Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/29/2006

Earning A Seat At The Table - Training Day
If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone from the training sector complain that senior management doesn't get it or doesn't support training, I would be a rich man.

Design Models As Emergent Features: An Empirical Study In Communication And Shared Mental Models In Instructional Distance-Educator.com
The design and development model actually informs the activities of the group, but that it is interpreted and adapted by the team for the specific project. Thus, the actual practice model of each team can be regarded as an emergent feature.

2006: The Year of Living Globally - eWeek
Although international commerce has been going on since the beginning of civilization, what's different now is instant communication between scattered locations that makes an office on the other side of the world look like it is next door.

US Mobile Learning Market Reaches $460 Million in 2006 - PR Web
The market for Mobile Learning products and services across all the buyer segments is growing by 27.2% and will exceed $1.5 billion by 2011.

Should the CLO Focus on Talent Management Education? - CLO
Some organizations only think of talent development in terms of who are the future leaders of the organization, and really it’s much, much broader and deeper than that.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/27/2006

Knowledge Solves Manufacturing's Rubik's Cube - Desktop Engineering
Product development is like Rubik's cube. Each face representing IP, product, or process knowledge. All of which must come together in the right series of steps to develop a manufacturable product.

Shoveling on Digg - Business Week
As much as I like the idea of Digg--a site where a community chooses the most interesting or relevant news--I must confess that I just don't use it that much.

Putting the pod in podcast - The News-Gazette
Instead of simply recording lectures and making them available to students to download, D'Arcy and Eastburn have chosen to assemble weekly podcasts, each about five to seven minutes long. In each, they summarize the week's lesson, address common points of confusion and pose critical questions.

Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent - Manage Smarter
"The training department is a gray elephant," he says. "They focus on classes and students, and their metrics are how many people are in there, and that's it."

Is Web 2.0 Darth Vader? - ZD Net
Bill Thompson's essay on The Register warns that "Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable."

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/25/2006

Web 2.0 happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web - ZDNet
Web 3.0 is another name for the Semantic Web, which has been anticipated for some time now. We are entering an era when communities of end users not only build content, but also can quickly and easily assemble their own applications to leverage the content in new and innovative ways.

What Matters in Student Learning? - Innovation Online
Results reveal that student performance is significantly influenced by community attributes, but not school attributes. Of the things that did matter: household income, parent education, among other community variables. And the things that didn't matter: teacher certification, teacher experience, spending per pupil, and school size (though teacher certification showed some promise).

Interested in learning how to develop mashups? - ZDNet
There are a lot of different definitions of what a software mashup is (there are also other types of mashups, like music). But I stick to the one where the final piece of software is derived from the functionality and/or data of two or more disparate sources that have been woven together

Why does the fashion industry thrive in spite of rampant IP "piracy"? - ars technica
The fashion industry has what they term a "low-IP equilibrium," in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others' work. In spite of the lack of IP protection, the fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, mostly through the effects of Induced obsolescence and Anchoring.

The problem with innovation... - CIR
There are all sorts of barriers thrown up against taking the innovative steps needed to meet challenges facing us, for example, staving off competition from lower cost economies. However, many organisations fail to grasp how vitally important the role of innovation is today. Worse still, they realise how important it is, but for whatever reason, their inventions often fail to be implemented.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/24/2006

A portrait of the internet's new storytellers - Pew Internet
A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. PDF File.

Debunking three lies about social software - Using Wiki in Education
Three lies about social software is a great piece in which JP Rangaswami examines three lies about social software that need to be debunked. To the idea that social software causes groupthink, Rangaswami counters that social software actually relies on the aggregation of ideas from people with common interests, but not necessarily common views. He says, "Much of what I learn from comments on my blog is from the extensions, the qualifiers, the provisos, even the complete disagreements. This is not groupthink, it's anything but."

Web 2.0: What's Hot and What's Not - Seeking Alpha
Representative examples of the fastest growing websites in each category:

• 1. Media Sharing: youtube.com, flickr.com
• 2. Search: google.com, baidu.com, google.com.br, live.com
• 3. Blog: blogger.com
• 4. Utility: megaupload.com, rapidshare.de
• 5. Social Networking: myspace.com, orkut.com
• 6. Informational: wikipedia.org, digg.com
• 7. Software: sourceforge.net
• 8. Portal: qq.com, yahoo.com.cn
• 9. Commerce: craigslist.com

You Tube vs. Boob Tube - Wired
Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over.

