Entries Tagged 'general' ↓

I’m the opening act at this event next month in Salzburg, Austria. Me and Dr. Dr. Was-ist-das. They have printed an article I wrote in „Selbstorganisiertes Lernen mit E-Learning. Einblick in die Landschaft der webbasierten Bildungsinnovation. Sammlung von ausgewählten Fach- und Praxisbeiträgen zu interaktiven Lehr- und Lernszenarien.“ Auf Englisch.

Most educators I run into are oblivious to the mind-blowing changes going on in the world.

Educators have traditionally focused on teaching students in a particular discipline. They sought to impart the wisdom in their curriculum. Their goal was to bring order out of chaos. Their program of instruction was determined in advance of its delivery.

In a connected world, disciplines are blinders. Unpredictability makes it futile to plan for every contingency in advance. Rigid rules and scientific laws are too brittle to flex with change.

From now on, the role of education is to provide, maintain, and improve a context that enables students to learn content among themselves. Helping students prepare to adapt to the future is more important than focusing on what has already happened. Students need to learn how to learn. In the words of this conference, they need to become effective self-directed learners.

Hints for Online Collaboration (Free white paper)

Related: Keeping up with the pace of change

Complete our three-minute survey of informal learning and web 2.0 practices. We’ll send you a report of the results.

Internet Time Group hosts in-house workshops for corporate teams. Contact us for further information.

Register for June 2008 sessions in Melbourne and Sydney. For more information, call Blended Learning Solutions at 1300 133 699 in Australia or +613 9857 3758 internationally. Or email us: info@blended.com.au

EVENT OUTCOMES
Participants who actively take part will:

• Understand informal learning concepts and opportunities.
• Know how to incorporate natural learning and the social web at various levels.
• Understand the life cycle of natural learning interventions; maximizing the impact.
• Learn how to make informal learning work
• Become aware of obstacles, measurement, governance and resource requirements.
• Know how to rally enthusiastic support for informal learning initiatives.
• Understand how networks evolve and how common ‘network effects’ change the way business is done.
• Re-invent learning as an active, collaborative, need-driven, social process of adaptation.
• Evaluate various Web 2.0 tools and understand how to make them work to fit with business needs.
• Prioritize informal learning projects, select one, and start it.

The Science of Thinking Smarter
an interview with John J. Medina
Harvard Business Review 2008

This mercifully short interview in HBR reinforced a few neural pathways in my noggin.

Bona fide recorded memory is a very rare thing on this planet. The reason is that the brain isn’t interested in reality; it’s interested in survival. So it will change the perception of reality to stay in the survival mode. Unfortunately, many people still believe that the brain is a lot like a recording device—that learning something is like pushing the “record” button and remembering is simply pushing “playback.” In the real world of the brain, however, that metaphor is an anachronism. The fact is that the actual moment of learning—the moment of fixing a memory—is so complex that we have little understanding of what happens in our brains in those first fleeting seconds. Long-term memory is even worse. That’s because, much like cement, memory takes a long time to settle into its permanent form. While it’s busy hardening, human memory can very easily be modified, as traces of earlier memories leave their imprint upon it. All of which is to say that our understanding of reality is approximate at best.

Witch doctors who claim to understand the brain and prove it with parlor tricks need to read this article.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for showing that when people learn something it’s because the wiring of their brains changes. You can test sea slugs or human beings, and you will come up with the same results—any creature that ends up learning something does so because of physical changes in its neural architecture. This is astonishing. We used to think that we were born with all the neurons we were ever going to get and that it would be hard, if not impossible, to change them beyond a certain age. But it’s been quite clear for a while now that the physical changes neurons undergo when learning something happen to anybody’s brain at any age. The brain remains quite plastic until we die. We are lifelong learners. That’s excellent news indeed.

In short, neurons that fire together, wire together.

I wish the laymen who talk about the amigdyla, the corpus collosum, or the frontal lobes would just stop. As if they think labeling a dozen pieces of the most complex organ is the universe is meaningful. Science is still in the dark about brain basics.

I’ve heard people claim that tests such as Myers-Briggs are based on “sound neurological principles”—that brain science proves their validity, or even that these tests were designed with brain science in mind. The fact is that most of these tests—including IQ tests—were developed long before we knew very much about how the brain processes anything.

