The k-collector beta is now installed in Radio and this is the first post with it running. It does mean giving up LiveTopics but I figure I'll be better off with a shared dynamic topic list.
Author: Jim
Getting better at supporting informal learning
Informal Learning – The Other 80%. I don't know how to emphasize more that this – rather than classroom-based learning – is where we should be focussing our efforts. As Cross writes, “Informal learning has always played a larger role than most people imagined, but it’s becoming increasingly important as workers take responsibility for their own destinies. Formal learning consists of instruction and events imposed by others. When a worker chooses his path to learning independent of others, by definition, that’s informal.” This is an outstanding article, clearly documenting the importance of informal learning, defining it, and showing how organizations can make the most of it. By Jay Cross, Internet Time Group, May 8, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
This is just one of many pointers to Jay Cross's excellent piece on why we should be focusing on informal learning. Accomplishing this boils down to an issue of leadership over management. From a management perspective it's easy to see why formal learning dominates, especially in organizational settings. There's stuff you can point to, there's stuff you can measure, and you can put someone in charge. The only problem is that all this activitiy doesn't make much of a difference.
It takes a huge act of leadership to acknowledge where the real learning takes place and to start figuring out how to better support that learning. First, it takes a huge act of trust in believing that your people can figure out on their own what they need to learn. Second, you need to start helping them get better at doing that figuring out. They may still be under the illusion, perpetuated by your training systems, that they should be looking for classroom courses or looking for their slick e-learning equivalents.
Most of us are products of educational systems that leave us confused about how and when we learn best, partly because those systems are dedicated to preserving themselves. It takes time to develop skill at self-managed learning. It also takes time to learn how to tap into the informal systems that are out there to support you (another of the huge advantages of weblogs, BTW). Some resources I would recommend here would be Ron Gross's books, The Independent Scholar's Handbook and Peak Learning, Peter Vaill's Learning As a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water, and Roger Schank's Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules.
My stop is up next, so I'll pick this up in another post later.
Watching for the imminent arrival of k-collector
Paolo and I are now subscribed to a single shared cloud (called WWWW) of topics using the k-collector server and client for Radio.
This means that our posts will be aggregated together by k-collector on the basis of the topics we use. The demo interface shows a simple hierarchical view but we have lots of other things planned.
Another poweful feature of this setup is the shared topic roll. Because we are both subscribed to the WWWW topic roll we use the same topics and any topics we create are automatically made available to other subscribers.
For example I am creating a topic 'Paolo Valdemarin' to attach to this post. In a little while Paolo's client will automatically have this new topic available for those moments when he wishes to talk about himself!
I'm looking forward to seeing how k-collector really works. Matt Mower's liveTopics tool has been immensely valuable to me on a personal basis. I can see how k-collector would be even more valuable in an organizational or team setting.
Protect and Exercise your freedom to read
American Civil Liberties Union : Support the Freedom to Read! .
With the passage of the USA Patriot Act, the FBI gained the power to search your library and book-buying records without probable cause of any crime or intent to commit a crime. Furthermore, librarians and others who are required to turn over records are not allowed to say that the search has occurred or that records were given to the government.
This means that average Americans could have their privacy violated wholesale without justification or proper judicial oversight. Questions from Members of Congress to the Department of Justice about the use of this power have gone unanswered or have received a superficial response.
In response to these un-American and dangerous powers, Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) has proposed the “Freedom to Read Protection Act” (HR. 1157). This act would restrict the key provision of the USA PATRIOT Act — by exempting libraries and bookstores from the laws that allow the FBI to conduct these searches of personal records.
Take Action! Urge your Representatives to support the Freedom to Read Protection Act! [Privacy Digest]
Supporting the Freedom to Read Protection Act is a good idea but here’s something else you might want to think about doing as well. Radically diversify your reading choices. Order something at the opposite end of the political spectrum from your usual fare. Check out something at Loompanics or Paladin Press, or ChristianBook.com. Create patterns in your data that don’t add up and can’t be categorized.
There are two desirable features to this strategy. First, if enough of us do it, we can overwhelm these silly systems with white noise in the data. Second, if we actually start to read and think about viewpoints that radically differ from our own, we might actually start to get smarter as individuals and as a society. There isn’t much point to protecting our freedom to read if we don’t bother to exercise it in the first place.
RSS feed for Radio Userland tech support
Radio UserLand tech support via RSS. The Radio UserLand discussion group, the best place to receive user-to-user technical support on the software, now is available as an RSS newsfeed. [Rogers Cadenhead: Workbench: Radio Userland Kick Start]
Weblogs and knowledge management
Another stream of recent posts has focused on weblogs as a tool for knowledge management both to capture and share knowledge. They include a mix of posts focusing on individual knowledge workers and on knowledge workers within organizations.
