This time next month I will be in Sao Paolo. This will be my first trip to Brazil. I’m looking for innovative companies to work with on informal learning and innovation. Or well-heeled friends (sorry I neglected you until now). Or advice on what I can’t leave without doing.

Time after time in my recent workshops on web-enabled informal learning, I found myself using my own sites as examples of learning technologies. For example, we’d walk through the Informal Learning blog to look at an RSS feed, an internal search engine, scanning the 100 most recent posts, a Creative Commons license, and so on.

I began showing things like my research tools page, which has always been public but was hidden in plain sight. Previously hard-to-find articles on my wiki have morphed into leave-behind reference material, for example, Learning in Business or Seminal Documents.

The focus of my workshops is shifting, too. Two years ago, the focus was on how to apply social software for learning. That’s still an issue, but what’s front and center now is helping participants sell the concepts they’ve learned when they return to their organizations. When you’re getting ready to sell your boss on a new approach, you can use all the ammunition in the arsenal, and that means I need to make things easier to find. Thus, I’ve been darting around my blogs, wikis, and other online oddments adding labels and links.

This is a tough exercise. There’s a decade of writing, news, pointers, cases, jokes, and suggestions floating around out there. And of course, I am accustomed to using my own hacks for finding what I’m looking for. I don’t notice when a sign is missing.

Help me out here: when you end up in a blind alley or bump into something counter-intuitive here, drop me a note so I can fix it. Every major page has a button you can use for that: CONTACT

Here’s a good starting point.

Our world is going to hell in a hand basket. The rich get richer, the air becomes more foul, soul-less corporations run everything that’s not under the thumb of the banks, resources are scarce, and people are running scared. It was wonderfully refreshing to spend the past 24 hours with a guy who doesn’t just bitch and moan about it. He’s working on an alternative.

Doug Carmichael is a professor, consultant, author, consultant, artist, and psychotherapist who is out to make the world a better viable place. Doug proposes a new world order that is humane and just, a vision he calls GardenWorld. His draft book on the topic is on the web.

The image of the future and the promise of progress have languished, under the pressures to adapt to “modernism”, through a failure of imagination, leadership, and resources. The promise of a better life after WW2 has not been realized. Progress for all turned into privilege for ever fewer in a great game of economic musical chairs.

The economy is making the rich richer and the poor poorer in almost every country (including the Middle East, creating the conditions for chaos there), and that the legal structures of corporations, along with the computer enabled mischief by financial institutions are a major factor;

The fact of global climate change is also now accepted, realizing that its changes are a mixture of natural and man made actions. But the actionable policies we need to make this livable with grace and compassion have not been architected by the politicians;

The idea and practice of democracy have been corrupted and nothing yet replaces them;

Security in a crowded world is better achieved by diplomacy and pinpoint police professionalism than by militarism, but above all by worldwide fairness and compassion;

All these problems affect the local quality of life.

When not on the Stanford campus, Doug works from a delightful house on the Russian River and a railroad passenger car by the side of the road in Duncans Mills, California. Both are lined with books. Running my eyes over the titles brought back memories of philosophers, historians, and humanists long crowded out of my thinking. This was a delight, although I’m sure Doug tired of my broken record response to his query “Are you familiar with the work of [fill-in-the-blank] ?” Most of the time, I was not.

Environment is vital for thinking big thoughts, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Before heading to the railroad car, Doug and I chatted on the deck below his garden as the Russian River flowed by.

Last night we were swapping thoughts about the greed of corporations, the goodness of gardens, the power of connections, and so on. Two scenes from the bookshelf across from us: a book titled You’ve Got to Read This and a binder marked Now!

The lessons of the last day are still sinking in. I learned a lot from our encounter. Over lunch I concluded:

All reality is virtual.

On Bastille Day (July 14), I’ll be attending the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View from 1:00 pm to 9:00 pm. (Kooky hours because the event is co-located with Sydney, Australia). 

Topics include future of t.v. and video, future of privacy and personal advertising, global media strategies. and  future of journalism.

Price: $149 . Cheap. Three times that if you’re attending in Sydney. (This is an Aussie-heavy bash.)

Coming from Berkeley? I’ll be happy to give you a ride.

