Entries Tagged 'Just Jay' ↓

Day before yesterday I installed Parallels on my MacPro; it creates a virtual machine to enable me to run Windows.

Ten years ago, something like this would have had maybe a 25% chance of working, and when it did, it would be as slow as snails on valium. And it would have taken four hours with many wrong turns to install.

Parallels was as easy and user-friendly as they come. Windows runs on my Mac faster than it did on my ThinkPad. I have yet to read the manual. I am a happy camper. And that’s why the photo of the dancing bear.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper compares software to a dancing bear. You don’t look for the bear to dance gracefully. The amazing thing is that the bear can dance at all.

Switching topics, does anyone know of a company making good use of e-mentoring? A student writing her dissertation on the subject needs to know.

And switching again, the cover story in the current Fast Company is about ning. Amazing growth rate. When I posted a question about some glitch I couldn’t figure out when we were starting this community, Gina Bianchi emailed me an answer in about ten minutes. I replied that her level of service blew me away. You have to admire a Stanford MBA, serial entrepreneur, investment banker who works in the trenches. It reminds me of the early days at AOL when Steve Case personally answered the questions and gripes.

Ning’s software is another agile dancing bear. Essentially, a community-in-a-box, Ning is a snap to set up. We’ve used it to run the Internet Time Community for a year now. Ning’s missing a few tricks (I still have a tough time find new posts), but by-and-large, it has provided discussion forums, blogs, albums, member pages: not bad for something that took five minutes to set up and is free. We have 200+ members.

The gremlins have just punished me for being so chipper. I had about an hours’ worth of unsaved code (don’t ask) in a web app when Firefox froze on me. WTF? This happens several times a week around here, and I’ve never been able to isolate the problem. Argh. Some bears don’t dance.

Continuing the photo tour of our outpost on Poppy Lane in North Berkeley.

What you see from Poppy Lane…

…and what you see if you peek over the fence.

Looking from the dining room to the front deck.

Here’s the view through the dining room. The top floor resembles a glass shoe-box. I’ll show you the view to the west from the southern end of the house to the north.

Inside, to the left of the front door is my office. Sliding door for privacy.

From my office.

The kitchen.

From the living room.

Slide show

Location.

The house is two blocks from the crest of the ridge across the bay from San Francisco.

Rock climbers frequent the two neighborhood parks. Cragmont Park has a magnificent panorama of the U.C. Berkeley campus. From atop Remillard Rock you can see the Marin Hills, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and south along the San Francisco peninsula. We are a brief walk from an immense regional park, where I frequently go hiking.

Down the hill, a five-minute drive or twenty-minute walk, is the Berkeley “Gourmet Ghetto,” home of Cafe Panisse, the Cheese Board, the original Peet’s Coffee, the farmer’s market, Black Oak Books, our wine merchant, and the first outlet for Ecco shoes in America.

Poppy Lane is a quiet, one-block street in the Berkeley hills that ends at a small public park where people come to climb Remillard Rock, watch their kids in the tiny playground, or play fetch with their dogs.

The Meyer lemon tree out front bears fruit all year long.

Bougainvillea and black bamboo hide the vaguely Japanese-looking house from the street. We’re thinking of selling the place and moving on next month.

The back deck is a tranquil spot for reading or meditation. .

The deck looks out to the redwood grove at the far end of the back yard.

View of the back of the house from the redwood grove.

We’ve let the back yard revert to nature. Skunks, raccoons, and deer sometimes take up residence.

The four rooms on the lower level look out on the back yard.

The squirrels are entertaining but I wish they won’t eat all the pears.

Deer sometimes sleep under the back deck.

I plan to put 30 Poppy on the market in about a month. In a grand Bay Area tradition, friends and acquaintances get first dibs. Drop me a line if you are interested. No real estate agents, please. ,

4 bedrooms, 2 baths, 2 decks
2,016 sqft, Lot 7,748 sqft, built 1961.

exported from next post

Continuing the photo tour of our outpost on Poppy Lane in North Berkeley.

What you see from Poppy Lane…

…and what you see if you peek over the fence.

Looking from the dining room to the front deck.

Here’s the view through the dining room. The top floor resembles a glass shoe-box. I’ll show you the view to the west from the southern end of the house to the north.

Inside, to the left of the front door is my office. Sliding door for privacy.

From my office.

The kitchen.

From the living room.

Slide show

Location.

The house is two blocks from the crest of the ridge across the bay from San Francisco.