Lou Rosenfeld, author of the excellent Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has a good post on blogging k-logging.
Dave Pollard has generated a great set of posts on weblogs as knowledge management tools. His weblog in general has become a must read for me.:
Blogs in Business: The Weblog as Filing Cabinet
Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system.
A Weblog-Based Content Architecture for Business (this post also has some excellent diagrams of how weblogs fit within the entreprise)
The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever.
Blogs in Business: Finding the Right Niche
Weblogs can be effectively pitched to senior management of major organizations by explaining how they help solve the six problems:
They make contributing knowledge simpler, easier, and more automatic They make it easier to update knowledge on a timely basis They make knowledge more context rich They allow the authors of key business knowledge to build and retain 'pride of ownership' They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing' They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing' Each individual's 'collection' of shared knowledge is easy to define and assess at performance evaluation time They make knowledge easier to route, to 'subscribe' to, to canvass and to 'mine'
Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati, and Doc Searls did a piece for Linux Journal on Building with Blogs. One key excerpt:
As weblogs account for more and more of the traffic in knowledge about a given subject, they become powerful instruments for hacking common wisdom. In many categories, they are moving ahead of mainstream journals and portals and building useful community services where over-funded dot-com efforts failed spectacularly.
Sébastien Paquet adds a piece on “towards structured blogging” where he starts to think about how to begin adding a next layer of metadata to collections of weblogs.
Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on.
Donald Luskin makes the following observation in his weblog (pointers courtesy of “Scripting News” and Roland Tanglao)
At the dinner table I explained what a blog is. There was the usual polite, partially feigned fascination with anything having to do with the Internet. But when I said that blogs have completely transformed my utilization of media and the way I acquire information about the world — that I basically get everything from blogs now — everyone stopped being polite. One fellow at the table was utterly shocked that I would trust any information I acquired online. I asked him if he trusted information he got from politically biased mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, or for that matter, from any commercial media biased toward at least some degree of sensationalism, if not some particular political view. I asked him if he had ever, once, read a newspaper account of some event of which he personally had expert or eye-witness knowledge, and found it to be accurate. I asked him he had ever once been interviewed by a reporter who quoted him accurately or in context, or who didn't already have the story written before the conversation even began? Well, no, he had to admit… but still… “…not the Internet! You can't be serious!”
Roland is always a source of good observations and links about blogging in knowledge sharing and knowledge management contexts. Some recent commentary via his blog include
Blogging is too difficult but it will get better. Like I always say we are at the VisiCalc stage of blogging. Compare and contrast Excel and VisiCalc; lightyears better and people in 2003 understand spreadsheets. Same thing will happen with blogging; we need years of experience and iteration to get from the VisiCalc of blogging to the Excel of blogging.
and this pointer to Value Creation by Communities of Practice
Blogs encourage cross-functional disruptive thinking.
I read a great quote that, like a magnet of meanings, pulled together layers of my thinking into a surprising pattern of possibility. Here it is: “Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony! … While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects.”
That should cover it for tonight, although there are still a bunch of good posts on this topic filling up my aggregator.
Weblogs in Learning Settings
Good series of recent posts on weblogs as a learning tool both for individuals and organizations. Here are ones I consider worth visiting and revisiting.
Stephen Downes – More Than Personal: The Impact of Weblogs. Good overview with a learning perspective.
Sebastian Fiedler on the use of weblogs as personal webpublishing systems to support self-directed learning:
I want supportive technologies with a high degree of freedom. Technologies that can be twisted and tweaked, that can adapt to my changing purposes and interests, that can grow with me over time. Personal Webpublishing systems are a big and important step into that direction. After all, I own that freaking publishing space and I can experiment as much (or as little) as I want.
James Farmer offers two interesting posts on how to use weblogs to create a learning management system (and Part Two)
Sebastian Fielder had a interesting post last month about the general idea of Learning Webs that builds on this observation by Ivan Ilich:
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, 'What should someone learn?' but with the question, 'What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?'
When you start to think about learning as plugging into a network of resources and people, it's pretty clear how weblogs have a critical role to play.
Finally, from the Distance Education Online Symposium mailing list comes a nice post on weblogs in education (courtesy of David Carter-Tod)
Trust, security, and organization design
Security doesn’t create trust [SATN]
Humans gain trust by interacting and “getting to know” people. Transparent technologies that make it easy to see what people and companies are up to (in a sense the opposite of firewalls) are what help me trust. I like Reagan’s saying: “trust, but verify”. It implies that trust requires means for openness, not firewalls and secretiveness
More wise words from David Reed.
We spend time in the summers on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island. There’s a little vegetable stand that runs on an honor system; you pick out the fresh vegetable you want and leave your money in a little cash box. It works in that environment.