My fellow facilitator put me on the spot in yesterday’s session. Didn’t I find the Myers-Briggs instrument useful? Hmmm… Anything that gets you reflect on the nature of others is probably useful. But saying you can never change your type is wrong-headed. The the terminology is a direct takeaway from Jung. And how about learning styles, certainly they can help us improve learning? Well, no again. This brain stuff is tricky.

Saul Wurman recounts the story that “I used to think my brain was the most important organ in the body. Then I paused to ask ‘Wait a minute. Who’s telling me that?’”

At Web 2.0 Expo, a fellow turned me on to a service called WOT (web of trust) that warns you away from virus and malware sites, among others. I installed it and forgot it was there…until I was on an innocuous looking shareware site and received this alert:

Enough said.

IBM, Oracle, Yahoo!, and Microsoft (ominously close to Yahoo!) had big booths. I It’s ironic to see traditional bloatware providers claim to be loose, flexible, and fleet of foot. Uh huh. Remember Steve Martin in the early days of Saturday Night Live? “Let’s get small.” Scores of tiny companies, most of them with odd-ball names, were doing the booth thing. It’s hard to tell some of them apart. By the end of the year, half of these guys will no longer exist.

In the “Long Tail Pavillion” for small companies I found a some technologies that fit well with the concept of impromtu learning. OpenaCircle is a lightweight collaboration platform which has just what our Cafe group has been looking for: simultaneous video conferencing. CamWii is a very slick screen-sharing app. No client software required. Blazingly fast. Apps like this can support over-the-shoulder learning: live screenshow. I hope I get into CamWii’s beta program before leading workshops on natural learning to Australia in June.

WOT is short for Web of Trust. WOT offers an internet reputation scorecard that pops up when you’re visiting sites. “wOT is a free browser security tool that warns the user about risky websites that try to scam visitors, deliver malware, or send spam. The company, Against Intuition, was founded by a couple of Finnish grad student a couple of years ago. I’m going to test drive this one.

I picked up a couple of interesting O’Reilly books that didn’t feature the usual menagerie on the cover: Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change and Amy Shuen’s Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide. I love most O’Reilly pubs but wonder how long they can continue proliferating new series without watering down the brand. Knowing Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground: The Missing Manual. Some of the O’Reilly digital photography books are spectacular.

As the day was coming to an end, Chris Heuer motioned for me to join him in front of the cameras for a live videochat on UstreamTV. His questions punched my mental hot spots, and we had a rollicking good time. (Check back tomorrow for the full rant. How are people going to cope with mind-blowing change? Unlearning. Visualization. Mindful flexibility. What did I think of this conference? This is not a conference; it’s a ten-ring circus. Normal people (i.e., not us) would have a hard time figuring out whether the activities in the Blogtropolus room were real or science fiction.

My early warning system is flashing, signaling that it’s time for business people to play a new game or take early retirement. Why the urgency? Because The object of the game is survival, and that requires crossing the great divide between where we are now and where we need to be a year from now.

We’ve lived on the left side of the divide for centuries. Enormous successes have lulled us into a complacent rhythm. We have wrought miracles: electrification, electronics, bio-tech, computers, television, mass production, biotech, trains, planes, and automobiles: you name it. I sent a letter by FedEx yesterday; scan - blip - look-up - and it will be on the other side of the country tomorrow; I shook my head and said to no one in particular, “I’m amazed that this works.”

Nonetheless, it’s time to move on. Everything is going faster, swinging further out of normal limits, and behaving erratically. We’re ripping along so fast that the wheels are about to fall off. Think demise of the planet, using up irreplaceable resources, turning up the heat, weapons of mass destruction (unlike Iraq, we have real ones), tribal and religious hatred, etc., etc., etc. This is entropy.

You cannot get to the other side incrementally. It’s the old conundrum of not being able to solve a problem when trapped in the same frame that created it. This is a phase change. You only get through it by taking a death-defying leap of imagination and courage. No matter how much you improve a motorcycle, you are not going to turn it into an airplane.