Rock climbers frequent the two neighborhood parks. Cragmont Park has a magnificent panorama of the U.C. Berkeley campus. From atop Remillard Rock you can see the Marin Hills, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, and south along the San Francisco peninsula. We are a brief walk from an immense regional park, where I frequently go hiking.

Down the hill, a five-minute drive or twenty-minute walk, is the Berkeley “Gourmet Ghetto,” home of Cafe Panisse, the Cheese Board, the original Peet’s Coffee, the farmer’s market, Black Oak Books, our wine merchant, and the first outlet for Ecco shoes in America.

Yesterday an email query from Clark Aldrich struck me as oddly impersonal, since Clark and I usually converse in real time. He asked, “What is the most important thing that needs to be said about educational simulations?”

Then I realized it was a question sent via LinkedIn. I don’t know how many of Clark’s contacts he asked but he has more than two hundred, so it could be quite a few.

What’s next? I thought. Using direct mail marketing techniques on one’s friends? And then I reconsidered. “Why not?” I decided to ask a question of my own.

Since I’m immersed in conceptualizing the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook, I asked my LinkedIn contacts, “Workers, profits, technology. Make up your own question for the sequel to Informal Learning.” Eight people have responded. Three of them are people I would never have dreamed of asking such a question.

I pay next to no attention to LinkedIn but this question-your-contacts feature piqued my curiosity. It seems to be part of a LinkedIn strategy to get more Facebooky. There appears to be a competition among some members to answer the most questions. My site says I can ask ten questions a month, but I’m not going to use my quota: I’d rather not become a nuisance and pariah on LinkedIn.

Lisa Neal, editor of eLearning magazine, just inquired:

Have you seen a movie, television show, or play or read a book that included e-learning? There are certainly many examples of media portrayal of education - Hairspray comes to mind, where detention was where people had fun, or the play Spring Awakening, where the teacher had rigid expectations for behavior.

Given the prevalence of e-learning, it seems like it should be in the media. But even computers, which are so important in many people’s lives, are typically in movies only as props or for product placement!

I appreciate any instances of where e-learning has been included or ideas for why it isn’t more often.

Great question, Lisa.

Unfortunately, I fear it will be followed by a few thousand others. This meme seems viral.

From an article I wrote in January 2007:

Microsoft hates losing business to upstart Google, first in search, then in advertising, and now threatening the Office monopoly. To try to make up for lost ground, Microsoft will buy Yahoo!

I guess I’ll have to wait for Wal*Mart to acquire Amazon.

More papers and predictions

The wisteria over my front gate is in full bloom, our plum trees are covered with purple pom-poms, the pear tree in back is snowy white with blossoms, and my allergic reaction is so bad that I can hardly think straight. With my immune system compromised and my defenses down, last night I tottered on the edge of the bottomless pit of raw, seething information that is the web.

Lock me in solitary with a fast connection to the net, and I’d get lost in the feeds, photos, avatars, links, and thoughts for days. Last night I went online to write a few pages of the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook. Soon I had a dozen tabs open on Firefox: a list of corporate social media evangelists, Nature magazine (archives back to 1869!), a great presentation by the late Hal Riney, the infamous Dutch anti-Koran movie, Scoble, Jason Kotte, the Smart Car (decided to give it a test drive today), the motorcycle concourses d’elegance (bought tickets), a series of papers on web-based learning I wrote in 1999, photographs of Cozumel, Dave Gray’s new blog, the Story of Stuff, Elliott Masie’s new ning community (Learning Town), and a gallery of sock puppets.

Like the pioneering Whole Earth Catalog, the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook will function as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting. As generous “users” would said when the Catalog came out in the sixties, we’d love to turn you on. We aim to produce a diverse, visually compelling, perusable, continually-updated, pragmatic idea book.

Unlike the Whole Earth Catalog, this un-book lists things that are readily available via the web. The Catalog described everything from cookbooks to solar heaters, Swiss Army knives to first aid, and geodesic domes to shovels. The Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook is more likely to dwell on enterprise 2.0, communities of practice, stealth learning, appreciative inquiry, and social networks.

I’m conceptualizing the UI for the Informal Learning 2.0 Fieldbook as I go. I suspect it will include a printed guidebook and commentary, and take-all-you-want components on the web. The whole deal will consist of “small pieces, loosely joined.” Participants (what I call the people once known as readers) can dive in via tags and connections. Alternatively, they may begin with thought leaders’ overviews, perspectives, and pointers.

Bottom-up or top-down? Have it your way.

More to come. Suggestions welcome.

And I’m going to head over to the beach to find out if sea breezes can appease my allergies.

Ah-choo.