Anonymity and large scale make those kinds of processes hard. But solutions based on protecting yourself against the risks of anonymity and scale aggravate the problem instead of alleviating it. There is risk associated with opening yourself up either metaphorically or technologically. I think a portion of the answer lies in working from the grassroots up. Inside organizations most of the real work gets done by small groups of people who’ve learned how to trust one another. But how much of their work is overhead generated by having to work around well-intentioned but ultimately fear based rules, regulations, and processes?
One reference worth checking out in this regard is Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Support Economy: Why Corporations are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, which I’ve mentioned before.
There’s quite a lot going on in this realm right now. Chad Dickerson just ran this interesting column in Infoworld on “the battle for decentralization.” All of the current ferment around Social Software.
There’s an interesting book about organizations published a few years back called Seeing Organizational Patterns : A New Theory and Language of Organizational Design by Bob Keidel. In it he offers the following diagram for understanding the tradeoffs that must be managed in designing organizations. Typically we tend to think only in terms of the tradeoff between control and autonomy. His, richer, model introduces a third point of cooperation and suggests that organization design problems can be treated as looking for a spot somewhere inside the triangle instead of somewhere along one of its edges. The trend has been northward towards more recognition of cooperation and, hopefully, away from stale debates about control or autonomy.
Knowledge workers and productivity tools
Surrounded by new opportunities.
Ray Ozzie on ZDNet : Surrounded by new opportunities
Even though our current use of PCs, productivity tools, e-mail and the Web seems quite sophisticated, we’ve only just begun to understand how to apply them and effectively realize their benefits. The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software. That will involve a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections. It will be an era of highly interdependent systems and relationships, with technology continuing to reshape the nature of organizations, economy, society and personal lives.
Ray Ozzie is busy thinking about the kinds of problems we’ll want computers to help with five to ten years from now. “Groove”, or something like it, may well be part of that answer. Certainly, the focus on collaboration and social software will be a major element of what’s next. That’s certainly what I expect someone like Ozzie to be thinking about.
At the same time, I think it’s an overstatement to claim that many of us are realizing the personal productivity promise of today’s technology. While I might not go as far as Alan Kay’s claim that the computer revolution hasn’t happened yet, I do think that both individual knowledge workers and organizations could be doing a lot more to take advantage of the tools we have.
In the mid-1980s, the Harvard Business School was one of the first MBA programs to require incoming students to buy PCs. One of the things I got to participate in as a doctoral student at the time was to help deliver the training to incoming MBAs. We spent three days teaching them the basics of the IBM PC and how to use Lotus 123.
How much training does the average organization offer new hires about the technology environment? An hour? Thirty minutes? Some of that is a testament to the overall improvements in usability and in general knowledge of technology. But I can’t think of anyplace that invests any time in how to use the tools effectively. One interesting item (by way of Sebastien Paquet) is a white paper by Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University titled “A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge structuring in a computer world.” (pdf version)
The fundamental challenge, and opportunity, is that we’ve been content to focus on increasing the power and flexibility of our technology tools while assuming that knowledge workers will figure out how to take advantage fo that power. As knowledge workers it’s our responsibility to do more of that figuring out. We need to stop counting on the marketing promises of technology vendors and start learning how to use the tools we’ve already got.
Alan Kay and Emerging Technology
I’ve been a fan of Alan Kay’s for a long time. It’s nice to see that he’s starting to develop some recent visibility in the blog world. The first thing that popped up in my aggregator a while back was this comment:
Clueful markets yield good products.
Here’s an “aha” quote from this interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay:
After complaining about the current state of software targeting children, I ask Kay how we encourage the production of better educational software for kids. He answers, “don’t buy bad stuff.”
As simple as that sounds, he points out that “the market needs to reject what is bad. The stuff that got put out wasn’t rejected. It’s a certain kind of laziness. […] On the other hand, you have to make sure people are aware of their alternatives. A popular fast food restaurant might be across the street. Meanwhile, a mile a way is a better restaurant where a good meal costs just a little more than at the place across the street. We need to help get the word out for the alternative. [Seb’s Open Research ]
Then he shows up as a keynote at etech which was heavily blogged. Lisa Rein provides a wonderfully rich collection of audio and video clips plus links to major resources. Cory Doctorow provides detailed notes from Alan’s talk including follow up corrections and elaborations from Alan. So do Phil Windley and Jon Lebkowsky.
If you’re so inclined I would definitely recommend you spend some time with Squeak and Croquet. Unfortunately, between other time demands and the lingering effects of first learning to program using Fortran and Cobol, I’ve only made the slowest progress. Alan tells me that the problem is that I just have more to unlearn.