Entries Tagged 'The Future' ↓

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.

We went to the local drugstore yesterday.

I heard a voice behind me and turned to find this guy.

A new addition to the staff at Long’s Drugstore in El Cerrito.
I bet the retail clerks union doesn’t think much of this.

Pharmacists’ jobs are safe for eons. I don’t trust Mr. Pharm Assist.

The drugstore doesn’t seem to trust me either.

The robot is bilingual. He reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon.

A guy standing at an ATM tells the person behind him, “This may take a while. I’m learning Spanish.”

My workshop in Bodega Bay this weekend converted me into a Visual Journalist.

Left: Bodega Bay, from our meeting room
Right: Tomales Bay, freshest oysters in the world

Nick van Dam (right) is Deloitte Touche Tomatsu’s CLO, the world’s tallest man, and the founder of eLearning for Kids.

e-Learning for Kids is a global nonprofit foundation dedicated to fun and free online learning for children ages 5 – 12. The curriculum includes math, science, language arts, english, computers and most recently health and life skills. All courseware is available for free and unlimited use by schools, parents and of course, children.

This little guy won our hearts at Learning 2005 by dancing to the background music in a video. He was oblivious to an audience of several thousand, a perfect example of the innocence of childhood.

This is a cool site and a good cause. Take a look. And rather than drop your money into some street-corner Santa’s bucket, make a donation to helping the world’s kids.

At Learning 2006, I was fortunate to meet Nigel Paine, who was just coming off a round-the-world tour and picking up a Learning Leadership Award for his work at BBC. We missed one another’s keynote sessions, but something drew us together, for we are both true believers in the power of informal learning.

As I’m on a campaign to restore informal learning to its proper place, I am delighted to post this piece summing up Nigel’s observations at Learning 2006.

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Life evolves without a designer. All it takes is replication (copying), changing conditions to adapt to, and low survival rates.

DNA is a species’ overall blueprint. Strings øf DNA are composed of genes. Making copies of genes is not exact; some don’t replicate precisely. Mutations happen. Offspring vary.

Psychologist Susan Blackmore gave this analogy at PopTech. She holds up a coat. What if we made ten copies of the coat? Some would have slightly shorter sleeves, others would appear in a different color, and other variations would appear. Next you take the best coat of the lot, best being defined as the most appropriate to surrounding conditions, and throw the rest away. Then you make ten copies of that coat. And again. And again. If the room became colder, eventually heavy coats with fur collars would predominate since they’re the best adapted for cold temperatures.

Animals and plants have always evolved this way. No plan. No brain behind it. Just replication with variable results and survival of those which adapt the best. Polar bears are white and fat because that works best where they live, not because a deity decreed, “Let there be fat, white polar bears.” From a gene’s point of view, propogation is the only goal and replication is at the heart of it. DNA had a monopoly on replication until humans came along.

Humans replicate culture. People share ideas and pass them along to others. These snippets of culture, called memes, are modified in the retelling. Just like the coats, the memes with the best fit with current conditions persist. And just like the genes, memes exist only to propogate. So now we have two sorts of evolution going on, the genes and the memes.

The memes are making tremendous advances. What would help memes spread among humankind? Language certainly made it easier to transmit memes from one to another. So did writing. And printing. And the telegraph. And radio. And television. And now the net. The memes are using us to expand their reach.

This gets scary. Memes don’t know when to quit. For a meme, more is always better. We are depleting the earth’s resouces in service of memes. Susan Blackmore suggests we all wake up to what’s going on.

I’ve used the term meme for years, but until hearing a podcast of Blackmore while hiking this morning, I’d never drawn the obvious implication.

Last night I read George Siemens‘ provocative new book-in-progress, Knowing Knowledge. (I highly recommend you do the same if you’d like to savor how what we know ain’t what it used to be.) Mid-morning today, I was reading Gmail and noticed in the margin that George was on-line. We exchanged a few lines of text in GoogleTalk and switched over to GoogeTalk audio.

I suggested the two of discuss what we are thinking of talking about at Online Educa Berlin, which comes up in a couple of weeks. Unlike American conferences, Educa attracts academics, government officials, and business executives: it’s a great mixing bowl. George has the first session Thursday; I’m in the same slot the next day.

Here’s our our impromptu twenty-minute conversation.

Learning Circuits Blog seeks comments on one big issue each month, “The Big Question.” Dave Lee and Tony Karrer have added a twist which has boosted participation. We who answer are requested to write and link posts from our personal blogs. This answers the perennial question for those of us who blog personally: post here or there? We grappled with this when I set up Learning Circuits Blog, and I wish we’d come up with this great compromise.

This month’s question is:

Are ISD / ADDIE / HPT relevant in a world of rapid elearning, faster time-to-performance, and informal learning?

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Learning 2006 Monday morning. Learning 2006 has about 60 sponsors. Along the back wall, each sponsor has a 3′ wide stand which holds their literature. Every vendor has a cell phone, should you want to connect with them. And the CD in the portfolio has 386 pp. of vendor brochures and white papers.

Sleep disruption. It’s a threat to productivity. See the article in HBR. (Or Marcia’s latest article on the Fast Company site.)

Dave Hopla, one of the top coaches on shooting baskets from the foul line, is going to tell us a bit about muscle memory. “How are we doing today?” “Good.” Dave says good is not good enough. You gotta be great. Try to swish every shot.

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Aren’t these great? See ‘em all on Flickr.