April 2008 in CLO

Networks arise when isolated entities link to one another. Improvements in communications technology (e.g., the invention of language, writing, printing, mass communication, computer networks) encourage connections. The denser its linkages, the shorter a network’s cycle time. Speed begets speed.

The connections that knit us together make us interdependent. Because other members of the network impact what we do, we lose even the illusion of control. The future becomes unpredictable.

Factory workers once were paid for what they produced. In a mechanized system, the slowest worker produced only slightly less than the fastest. If workers produced one widget an hour, paying by the hour was equivalent to paying by the widget. It also was simpler to measure. Managers became accustomed to equating time with production.

For the knowledge worker, time on the job often is unrelated to output. Google’s recruiters figure that an exemplary engineer can create 200 times more value than an average engineer. Only a fool would think it fair to pay each by the hour.

Visualize the workflow of a physical job: produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce, produce.

Now visualize the workflow of a creative knowledge worker: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, flash of brilliance, nothing, nothing, nothing.

That single moment of brilliance may be more valuable than years of production. The flash occurs in Internet time. A year of Internet time is roughly equivalent to seven years of calendar time. The term came into being because in its first year, Netscape was said to accomplish what had taken others at least seven years. (The firm has since imploded at an accelerated pace as well.) Internet time is a generalization, like a New York minute, the idea being that it’s faster than regular time.

A businessperson with a watch knows what time it is, but a businessperson with two watches does not. Most managers tell time with Industrial Age watches, acting as if Internet time does not exist and missing the prospects it offers. The hands of future watches will spin so fast they will appear to be a blur.

Opportunities abound because the world now moves on ideas instead of things. Value has migrated from tangible assets you could see and touch to intangible assets such as ideas, relationships, patterns and reputation. Twenty-five years ago, intangible assets accounted for less than a third of the valuation of U.S. companies. Ten years later, more than 80 percent of that value was intangible.

In the world of intangibles, quality trumps quantity. You can build a relationship or develop an idea in a fraction of the time it took to build a factory. Furthermore, some efforts yield outsized rewards. As in nature, for every action, there may be an unequal and totally unexpected reaction. The butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazon is perhaps the catalyst for Hurricane Katrina. An algorithm might give birth to the 17th most valuable company on the Fortune 500.

Chief learning officers consider themselves enlightened if they provide workers with a month of training per year. This would have been generous when the pace of business allowed for three-martini lunches and the nature of work rarely changed. Today, everyone is busy nearly every waking moment, they figure things out on their own, and they deal with increasingly complex situations. Routine tasks crowd out reflection and innovation.

Today’s managers have scenarios and possibilities, not single-track plans. This calls for new models. Some creative workers would produce more value were they required to dedicate 11 months of the year to learning and one month to innovation and decision making. Meta-learning and flexible infrastructure are becoming more important than individual topics. “Learning to be” will supplant “learning to know.”

At the dawn of the network age, managers enjoyed the luxury of annual planning. They communicated the firm’s goals to the training department, which in turn translated those goals into workshops, learning management systems and so forth. Back then, the past resembled the future closely enough that driving by the rearview mirror was feasible. Today’s rapid changes require the driving skills of winning race drivers. The track is being built a little of the way ahead and could take a turn we don’t expect.

Upon arrival in Ottawa yesterday morning after a sleepless night on Air Canada, the falling snow did not cheer me up. Brrrr. (Yes, I’m staying at a B&B called the Gasthaus Switzerland; it’s campy, with cow bells and posters of the Alps.) Perhaps I was meant to live through a mean yesterday to provide contrast to today, a wonderful, sunny day made for walking around outside.

The National Gallery of Canada is an awesome place. I snapped this photo from my table in the Rotunda while snacking on a light lunch. From the outside, the architecture of this end of the gallery echoes the spires of the Parliament Library just to the right of the taller tower of Parliament itself. Art galleries make me creative, and I jotted down pages of thoughts during lunch.

The contemporary collection on the second floor blew my socks off. It’s a combination of the familiar and the experimental, housed in enormous, airy rooms. This Jackson Pollock…

…is transparent!

Check out the scale of this building! Enormous, sky-lit inner courtyards are great for meditation.

Duchamp’s Readimades are well represented here. He said art is like dope; too much and you’re in trouble. So in spite the opportunity, he limited production of the Readimades.

The Byward Marketplace neighborhood is riddled with passageways. That’s where I found this great dancing bear. Pauta Salla, an Inuit hunter, carved the bear. Son of a legendary Inuit leader of Baffin Island, Salla sculpted his abstract bears to supplement his income.