In this month’s Atlantic, Nicholas Carr shows us his thinking has not improved since his lame-brained diatribe that claimed “IT doesn’t matter” in Harvard Business Review several years ago. This time around, he blames the net in general and Google in particular for putting his mind in such a jumpy state that he can no longer read books cover to cover.

Carr accuses the Googleplex of masterminding a plot to Taylorize the world’s culture. He says Sergei and Larry think humans would be better off were our brains replaced by artificial intelligence. “In Google’s words, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation.”

Carr confuses the ease of search with the result of what search finds. When Google delivers my Zen koan of the day in seconds, my contemplation is no less arduous than if I found the koan in an old-fashioned book.

Speaking of books, maybe Carr’s inability to concentrate is due to the quality of what he reads. These “Business Bestsellers” are a sad commentary on the intellectual prowess of American businesspeople:

I am partway through Here Comes Everybody, The Lucifer Principle, Smart World, The Design of Future Things, Subject to Change, Weird Ideas that Work, Dreaming in Code, and Out of Our Minds. And I’m loving it. Today i decided to lock in another week of reading and reflection. I think I’ll give up reading The Atlantic.

Mu.

First of all, I do not respond personally to unsolicited email. Spam is generally an intrusion on my privacy, a time-waster, and a general nuisance.

Before inquiring about my needs, do your homework. When someone, perhaps this is you, tells me they want to understand my needs, I expect them to begin by finding out a few things for themselves from openly available information. I started blogging my professional activities in the last century. I have published hundreds of articles on learning and development. I have written several books on the subject. My work is close to being an open book. Read it before we talk. You will find that:

• Internet Time Group does not purchase training programs, learning management systems, or advice.
• Internet Time Group is not interested in paying to attend your event. People pay me to speak, not vice-versa.
• I do not endorse products I know nothing about. I find no value in swapping links. I do not accept advertising.

Please remove my name from your mail list. If I need your services, I’ll find you.

jay

Effectiveness Column in June 2008 CLO magazine

Malleability, multimedia, and more

CLOs know that extracting meaning from growing mountains of information is tougher than ever before. The walls between disciplines are falling. Specialization, knowing more and more about less and less, is no longer an option. Everything is connected to everything else.

Reality is an endless stream of knowledge, culture and ideas that flows faster and faster. Traditional books are snapshots of that stream. The swifter the stream, the shorter the life of the book. A book is an event. We need a process that outlasts the moment — a movie in place of a photograph.

“I AM OUT OF TIME. You bought the beta edition of this book. Things change so fast that all books are dated by the time they are published. The world is moving too fast for closure. Our lives are in beta.”

So began my 2006 book, Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance. The day it was published, my ideas were frozen in time, inert and unyielding to change. My author journey from outline to printed book took the better part of a year.

Something’s wrong here.

Books have been a mainstay of self-directed learning for centuries. CLOs may not break out the cost of books in the budget, but they assuredly invest heavily in them.

Books are not the ideal way to present subjects that change rapidly. Before I’m accused of calling for the death of books, permit me to say that works of art are timeless. Books such as Moby Dick, The Little Engine That Could, Catcher in the Rye, and David Copperfield are unbeatable. These novels and stories are whole unto themselves. That’s not the case for most nonfiction.

Wake-up call to the publishing industry: Why don’t you produce books that are current? Where are the pictures and maps? Why is the text all one size and color? Why don’t you provide updates on the Web? Why does it take a year to turn out a book? Why do most books come out as if one size fits all? Why don’t you encourage conversation with authors? How long do you expect to remain in business if you continue to act like fossils?

The publishing industry hardly has changed at all since the first paperback was printed in Venice. A page from the 1493 edition of Virgil’s Aeneid looks very similar to a page from The Social Life of Information printed 500 years later: rectangles of monochromatic text, no illustrations, page numbers in the corner and 1-inch margins all around.

A study by the Jenkins Group, a custom book publishing firm, found that:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.

• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

Increasingly, people hunt and gather what they want to read. Today’s activist readers pluck information from the blogosphere and YouTube and their friends on Facebook and MySpace.

