A week ago, we flew into Zurich, rested up a couple of days, drove to Chur and on to Andeer.
Andeer is a beautiful village and the source of the Rhine; it’s but a trickle here. It was warm the day we visited: every other block along the cobblestone streets, I would scoop up a handful of cold, pure water from an open-air fountains. Andeer has been a stopping place for people crossing the Alps since Roman times. Tourist season has yet to begun, so it was just us and the locals wandering among the graffiti-covered houses along cobble-stone streets.
Alpine wildflowers are in bloom, making for a colorful drive from Splugen to Chiavenna on mountain roads so obscure that I can’t find them in Google Maps.
In late afternoon, we arrived at our resting spot for the next four days: the tiny village of Soglio. An hour’s walk from Italy, Soglio is perched on a hill above groves of chestnut trees. Fewer than 200 people live here. Cars are not permitted; most of the streets are only five or six feet wide. Houses and barns are typically constructed of stacks of local rock. People have lived here since 1350. The internet has yet to arrive.
Walking paths overlooking the valley is the primary activity here, so when heavy rain made the Panoramaweg impassible, we drove down to Italy for lunch
Twenty-two years ago, Uta and I happened upon a delightful restaurant high up a hill in Tremezzo, overlooking Lake Como and Bellagio. A favorite family photo shows three-year old Austin at the table to the left as Uta writes postcards. Al Veluu is still picture-perfect. The food was simple, fresh, colorful, and delicious. There was only one other patron, so we had the place to ourselves.
The fried zuchini that accompanied my grilled lavarello was so tasty, we ordered a platter. I cannot remember a tastier, more delightful lunch.
The Giacometti family hails from Stampa, a village several miles to the north of Soglio.
Yesterday we drove the length of the Engadine Valley, from Maloja to St. Moritz, Zernez, and Scuols, and thence to Innsbruck and finally Salzberg, where we’ll be for a few days.
My freshman year at Paris-American High School, our general science teacher told us that several times a month he would forgo drinking orange juice with breakfast. He didn’t want to habituate to it. I’ve been off the grid for five days. It’s pleasant to skip sorting through dozens of meaningless emails every morning. I don’t need newspapers and websites to give me the same daily news again and again: politicians are corrupt, military dictators violate human rights, Mother Nature causes catastrophes, the health advice you’ve heard since childhood was wrong, Democrats hate Republicans, Republicans hate Democrats, the Middle East faces thorny problems, yadda, yadda, yadda.
I’ve been drawing pictures for a story I’m developing: My Life as a Node.
But for now, we’ve got sites to see. Auf wiedersehen.
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,
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.
Tom Stewart, Don Tapscott, John Seely Brown, John Hagel, Stan Davis, Baruch Lev, Verna Allee, Ted Levitt, Bob Kaplan & David Norton, Kevin Kelly, Fritjof Kapra, Shoshana Zuboff, Geary Rummler, Ross Dawson, and Tom Malone say that what you can’t see (intangibles) is more valuable than what you can see (tangibles).
Relationships are worth more than buildings. Intellectual capital, social capital, customer capital, whatever you call it: this is what’s important in the age of networks.
I am growing weary of explaing why old-style numeric ROI that does not take intangibles into account is a bean-counting exercise from yesteryear. Here’s nine minutes of my thoughts on the subject.
By the way, You Tube is a fantastic resource. To my amazement, 1,800 people have watched my 10-minute YouTube video on informal learning.
The video above is the first take. Editing was minimal. Start-to-finish, this You Tube video took me about an hour and a half. (Of course, the ideas were already in my head.)
Given that we have a health care system whose errors are a leading cause of death, an international development model that has invested $2.3 trillion with little or nothing to show for it, an educational system that is heading down a similar path, I guess I am glad to be “oblique to the consensual reality.” And yes, I think that our 500 year old pre-Columbian artifact of an accounting system is need of replacement. Just because we happen to have this shared delusion that we can add up labor, goodwill, interest, and options and get a bottom line (assuming linearity) doesn’t mean that the world actually works that way
Nearly everyone I know feels short of time, enough so that it’s diminishing the quality of their lives. Our homes and workplaces are filled with labor-saving devices but most of us are laboring more, not less. In the sixties, people assumed that by the turn of the century robots would do the work. Our biggest chore was going to be figuring out what to do to fight off boredom.
Many time-savers have entered my life in the last quarter century: word processing instead of typing, Google instead of going to the library, sending mail without heading to the post office, driving a car that never breaks down and needs maintenance but once a year, and using a personal computer that runs 700 times faster than my original IBM-PC (and more than 5000 times faster than the first computer I ever programmed). Continue reading →
Last night I dreamt that I was at checking in at some out-of-the-way international airport. I was at a table covered with a pile of receipts, tickets, credit cards, itineraries, printouts, business cards, and notes. I had lost my shoulder bag, so I stuffed everything into a cardboard box. I checked the box as luggage, got my boarding pass, and realized I’d left my ID was in the box. Thank heavens I woke up before I had to go through Security.
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On another matter, Web 2.2 closed with a drawing. My business card came out of the fishbowl, and I am now the owner of a ViewSonic Pocket PC V37. Now I need to figure out what to do with it.
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And another… I’ve been touting the concept that most traditional training focuses on novices, to the neglect of the high-producing people with experience. That’s an over-simplification because a learner may be expert at a dozen things but a novice in several others.
Bus Routes and Bike Paths – Jay Cross on Informal Learning
Nothing is more important to business success than continuously improving the know-how of workers. In the industrial era, management’s role was training workers what to do: formal learning. In the knowledge era, workers want to learn but hate to be trained; telling them how to do something insults their intelligence; they want to learn for themselves: informal learning.
Formal learning is like riding a bus. The driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. On the opposite end, informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. The rider can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or go to the bathroom.
Informal learning happens outside of the bus and the classroom. There’s no curriculum and no certificate of completion. It goes on all the time. Informal learning includes things like trying and failing, asking a colleague, reading a book, or watching television. Informal learning is how we learn about life. It’s how we make sense of things.
The MASIE Center surveyed thousands of learning colleagues about their hopes for the field. Here is their wish list:
CEO’s and Boards will begin or continue to understand the value of meaningful development for themselves and their teams.
Learning professionals would be more honest with ourselves.
That we stop looking for “the answer”. There is no one silver bullet.
Learning Research needs to be more effective and discussed.
After we “build” it, they really do “come” Learning is accessed by those that need it.
We can truly measure the ROI or Impact of learning. Or, create a better way of talking about the effectiveness of our work.
We understand the difference between training and learning.
The “cool” learning technology actually works and is valued by the entire workforce.
LMS systems that are engines for performance and profitability rather than tracking system.
Every learner is self-directed, understanding that they have to develop constantly if they are to keep up; understanding that learning is *their* responsibility, not their manager’s or the HR department’s, or anyone else’s. And the flipside of that dream, of course, is that we are providing them with engaging, on-demand content as and when and how they need it.
Wouldn’t adopting a mission of improving organizational performance in lieu of training/learning help fulfill the hopes I’ve marked with italics?
Today Uta and I drove to Half Moon Bay for an impressive motorcycle c
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