A short stretch of Rideau Avenue, about three blocks from the Gasthaus Switzerland, is host to seven tatioo parlors. They also function as head shops and gathering places for strangely ornamented youth. Some shops also remove tattoos. All do piercings and (don’t think about this one) body modification. The two shops in the photo share space with a souvenir place that celebrates drunkenness and a branch of the Church of Scientology.

I’m in Ottawa to interview a fellow who set up the best implementation of web-learning 2.0 I know of for the informal Learning Fieldbook. I’m also here to advise small manufacturers on establishing and maintain successful communities of practice on the shop floor.

Tuesday morning, I’ll be in Orlando, delivering a “Power Hour” presentation to the CLO Symposium on Orchestrating Change. My red Hawaiian shirt is ready, and I may offer the CLOs some zaniness by wearing the hot-sauce shirt with the white suit I bought for travel in South America.

Stuck in traffic a few days ago, I listened to the Secretary of the Treasury talking about regulatory reform. Usually I pay no attention to the black magic the Fed is performing, the obscure financial instruments dreamed up by greedy quants on Wall Street, the shenanigans of bankers testing the limits of the law, and the ups and downs of the financial markets. When it’s not the same old story over and over, it’s a random walk, and in either case I find it boring.

However, irresponsibility in high government office does arouse my crap detectors. Why, in the dying days of the most disastrous administration in American history, would we even consider re-structuring the entire regulatory framework?

The gang in Washington has a legacy of botching whatever they lay their hands on and using yours and my money to pay for it. Consider the reaction to 9/11. The horse was out of the barn. So we reacted by building a $100 billion barn door just in case there were any other horses still in there. Then we drove future terrorist bombers to our railroads, water supply, shopping malls, stadiums, and other unguarded areas by populating the airports with the TSA’s Keystone Kops. One nutjob stuffs explosives in his shoe and now millions of us have to take our shoes off to get on an airplane. Seeking retribution for 9/11, we declare war on terrorists and start an illegal war with Iraq even though it wasn’t their terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. My level of confidence in Washington has never been lower.

The latest horse to escape the barn is the massive losses attributable to loaning money to people without the means to pay it back. The house of cards crumbled when markets stopped going up. Financial institutions thought they could somehow outwit the balance of risk and reward by letting Citicorp and its brethren hold the bag if loans went south. The greater fool theory only works when that fool has extremely deep pockets. Here’s news for the financial hotshots: There’s no free lunch. Rising markets cannot defy gravity forever. Ever hear the term cyclical?

The mortgage horse has left the barn, sacked the dollar, cost many citizens their homes, and thrown financial institutions out of kilter. So the Secretary of the Treasury wants to restructure financial regulation, put investment banks under the microscope, dismantle the SEC, give the Fed more than it can handle, and heaven knows what else. That’s the new multi-billion dollar barn door, and it’s the wrong cure for the wrong problem.

Markets are a series of checks and balances. The current regulators let the checks be cashed regardless of the balances. Duh. Why should we trust these characters to implement a new system? Why not enforce the old one?

Let’s define the problem before crafting the solution. Appointing a risk czar reminds me of the drug czars who have wasted countless sums while exacerbating the problems they were supposed to solve. We have a security czar, a cybersecurity czar, an intelligence czar, a counterintelligence czar, an AIDS czar, a trade czar, a mine safety czar, and I’m confident someone will propose the appointment of a czar of czars even though the age of kings and czars is over. Saying “Joe’s in charge of that” is not comforting when Joe the Czar doesn’t have a clue.

Let’s wait until we have a new administration in place. It’s not healthy for the architects to wash their hands of the design as soon as the blueprints are passed along to the builders.

Finally, if you were looking for an unbiased, level-headed visionary to orchestrate the restructuring of the banking and securities markets, would you really choose the former head of Goldman Sachs?

Can Henry Paulson identify with the needs of the people? He’s worth $700 million.

Goldman Sachs is a great firm, but can its former boss remain neutral in an industry he helped put together?

Allan Sloane in The Washington Post stated that one of Goldman’s 2006 crop - the GSAMP Trust 2006- S3 - may actually be “the worst deal…floated by a top-tier firm.” One in every six of the 8,274 mortgages bundled together in GSAMP Trust 2006-S3 was already in default 18 months later. Whoever bought the S3 bonds will have either taken a 100% loss, or are waiting to sell it on at a heavy discount. [39]

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716) invented calculus at the same time but independently of one another!

