DevLearn & KM World

eLearning Guild DevLearn

Tuesday morning, November 6, 2007

This morning I looked outside my hotel window and saw San Jose city employees putting down snow in the Cesar Chavez Plaza in front of my hotel. Snow!

The snow turned out to be white felt but that’s the best you’re going to get in San Jose.

I’m registered at both KM World and DevLearn. It’s a five-minute walk from DevLearn (at the Fairmont) to KM World (at the San Jose Cenvention Center). This is stream-of-consciousness blogging, so forgive any confusing transitions.

Sir Ken Robinson

Wonderful presentation by a wise man who is also a wise guy. Great comedic timing.

Las Vegas. Venetian: inside or out. I’ve been to Venice and the Las Vegas version is better.

Show opened with two guys juggling chainsaws. They originally were eight.

Vegas: no reason for it to be there. No harbor, no bend in the river… It’s only there because of our imagination.

Power of imagination. The most important aspect of humanity. We depend on it for our very survival.

We are caught up in a revolution. A seismic shift in culture. In a revolution, the things you take for granted are turned on their head.

We must think differently about our children. How many have five-year old kids? They are just entering school and will retire about 2070.

We have to behave differently. Many of our political and corporate structures are not up to the task.

Most people have no concept of how powerful they are. California spends about $3.5 billion on the university system and $9 billion on its prison system.

Out of Our Minds: Learning To Be Creative (“It’s a great book,” says the author.)

Creativity can be made systematic. We can address its development in a purposeful way. Your creativity? Vote 1 to 10. Median of the audience: 8. Your intelligence? Rate 1 to 10: 7.5. Three-quarters rated themselves differently on creative and intelligent. But creative & intelligence are totally connected. Divergent thinking.

The Decline of Genius. 98% of kids think themselves genius. Five years later, 32%. Five years thereafter, 10%. This is “education.” (As adults, the number drops to 2%.)They’ve spent ten years hearing that there’s one answer. Don’t peak. Don’t cheat. This is systematic, not deliberate. It’s due to the culture of education.

Corporation and education mucked up with industrial-age mindset.

Teenagers don’t wear wristwatches. Time is everywhere for them. Or, as Sir Ken’s daughter said, “Wristwatches only do one thing. What’s with that?” Kids have a dozen windows at once. Sir Ken looks at one window at a time; and he’s proud of it.

Technology is whatever came out since you were born.

Computer will be have the intelligence of a human baby by 2010. This means that it will be able to change its own operating system.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. hard to know what it is because its taken for granted.

Culture and the senses. five senses + one (balance). pain. touch.

Take a child into a garden and point at the moon. She looks at the moon. Take your dog into the garden and point at the moon. he looks at your finger.

We take our intelligence for granted.

I ran from the Fairmont, past The Tech, to the San Jose Convention Center to attend KM World

KM World, Dave Snowden

knowledge is context dependent
crews, not teams
what works in one place flops in others
knowledge is content dependent
“worse performer” takes too much time but really answers callers’ question
solved problem by taking a few minutes, saves millions of pounds

Where is KM? At the end of its life-cycle. Shrinking in industry. “When you can’t sell it to corporate any more, sell it to the government as industry bet practice.”

focus should be improving the way people make decisions
creating the conditions for information
increasing recognition that we deal with complex systems

complex adaptive systems - “non causal” system. Taoism has roots in this
from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation
fundamental attribution error - finding causality where it doesn’t exist
decentralized cognition - use network to make decisions

humans evolved as pattern recognition & blending intelligence; they are not information processors & critically there are limited to semantic analysis

evolutionary psychology/anthropology
role of ritual, natural numbers & the role of narrative including the fragmented nature of human knowledge

RAHS Software
Singapore building on Dave’s work with DARPA
flat, narrative-based fragmented database
collective expert knowledge captured in fragmented form within models
collective intelligence, bringing diversity into pay in decision making (not a prediction market)

Dave: put together database in the same form as people will use it; hence, fragments

sensing patterns in the metadata first

…interview someone twice and you’ve so shaped the interviewer that he only sees what is expected

Need now much stronger than need later.

