Entries Tagged 'informl2' ↓

In January, Donald Clark, Nigel Paine, and I led discussions on informal learning and web 2.0 at Learning Technologies 2008 in London.

This is my first mash-up of conference presentations. I encourage you to steal the concept: life’s too short for  linear video. Boil it down to essence. It’s not that tough to do.

What do you think?

My wife broke her wrist playing tennis this morning. Friends who drove her to the hospital called me to come to her side and to rescue her car from the parking garage. I decided to take the bus. It was my first local bus ride in years.

I went on line to check the bus schedule. The transit agency pointed me to a site called Google Transit that combined a local street map, bus routes, and a bus schedule. This was a mash-up: a consolidation of data from several sources.

Upon entering my home address and the name of the hospital, I received a personalized itinerary that suggested what bus to catch and when, where to transfer to another bus and how long the wait would be, a map of the route, and instructions for the 3-minute walk to the hospital emergency room.

Until recently, it would not have been possible to pull this information together on the fly. Now even non-programmers can assemble a mash-up because APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, enable the data sets to speak a common language.

My automated bus itinerary saved me time and hassle. It saved me an unnecessary taxi ride.

Whenever I see workers trying to coordinate information from different sources, I wonder how much wasted effort a mash-up might eliminate.

The message from the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo: We are at an inflection point in human history. Doug Engelbart’s vision of harnessing our collective intelligence is unfolding. We’ve only just begun. The turning tide is frightening or wonderful; that’s a matter of perspective.

Tim O’Reilly told us Web 2.0 is becoming the platform for everything. It’s an amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence. It is turning the enterprise inside out. It is the platform beneath a new way of living. We are at a turning point — a huge change in the way the world works.

Tim retold a great story from Clay Shirky. IBM’s Thomas Watson predicted the world would need about five computers. Clay points out Watson was wrong. Not in the direction you think. Watson overstated the number of computers by four. It’s all one cloud. Web 2.0 is evolving into cloud computing and the internet operating system. Ambient computing is on the way but it rides on mobile phones and sensors, not computers. It converging into one platform for the world.

Participatory is too uninspiring a word to describe what’s going on. Since the middle of the last century, we’ve received a gift: discretionary time. Confused, we didn’t make good use of it. When we weren’t taking instructions (at what we call “work”), we became accustomed to doing nothing: sitting back and letting the world go by. Watching the idiot box. From now on, we have to make better use of this gift of time. We must build and share; we must co-create the world we live in. This is a mind-blower on the order of the Industrial Revolution.

In that revolution, abandoning country life to live in cities and working in factories instead of farms put people into a state of perpetual disorientation. One thing enabled them to cope with the crisis: gin. People escaped mental chaos by becoming blotto. Gin pushcarts rolled down the streets. Swilling gin by the tankard blocks out everything.

Clay Shirky told us about one about a four-year old girl searching for something around and behind the family television. Her father asked what she was doing. She asked, “Where is the mouse?” To a four-year old, a television without a mouse is broken. If something doesn’t include you, it may not be worth sitting still for.

What are we doing collectively? Instead of drinking gin. We’re looking for the mouse.

The Blogopolis room here accommodates about a hundred people. As I write this, three or four huddles of them are recording interviews. I am sitting on the floor, beside a large screen. Three people in front of me are waving their arms in the air; they are air-bowling with Wii handhelds; the screen is their virtual bowling alley.

This is the blogging room, a freebie for people who self-identify as bloggers. You want to do something besides sit in a chair listening? This is the place. To the right, several 1′ high robotic dinosaurs are shmoozing. To my left, two people are slumped over the backs of chairs, receiving massages. Scoble’s here. Stowe Boyd is here. Dan Farber sits on the other side of the screen writing a story. A Finnish guy tells me about a web service that warns you of dangerous websites while you are on the net. I mention that for most corporate leaders, this room looks like an outtake from a science fiction flick.