When Newton and Leibniz first published their results, there was great controversy over which mathematician (and therefore which country) deserved credit. Newton derived his results first, but Leibniz published first. Newton claimed Leibniz stole ideas from his unpublished notes, which Newton had shared with a few members of the Royal Society. This controversy divided English-speaking mathematicians from continental mathematicians for many years, to the detriment of English mathematics. A careful examination of the papers of Leibniz and Newton shows that they arrived at their results independently, with Leibniz starting first with integration and Newton with differentiation.

To be sure, both inventors were standing on the shoulders of mathematicians who had been piecing calculus together since 1800 BCE, but the primary factor calculus came about when it did was that the time was right.

The term eLearning also enjoyed simultaneous discovery, probably in many places. In the late nineties two trends converged to make the timing right.

1. e was in the air. In 1997, Pierre Omidyar founded eBay; he chose the name because his first choice, Echo Bay, had already been taken. eCommerce, which was mainly about buying things online, was morphing into eBusiness, which involved doing things online. E-mail was becoming email. E-loan announced e-track. People read e-zines and e-books. Before the web, we had EDI (electronic data interchange) and EFT (electronic funds transfer).
2. The meme of learning was replacing training. Training is something trainers push to trainees. Learning is whatever gets past one’s personal firewall (AKA cranium) and lodges in the brain. I can learn something; you can’t learn me anything. A big part of the sales pitch for early versions of web-supported learning was the elimination of costly trainers. You couldn’t very well call this training.

e + learning. No wonder eLearning sprouted up in many places. Elliott Masie’s bio says he is “acknowledged as the first analyst to use the term e-Learning.” Elliott told me he first heard the term at IBM. I am credited with the first use of eLearning on the web. Six months that CBT Systems announced its transformation into SmartForce, the eLearning company, in late 1999, every training company with a dial-up connection and a web page claimed to have eLearning. The term was counterfeited at warp speed and was soon FUBAR.

Learnscapes

What kicked off this outpouring? I am weary of answering the question “Jay, did you invent the term eLearning?” with explanations of “Yes, me and a thousand other people.”

This morning, in his delightful blog Here Comes Everybody, Ken Carroll talks about whether his amazing ChinesePod is setting learning standards.

An integrated learning 2.0 scenario

There is a general agreement about the need for learning environments, learnscapes, or learning eco-systems, that enable participation, collaboration, and user-input, etc. The central organizing principle should, of course, be the network, with all the attendant network qualities and the right social software. The key thing about a network is that everything is connected to everything else. Connecting the people and all the bits enables the sharing, the discussion, the dissemination of good learning practices, as well as the self-expression, the debate, and all the other things that make human learning possible.

In this scenario, the learners are necessarily in control because networks break down hierarchies. The role of the instructor (or practitioner) is that of modelling and demonstrating, rather than as arbiters or controllers.

Learners are then free to select content on a self-service basis, and at the times that they, themselves choose, preferably from an input-rich environment, with a variety of ways to consume it. (Learning is multi-dimensional.) It also needs to be self-directed and happen through direct experience and personal decisions, rather than through instruction and vicarious decisions.

Within this adaptive, de-centralized, recursive, and exploratory learning environment, content needs to be cognitive, and engaging. An inductive approach that allows learners to participate, to discover meaning, to reflect, and identify patterns, takes precedence over lectures because learning is individualistic, and subjective. All the while, members of the community can communicate

Like Michael Corleone answering Fay’s question about the family business, I plan to answer this question but once: “Jay, did you invent the term Learnscape?”

“Yes, me and a thousand other people.” The time was right.

My take on Learnscapes parallels Ken’s.

Informal learning is about situated action, collaboration, coaching, and reflection — not classes. Developing a platform to support informal learning is analogous to landscaping a garden. You don’t make the platform; you make what’s there better.

A major component of informal learning is natural learning, the notion of treating people as organisms in nature. Our role as learning professionals is to protect their environment, provide nutrients for growth, and let nature take its course.

Self-service learners connect to one another, to ongoing flows of information and work, to their teams and organizations, to their customers and markets, not to mention their families and friends. Because the design of informal learning ecosystems is analogous to landscape design, I will call the environment of informal learning a learnscape.

A landscape designer’s goal is to conceptualize a harmonious, unified, pleasing garden that makes the most of the site at hand. A learnscaper strives to create a learning environment that increases the organization’s longevity and health, and the individual learner’s happiness and well-being. Gardeners don’t control plants; managers don’t control people. Gardeners and managers have influence but not absolute authority. They can’t make a plant fit into the landscape or a person fit into a team.

Learnscape Health Checklist

Learnscapes