Entries Tagged '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.

I was reading the collaboration section of a magazine geared to IT professionals when I came upon an article titled Cat-Herding Nightmare.

The first paragraph echoes the Web 2.0-is-good-for-you party line I’ve heard again and again this week:

Web 2.0 collaboration tools are irresistible to end users: They’re easy to set up and use and can be accessed from anywhere. Employees can upload or create documents, spreadsheets, wikis, and blogs, then invite co-workers and partners to access, edit, and download content. These apps often include productivity enhancers such as search and tagging. And not surprisingly, vendors are encouraging the trend–Microsoft and IBM have added wikis and blogging capabilities to enterprise apps including SharePoint and Lotus Quickr, while Google and upstarts like Socialtext, PBwiki, and Jive Software are luring corporate users with freebie accounts and dead-simple deployment. provision users in minutes, pay with discretionary funds–and never make a single call to IT.

Warning to IT folks: Mayday! Mayday! Turf is being threatened. Put up the shields. Ready the cannon. Mayday! Mayday1

All these wonderful benefits. Too bad there’s a dark side.

Sadly, all IT gets out of the deal is a big fur ball as it struggles to organize corporate content run amok. The potential for exposure of sensitive information or theft of intellectual property runs high, as do concerns about noncompliance with corporate or third-party requirements as end users scatter sensitive information around the Internet. If the company gets tangled in litigation, data relevant to discovery requests may be lurking unknown on third-party servers, exposing the organization to financial or legal sanctions.

Implication: IT can’t trust those pesky users. Possible solution: Get the knock-off versions of web tools provided by IBM, EMC, BEA, and Microsoft. That lets IT continue its battle to maintain control, even if it means dumping all those great benefits. The article notes that the products from the big boys…

…also come with the downsides of enterprise software–longer and more costly deployment than software as a service, and longer lag between upgrades. Enterprises are unlikely to dip their toes into collaboration through a six-figure software deployment. It’s not uncommon to find companies using SharePoint and third-party SaaS products.

The article concludes that IT needs to keep ahead of technologies and provide services before users demand them. That would be great but I am skeptical. IT has rarely come down from its me-first perch. Why should we expect it to stop now? It’s easier for IT to focus on the damage workers might do rather than the benefits an open business gives its stakeholders. Should we really let IT make the tradeoff between the hair-ball messiness of web 2.0 and connecting with the world in order to stay in business? That’s not really an IT decision, is it? Nah, we won’t get fooled again.

I’ve look at this from both sides now, it’s up and down and still somehow, I don’t think we should be picking sides at all. IT should support the business, not the other way around.

Related:
How it’s going to be

I test-drove a BMW 128 this afternoon. Costs about $30,000. I think I’ll buy the coupe. Any car-enthusiast readers have an opinion on this one?

Sales pitch video
Vrrooom

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.

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.

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

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A blessing in disguise: My laptop had 4% battery left when I arrived at Orlando airport to come home on Wednesday. No reason to lug it around. It went into my suitcase and rode home in the belly of the plane. Consequently, instead of writing a description of the last two days on the way back, I read a few more chapters of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, inadvertantly giving myself more time for reflection.

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At Gnomedex, I’d talked with Fred Fabro, president and CEO of Vancouver-based Qumana. We talked training stuff but Fred’s company was selling some blogging tool I didn’t quite understand. Today I came upon Qumana while searching Del.icio.us for a tool to streamline by blog-posting, and I didn’t realize it came from the same place until just now. (This is my first entry using Qumana.)

I love WordPress for blogging except for the somewhat funky input screen. Every now and then I’d push the wrong button after entering HTML and lose edits. Also,  WordPress sometimes wanted to show me who’s boss by inserting extra tags into my posts or refusing to accept lines of scripts it deemed inappropriate.

Here’s the default screen. I just grabbed it with the PrintScreen key, resized it with my photo editor, and uploaded it with Qumana. I’m a very visual blogger. Qumana has already won my heart. It’s going to save me hours of uploading and then keying in URLs of pictures.

It’s also a snap to switch from WYSIWYG to Source and back to WYSIWYG. There’s a spell-check built in. I am loving this.

I suppose I should see what this post looks like before gushing on.

(Fingers crossed.)

… Later. That not only worked. It also makes corrects a breeze. This is a dynamite product. (Did I mention that it’s free?)

TagJag.com (Chris Pirillo’s tag searcher/aggregator)

peopleaggregator.net (build your own networks!)

attentiontrust.org, inforouter (pay attention)

bluedot.us (what can I learn from my friends?)

pixsy.com (image and video aggregator — tells if it’s copyrighted)

farecast.com (an awesome airfar tracking site — only Boston and Seattle now)

melodeo.com (podcasts on your phone; will be huge in China)

blubrry.com (publish your podcast but keep it yours)

www.pud.com (from the guy who brought you F*cked Company)

bLaugh.com lampoons bloggers

Training Directors Forum 2006 took place at the Desert Springs Marriott in Palm Desert (nextdoor to Palm Springs) in the high desert about two hours east of Los Angeles. This is a wrap-up post.
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