All is for naught if we can’t get to the other side. Sure, the lug-nut businesses will help keep the wheels on a little longer (and put food on the table, too), but the main event will be preparing people and organizations to take the big leap.

Not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a college student asking about informal learning. I am generous in answering thoughtful inquiries, but I do not intend to rob students of learning experiences by doing their thinking for them.

Teachers give assignments to help students learn. Cutting and pasting the results of Google searches until they resemble a paper you might have written saves you time and effort at the expense of your learning. Learning requires reflection. This takes more effort the first few times you try it but saves time in the long run. When you learn, from there on you’ll be building on what you already know instead of continually reinventing the wheel. Unless you’re preparing for a career doing simplistic searches on the net, don’t game the system.

If you are a student, study. Getting answers is easy. Asking the right questions is hard. Read How to Ask Questions the Smart Way by Eric Raymond and Rich Moen. It taught me enough social engineering to get better answers quicker and with less waste.

This arrived in my morning email:

Hi my name is ___, i am a 3rd year student at ____ University studying educational studies i graduate this summer, my final assignment module is informal learning and i have to write a report on the evaluation of an effective informal learning context for learning, included observations and research methods. I was researching and came across your website and you seem extremely knowledgeable in this area, i would be extremely grafeful if you could suggest any interesting ideas, or previously research simliar to this because i am struggling to come up with a creative idea.

This email is more cordial than most but I don’t know what she’s really asking for. A creative idea? How about “What have I learned outside of class and what did it get me?”

Over the weekend, I had visited the wiki for a course on informal learning that the instructor had invited me to review. Here’s the first entry on informal learning:

If Cross suggests that informal learning should be learned through doing then what is the purpose in publishing a book on the subject? Wouldn’t a more effective way of disseminating the information be through a web site or similar sort of collaborative learning tool that everyone could add to? Maybe that’s what the website Informl was supposed to be. When I visisted the site, however, I was unable to efficiently find any information about informal learning and some parts of the web site returned an error message. I think wikis are a pretty good tool for informal learning - they allow collaboration and also are easily searchable. Maybe this should have been the format of the informl website instead.

Having once been a wise-ass college student myself, I don’t mind the snarky attitude. I do find it troubling when a student makes specious observations that end up inhibiting learning. Hence, I responded:

Permit me to offer a few suggestions for navigating the informl website. Look in the righthand column for the link to my wiki. From there, click informal learning, and you’ll find a YouTube explanation, a summary of informal learning, a poster about informal learning, the introduction to the book, lists of references, the first three chapters in their entirety, links to eight articles, descriptions of informal learning tools, and a list of books that influenced my thinking. Most of my major web pages contain a search engine for ten years of my blog posts, a link to articles, and a link to a discussion community. When you’re surfing one of the oldest sites about learning on the web, expect a few 404s; link rot happens.

Frankly, I am amazed you could visit the site and not find informal learning. Where were you looking?

Being a champion of informal learning doesn’t make me think that formal study should be lackadaisical.

Join the Fieldbook project.

Esse quam videri, Latin for “To be rather than to seem,” is the motto of North Carolina and my advice to CLOs. Presenters at training conferences say you can earn a seat at the table by speaking the language of business, expressing your ROI in hard dollars, and relating your learning initiatives to business goals. They are wrong.

Many training managers try to have it both ways. They pepper their speech with business buzzwords but deep inside beats the heart of a trainer. When push comes to shove, they prefer instruction to self-discovery and instructional design to business strategy.

Speakers at training conferences mouth the mantras they imagine to be politically correct among senior managers. They revisit the same old stories again and again, as if repetition makes them useful. The generic version goes like this:

In today’s fast-paced business environment, it’s more important than ever not only to stay attuned to organizational needs but also to heed what’s going on in the greater world outside. Leaders (like you) need insight and foresight to recognize the signs of change, understand broader trends, make enlightened decisions, and innovate to create competitive advantage.

Continue reading →

When it comes to visual thinking, they don’t come any better than Dave Gray.

Don’t go to his new site for the standard 20-second hit-and-run skim. The beauty of the design and clarity of message will force you to stay a while. Check out From Presentations to Conversations. This is informal learning in the flesh, and the opening photo has nothing to do with my admiration for Dave’s work on this: