the presses, as if the world is not always changing. Publishers spend a year doing what other sectors do in a month.
Hence, I’m assembling an un-book. Listen to the update.
Join me if you are interested.
March 6th, 2007 — Informal Learning, The Learning Business
Training 2007
Back to the Mouse Kingdom for another conference. Deja vu. I’d swear I was at a training event at the Coronado Resort in Disney World with a bunch of guys changing the tires of a NASCAR racer in record time less than six months ago. This time, the tire guys were inside. Click. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Click. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Click. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
M.C. Escher was here.
Tom Stewart
Continue reading →
February 8th, 2007 — Informal Learning
January 10th, 2007 — Informal Learning, The Learning Business
January 4th, 2007 — Informal Learning
Join me in a couple of weeks for a two-day retreat where we’ll learn to communicate visually.
This is the transformational business skill described in Informal Learning. You’ll come away with the ability to make drawings that inspire groups and clarify new gameplans. My attendance proves that you need no artistic skills to do this.
The retreat takes place in Bodega Bay, about an hour up the scenic California coast from San Francisco. (Call me if you need a ride.) We’ll stay at the sumptuous Bodega Bay Lodge, a 10-minute walk from the beach (and a 30-second stroll to the hot tub.)
The retreat is January 19-20. (Short notice, I know. I only found out about this last night.) The four coaches for the event are awesome. Cost is $1,500. There’s only one place left. If you want it, email eileen@visualinsight.com
December 31st, 2006 — Informal Learning, Just Jay
As the year winds down, the blogosphere overflows with nostrums on GTD (Getting Things Done) and plans for doing better next year. Life Hacker Gina Trapani’s new book offers 88 tricks to turbocharge your day. The book’s on the web & free. If that’s not sufficient to turbocharge your day, permit me to offer #89.
Feed readers, or aggregators, enable one to peruse headlines or summaries of blog postings before plunging in to read an entire post. This was a great time-saver when it came out six years ago. Now there are a hundred times more blogs. Keeping up with professional interests has become a time-consuming chore. I’ve found it useful to separate my RSS feeds into “must read,” “read when time permits,” and “read when time is plentiful.”
When time is scarce, there are nine blogs I read, no matter what. (Three of these belong to me and my son.) FeedBlitz pushes these into my email inbox daily.
Several times a week, I check in on twenty thought leaders. They are my inspiration. I keep the feeds to their URLs in SpeedyFeed. I can scan headlines — or hover over a topic to receive a pop-up with a summary of a particular post. Here’s a single pane of my 3×7 sets of SpeedyFeeds:
More obscure topics find a home at Rojo, a free, collaborative bookmarking service. I’m just getting into this one. I had been using SuprGlu. In fact, I had three SuprGlu accounts, broken out by subject matter. Unforntunately, SuprGlu appears to be kaput.
When I feel like a less regimented approach, I’ll drop by del.icio.us. I bookmark things I want to follow for a while before deciding whether to move them up a notch in my RSS hierarchy.
For most of 2006, I’ve used a free RSS reader from Adam Bosworth that presents feeds in a “river of news” format: very pleasant for ambling through the feeds at a leisurely pace. This is linked from the home page at Internet Time.
Update:
This morning I came upon an
interesting post in the Software Abstractions Blog that says what I was trying to say a whole lot better, e.g.
December 21st, 2006 — Informal Learning, Just Jay
The Institute of Neuroesthetics and The Minerva Foundation have opened registration for The Sixth International Conference on Neuroesthetics. It will take place at the Berkeley Art Museum on Saturday, January 20. Admission is free.
I know what you’re thinking. NeuroWTF? Neuroesthetics asks “What is art, why has it been such a conspicuous feature of all societies, and why do we value it so much?”
The subject has been discussed at length without any satisfactory conclusion. This is not surprising. Such discussions are usually conducted without any reference to the brain, through which all art is created, executed and appreciated. Art is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain. We are still far from knowing the neural basis of these laws, but spectacular advances in our knowledge of the visual brain allows us to make a beginning in studying the neural basis of visual art.
A theme like this attracts a wide spectrum of humanity. It’s an annual reunion for the world’s way-out brain scientists, but it also appeals to artists, psychologists, and hyper-curious amateurs like me. Everyone is very approachable.
The 2004 conference focused on empathy and the brain. We got a first-hand report on the discovery of mirror neurons at the University of Bologna. Leonard Pitt did sublime mime. A prof described Congo, an ape who paints. Paul Ekman taught us about reading faces.
The 2005 conference dealt with taste and the brain. Vintner Randall Grahm gave a grand presentation performance piece on The Phenomenology of Terroir.
This year, the topic is The Neuroesthetics of Love. If you want to attend, it would be a good idea to register now.