Scenarios are blinders

sense-scape: people more likely to change from fragments

moving away from SMEs
from structured information to naturally oral history

habit not rule-compliance in health and safety
people learn more from experience

battlefield KM: Patton’s brain

integration of social

lessons learning

back to devlearn

Mark Oehlert, DAU
Angels on the Head of a Pin or I Bet I Can Shove a Whole LMS…

Wow! A presentation where Mark is going to tell people to shove their LMS. Bummer. The session description was truncated. The ..Shove a Whole LMS on a USB Drive

FWe need to unpack ‘mobile’
doesn’t mean devices…it means learners
doesn’t mean always connected

Mark’s work environment (his applications and data) is on his USB. Gartner refers to this as Portable Personality. He runs Firefox at work even though DAU doesn’t support it.

How: U3, Ceedo, MojoPac, Portable Apps.

U3 is Windoze only. Ceedo is downloadable.

Mojopac. creates a virtual machine. Now requires admin rights?

Portable Apps. easiest, free, no special software needed

…and back to KM World

David Gurteen
How do we make people do things?

“We just created a KM system. How can we make them use it?”
How did you involve the users? “We didn’t. We didn’t have time.”
On time, within budget, totally ineffective.

Need to work with people rather than do things to them

www.alfiekohn.org

Punished by Rewards
rewards punish
rewards rupture relations - people will conceal problems from their manager…
rewards ignore reason - ignores the complexities
rewards deter risk-taking - less likely to take risks; #1 casualty is creativity
rewards undermine interest - love what you do. rewards are controlling (manipulation?)

John Holt Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how.

If they are given access to enough of the world…
David Weinberger: For all our knowledge, we have no idea what we’re talking about.

Anthony de Mello: The only way to change is to change ourselves.

Great informal discussion on “how do you make someone do something?” and what’s the role of rewards therein? My take is that you don’t “make” people do anything; the rewards that make a difference are emotional. Amygdala learning.

Dave Pollard
Social Tools & Knowledge Sharing

Social apps changing fast but coming along very slowly, especially since business is built on relationships.

Dave recently attended a conference of Fortune 500 executives who didn’t understand wikis at all.

Of five KM value propositions, the only one that will keep KM out of the dust bin: improve connectivity, collaboration and knowledge transfer (strengthen relationships)

Four types:

connect people, e.g. LinkedIn. InFlow for SNA, Rob Cross: quality of relationships,
DodgeBall: proximity detector system, encourages serendipitous meetings; NTag - find like minds

SNA/Sensor/GIS Mash-ups

social publishing & info-sharing. blogs & podcasts. (some companies assign a junior staffer to an SME specifically to post her knowledge on a blog) electronic newsletter substitute.

del.icio.us (in some areas, a del.icio.us feed is the best source of recent information), Flickr, SlideShare

meme diggers, e.g. Digg (sometimes tyranny of the crowds)

ThisNext - sort of Consumer Reports for things (as Digg is for ideas)

FaceBook. “kind of a lazy’s person’s blog for people who don’t have time to write.” letting people control their own pages on the intranet will be important

collaboration and communication
FluWiki now the best source of info on influenza
wikis: quick, ugly.
forums: Yahoo Groups

BaseCamp. can be overblown. one outfit had 300+ communities, only 9 of which were active (and being supported by a fulltime staff of five)

mindmaps: FreeMind. some places the way meetings are documented.

video conferencing: Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting

mash-ups
e.g. Google Earth + disease outbreaks
home monitoring

keys to success
experiment with pilot groups who ‘get it’
use simple, ubiquitous technologies
focus on real-time and just-in-time applications
use stories and future state visions to persuade CxOs

risks
security paranoia — mock it up on the net
lack of urgency
need for trust among network members

Email: I only use email when I have to communication with the Man. (IM instead.)

Richard McDermott
The Tragedy of the Knowledge Commons

Richard@mcdermottconsuliting.com

version control
now mobilized, virtual meetings
global

complicated work
lots more info available

more knowledge but less time to read it
little mind-to-mind communication

[usual recitation of knowledge explosion, population, etc goes here]

“It’s so tempting to look at your email every time the bell rings.”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Different crop of vendors

Evening