To prosper in times ahead, we need to re-conceptualize our relationship with books, the role of authors and how to make books better. The shorthand for what I have in mind is the “un-book.” Here are some of the characteristics of un-books:

• Un-books are guidebooks for knowledge explorers navigating the flow of the news, information, sound bites, observations, debate, hacks, diatribes and memes that are the Web. Un-books invite participation. Participants choose how deeply they want to explore a topic and can remix content to create the learning experience they seek. Un-books link to the flow of knowledge, not sanctified facts. Treat that knowledge as community property, and the community will maintain and improve it. Many authors may write guidebooks to the same stream of knowledge, and a single author may create many un-books from a single stream.

• Un-books are inherently multimedia. One of those media is paper. Paper is portable, familiar and easy to annotate. A hard-copy book conveys authority.

A spokesman for Alpo dog food long ago said the product was so good that he fed it to his own dogs. Using one’s own products is known as “eating the dog food.” In lieu of writing a book, I am going on the dog-food diet. Any CLOs want to join me?

Around five this evening, I opened an email that read,

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:56:57 -0700
From: Stewart Brand <sb@gbn.org>
Subject: [SALT] Paul Ehrlich TONIGHT June 27 (for forwarding)
To: salt@list.longnow.org

How does cultural evolution work? How should its
dynamics relate to the processes of biological
evolution? The accord or discord between the two
great evolutions determines how the world got
where it is, and where we are going.

“The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the
Environment,” Paul Ehrlich, Cowell Theater, Fort
Mason, San Francisco, 7pm, TONIGHT, June 27. The
talk starts promptly at 7:30pm.

Why not? So I took BART into the City, caught a bus to the Wharf, walked to Ft Mason, and listened to 90 minutes of Paul Ehrlich and Steward Brand. Ehrlich, who looks great for someone who has taught at Stanford for 49 years, was Brand’s ecology professor. Ehrlich came up with the term co-evolution; Brand named his magazine Co-evolution Quarterly.

What made humans the dominant animal on earth? It helped that a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. Otherwise, said Ehrlich, we’d have a bunch of velocoraptors sitting here. Having eyes in front for binocular vision and fingers for grabbing food were handy. Why did we go bi-pedal? No one knows.

What truly distinguishes us from other creatures in language with syntax. About 2.2 million years ago, culture began evolving. Culture is non-genetic information that is passed from one generation to the next. No cultural Darwin has appeared to explain cultural evolution.

50,000 years ago, humans were using bone needles and stone tools. Our brains haven’t changed much since.

10,000 years ago, the invention of agriculture created surpluses which enabled specialization, and this led to hierarchies, cities, and science.

Writing freed us from reliance on internal memory. The industrial revolution tapped into stored solar energy.

And here we are today, wrecking the climate and toxifying the planet, perhaps already beyond the point of no return.

Climate change spells re-distribution of water, and that means shifts in the food supply. The problem is not the rising sea-level: you will be able to out-walk the advancing tide. The problem is not running out of fossil fuel. The problem is running out of environment.

Sadly, cultural evolution (for example, ethics) has not kept pace with technological advances. If you want to know the state of the earth’s life support systems, walk into your bathroom, turn the handle on the porcelaine device, and watch where the water goes. And there are no silver bullets.

Can you believe that presidential candidates can call for a moratorium on gas taxes that would increase consumption? Americans have a low reputation in the world right now but we still garner respect. Imagine if the president were to say that we’re going to increase the taxes on gasoline until it’s as expensive as bottled water? Cut consumption. But the working poor need to get to work, don’t they? Use the new-found tax revenue to eliminate regressive taxes like FICA.

What accounts for human differences? We don’t understand. The Dionne quintuplets were practically raised in a lab yet all turned out different. Chang and Eng, the “Siamese Twins,” were as different as night and day, one being sober and the other a drunk. It might be that people just don’t want to be the same; Chang and Eng were exerting their individuality. And there’s that nine months in the womb, when the fetus can identify its mother’s voice and hormones are swirling all around.

I told Stewart I was in his debt, for my un-book was modeled on the whole earth catalog, and the meme of “access to tools” was as powerful as ever.

A bunch of us dropped by a reception at the offices of the Long Now Foundation. The components of the 10,000 Year Clock remind me of industrial age looms and steam engine parts.

Skip this one if you are tired of hearing me point out the customer service fiascoes of major corporations. My question to my bank:

[snip] Why are you bouncing my charges? What can I do to stop this? Is there any way to speak with a human at BofA or have you gone 100% robot?

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A relic from East Germany