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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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