Early responders to a survey on learning practices in enterprise 2.0 say their people are falling behind. What’s the feeling in your organization?
Take three minutes to complete the survey yourself. I’ll send you the results when we have them.
We will release the initial results at LearnX in Melbourne next month.
Our one-day un workshops in Sydney and Melbourne the following week will dig deeper into these and other findings about adoption of social network software, enterprise 2.0 tools, impact of communities, and learning from mistakes,
The sextet shares a few non-learning sites that may interest you.
Jon Husband’s Wirearchy blog provides an alternate point of view on corporations, technology and organizational development. Jon’s focus is on the “social architecture for the wired world”.
John Brockman’s The Edge is the place to eavesdrop on amazing conversations and dialog among the likes of Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell- Mann, Benoit Mandelbrot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner, Steven Pinker, Steven Levy; Naomi Wolf, Annie Dillard, Ken Kesey, Steven Levy, and Malcolm Gladwell.
Robert Paterson writes about a wide variety of subjects, ranging from renewable energy to new business models. Rob provides the unique perspective of an ex-investment banker turned independent consultant now living on Prince Edward Island, Canada.
Digital Inspiration - Amit Agarwal writes a very accessible, inspirational and popular technology blog that includes tutorials and how-to guides related to software, computers, and internet.
Junk Charts is a blog devoted to analyzing and critiquing visual displays of information, a great read if you use numbers in your work and want to improve your visual literacy.
Lifehacker - A number of authors contribute to this blog devoted to discussing software and websites that actually help you save time.
Engadget & Gizmodo - sites that track the latest technology gadgets with a slightly snarky attitude.)
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. You can zoom back in time. If you prefer, check out the recordings of Grateful Dead concerts.
The New York Times Navigator is used by New York Times reporters and editors as the starting point for their forays onto the Web. Its primary intent is to give the news staff a solid starting point for a wide range of journalistic functions without forcing all of them to spend time wandering around to find a useful set of links of their own.
In my quest to lose weight. I’ve given up ports and a DVD drive.
Steve Jobs is a mastermind. The Mac Air is just enough smaller and sleeker than its peers that it’s in a different category than the MacBook it replaces. I cart this little slab around the house with me.
Architecture can be jarring. This is just south of Market, San Francisco. Glide Memorial Church to the left, the Jukebox Marriott straight ahead, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum on the right. The black cube pierces the side of the handsome brick building, a one-time PGE power substation designed by Willis Polk.
When I was 14, I bought a Peugeot BB Sport cyclomoteur, a 50cc motorbike, the perfect ride for an American teenager living just outside Paris for a couple of years. Back in the States, I had no occasion to ride a two-wheeler until a college buddy dropped by my house on his BMW R50. I borrowed it for a quick spin around the neighborhood, dropped the front wheel into a pothole, flipped the bike on its side, skidded along the pavement until my elbow was peeking out from my flesh, and have never ridden a motorcycle since. Nonetheless, I still love the look and lore of motorcycles, especially Italian machines from around the early sixties.
Some of the bikes on display were antiques. Typically, a hundred-year old motorcycle looked as if it were brand new.
Others were flat-out racing machines.
…and some bikes are rolling art projects.
I wish I knew how to ride the beautiful machine. Pant, pant, pant.
As Harold mentioned yesterday, half a dozen kindred spirits are engaged in dialog to improve our individual learning and to “eat the dog food” of network effects. Yesterday we experimented with adding our abbreviated, outside opinions to a workshop I was taking part in.
(Click)
The workshop was an in-house, intensive session on innovation taking place at a Fortune 200 manufacturing company in the Midwest. When issues arose that workshop participants lacked the bandwidth to grapple with at the time, we recorded them on a “big issues parking lot” flip-chart page.
Here’s one of the three issues I emailed to members of our group in late afternoon.
New managers in the Asia operation are quitting to join other companies that promise them more responsibility, sooner. How can we accelerate their development? The newly-hired managers are impatient.
The outside group deliberated on our private discussion board and wiki. The next morning I provided a ten-minute summary of thoughts, for example:
Do the newly-hired managers have good reason to be impatient? What are other firms doing? Turnover may be to suboptimal acculturation. Are we being overly risk-averse because we have not been in this marketplace as long as our competition?
Reward them with opportunities to work on innovative projects. Partner new managers with old managers on new/innovative projects that give them a chance to learn from the old managers and opportunities to work on cool stuff. Wrap community around incoming training, so they’re getting used to dialog as well as getting up to speed. Coach them. Don’t separate performance from learning, wrap learning around performance: give them responsibility early, but provide structure, support, to turn each decision into a learning situation.
The people who had asked questions found the group’s responses thought-provoking; they gave insight into understanding the issues at work. There were no definitive answers, but questions like these don’t have pat answers.
The veteran manager in the room (the head of the corporate university reports to him) found the exercise useful. It could be more so if the group would bat around issues in a real-time fishbowl environment. People in the audience would swap opinions, Instant Messenger one another as a back channel, and pitch questions into the conversation. A virtual dialog.
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.
The strength of weak ties explains that you never find your new job through your friends; you find it through their friends. Your pool of contacts overlaps that of your friends; there’s nothing new there. But their friends are members of many different communities. In diversity, there are job leads.
The same principle holds true for information. Go to training conferences for a few years, and you find that you can almost mouth the words of some of the speakers. Novices learn lots; that’s who most of the conferences are for. Old hands may hear a few new terms, but breakthrough ideas are rare. Hence, if you’ve been around a while and are hungry for new concepts and fresh approaches, look outside of the training realm. Tune into conversations about business strategy, brain science, futurists, computer games, conceptual art, and advertising.
I’m assembling the un-book sequel to Informal Learning. It’s nothing if not multi-disciplinary. I clearing the eLearning books out of my library. Searching for something edgy, I arrive at John Hagel’s site. John’s blogroll was to the left of the article I was reading. I know, or know of, everyone there, but most of them aren’t among my incoming RSS feeds.
* BGSL - Umair Haque
* Chris Anderson - The Long Tail
* Confused of Calcutta - JP Rangaswami
* Creativity Exchange - Richard Florida
* John Battelle’s Searchblog
* Joho the Blog
* Lawrence Lessig
* Loosely Coupled weblog
* Many-to-Many
* O’Reilly Radar
When I come against an issue of, say, learning culture, I’d be more likely to get a fresh perspective from these folks than from the usual suspects in the training blogosphere.
Why not set up a custom Google Search on these blogs? It’s as easy as shooting ducks in the bathtub.
John Brockman’s 
Today Uta and I drove to Half Moon Bay for an impressive motorcycle c