As the keynotes conclude, the Blogopolis is shoulder to shoulder. Soon, people will be fanning out to continue the Expo 2.0 Expo conversation in bars and restaurants. A mash-up of Twitter, Upcoming, and an interactive map will enable them to locate friends via cell phone. They can also get a map — and a report on how big a crowd is at the bar. That’s part of the message: the formal event closes down for the day but the conversation continues on. Care for a pint of gin?

Dorothy Parker:

I like to have a martini
Two at the very most
After three I’m under the table
After four I’m under the host.

Gin is not my drink of choice. I wandered through the one-time wasteland that is now Yerba Buena Gardens reflecting on the day. Serendipity kicked in. Two guys were walking along Mission Street, next to Yerba Buena. Clay and Tim. I re-introduced myself and told them their presentations were awesome. I wasn’t buttering them up: jointly, they had delivered a wake-up call.

Today I’ll be heading across the Bay to attend Web 2.0 Expo. I don’t have a ticket. I don’t attend to buy one. It’s not that I’m cheap (although I generally am) so much as I don’t have three days for this. My plan is to suck as much knowledge from the event as I can in six hours.
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Today I got locked out of one of my online credit card accounts. My fault: I’ve got too many usernames to cover my split personalities. A box popped up asking me if I wanted live help. You betcha. This saved me time and strengthened my relationship with the bank. Thanks, Edward.

I’ve long advocated treating workers/learners as customers. If a stingy bank can justify providing a service to its customers, it’s probably inexpensive enough to provide to our internal customers. Why shouldn’t live help boxes be available on, for instance, new-hire on-ramps? Or in-house knowledge repositories? Or anywhere people in search of critical information may get lost?

Thinking you can’t afford it? I’ll suggest you can’t not afford it.

What’s a knowledge worker cost these days? For the sake of argument, let’s say $60,000 salary plus benefits, equipment, expenses, and so forth, a total of $80,000. If our worker is making sales or helping customers, what you pay them is the tip of the iceberg; the value of their lost time should be measured in sales not made or service not provided. If our average front-line performer does not have an opportunity cost of at least $200,000 /year, you need to find more productive workers.

If average, knowledge workers spend a third of her time looking for answers. Every case is different. Maybe your organization is so together that your number is 10%. You do the math. The cost/benefit ratio is so compelling that were I a CLO, I’d be asking for justification for not providing realtime help.

I went to Live Person, one of the first online live help software providers. Long ago, I had a Live Person chat box at Internet Time, but that’s another story. Today, they have a case study featuring National City Bank.

It’s not hard to imagine adding this sort of thing at the crossroads of your learning and knowledge management systems, is it? This is a no-brainer. Well, maybe not always. National City has been in the news this week.

Here are some lessons learned from my interviews last week with a company that lives and breathes community.

Few people willingly change the basic way they send and receive information. Email messaging is more likely to take hold than a portal.

Internet software travels with an invisible companion, the memes and processes I call internet culture. The net is an environment for sharing, optimism, and friendliness.

In email and on blogs, people speak conversationally, absent the officiousness of a traditional business memo.

Behind the firewall, behavior is casual but professional. People don’t foul their nest.

Live on the web inside your organization to learn lessons to share with your customers.

People who don’t visibly take part in virtual communities are not lurkers; they are silent partners. Thank goodness, for otherwise everyone would be talking at once.

Group membership should be selective. A couple of hundred people is a common group limit to growth.

Filter out the noise of mediocre and erroneous elements of raw knowledge to increase the fidelity of the knowledge flow.

People will read ten messages embedded in a weekly email. They will not read thirty.

Don’t think learning; this is raising collective intelligence.

The Story of Stuff is a twenty-minute animated movie about the sources of pollution and what to do about them.

This won’t have the impact of An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace, or Silent Spring. On the other hand, those eat up a couple of hours to a couple of years of your time.

Most people will never invest the time to listen to Al Gore or Rachel Carson.

The message per minute of The Story of Stuff is tough to beat.

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.

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