Wikis Are Alive and Kicking in the Enterprise - eWeek
Proliferating virally, wiki usage has grown exponentially in recent months, along with other consumer-centric technologies - including blogs, podcasts and RSS - that have made their way into the workplace thanks in part to the influx of the tech-savvy entry-level employees of so-called Generation Y.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/23/2006

Top 10 Learning Ideas to Try with Mobile Devices Mobile Learning
A personal list of the most powerful and innovative learning approaches that can be achieved using digital mobile technologies.

The Hoarding/Sharing Instinct - CommuNitelligence
When it comes to knowledge, which survival strategy (hoarding or sharing) is more likely to be effective in today's fast-paced, information-intensive world?

Plan to Learn: case studies in e-learning project management - CeLEA
22 case studies by authors in eight countries, drawn from both the corporate and educational sectors. PDF file. Via Harold Jarche.

Connections: Social and mobile tools for enhancing learning - The Knowledge Tree
A learner who is connected to other learners, experts and information services can tap into a widened pool of resources that can vastly enhance their capabilities and understanding. The use of social software (Web 2.0) and digital mobile tools are two of the latest trends in new teaching and learning practice that enable this connectedness and have demonstrably positive effects on learning. Includes podcast and PDF.

Informal Learning - Training Day
Steps to provide more structure to informal learning.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/19/2006

Adding Meaning & Value to Information - how to save the world
Dave Snowden's famous comment about knowledge is that "we know more than we can say, and we can say more than we can write down". In his case it has taken him four years to write the book on complex adaptive systems that he teaches in a three day course, and in neither the book nor the course could he hope to explain more than a fraction of all that he has learned on the subject.

Connectivism: Learning Theory or Past Time for the Self-Amused - Stephen's Web
Asked to review George Siemens's paper on Conectivism, Bijdrage van Plon Verhagen from the University of Twente treats readers to a detailed criticism of the paper. Siemen's Response is posted here.

"Blink" methods now being applied in the classroom - Cognitive Daily
oHw the methods pioneered by Ambady and Rosenthal are being applied in real high school classrooms. Rather than 30 seconds, principals take 3 minutes to assess each teacher's performance, to catch problems early and intervene before they adversely affect the classroom.

The Acid Test for e-Learning - e-Learning Now
For the e-learning market to have any hope of a long term future, we need to find sustainable business models that do not rely on a section of stakeholders subsiding the remainder. We're not clear which model will become the dominant one in the future (bespoke software providers charging licence fees, open source providers supplying additional services costed on top, or development being done in house), but looking at the recent results of the market consolidation activity, we do have to ask if what the "big boys" are chasing is sustainable in the longer term.

The State of the Internet - Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley
Interesting slide show on the state of the internet.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/15/2006

NLP - training's shameful, fraudulent cult - Donald Clark Plan B
This self-fulfilling faith has propelled itself into the heart of the training world. NLP Neuro-Linguistic Programming has little to do with serious neuroscience and linguistics but it is certainly a programme.
Tag: NLP

24/7 Innovation - Creating an Infectious Culture of Innovation - Dan Keldsen
The basis of all of my creative thinking work is about how to get people to get new dots, get new experiences, look at problems through a different lens rather than the way they've always solved it in the past. (reposted -- link correction)
Tag: creative thinking

Nottr and Helipad
Two different programs for taking and sharing notes on the web.
Tag: Note Taking

Web 2.0 isn't dead, but Web 3.0 is bubbling up - ZDNet
There will be a web3.0 and it has been associated at this point with concepts of the semantic Web, derived from the primordial soup of Web technologies. It's been a focus of attention for Tim Berners-Lee, who cooked up much of what the Internet is today, for a nearly a decade.
Tags: Web 3.0 Web 2.0

How Doctors Use Google - Clinical Cases and Images
Patients trust Google almost as much as their physician, not surprisingly, they too, find the search giant results very useful. Also see Doctors use Google to diagnose disease
Tag: Google

What price innovation? Not that much - The Age
Companies that spend more on innovation do not generate more sales, bigger profits or better shareholder returns.
Tag: Innovation

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/12/2006

Growing Popularity of E-Learning - Inside Higher Ed
More students are taking online college courses than ever before, yet the majority of faculty still aren't warming up to the concept of e-learning, according to a national survey from the countrys' largest association of organizations and institutions focused on online education.
The evidence: Problem areas identified in previous years are still seen as areas of concern among academic leaders.

• Only 4.6 percent of Chief Academic Officers agreed that there are no significant barriers to widespread adoption of online learning.
• Nearly two-thirds of the academic leaders cite the need for more discipline on the part of online students as a critical barrier.
• Faculty issues, both acceptance of online and the need for greater time and effort to teach online, are also important barriers.
• Neither a perceived lack of demand on the part of potential students nor the acceptance of an online degree by potential employers was seen as a critical barrier.

Tags: eLearning Research Online Learning National Research

SMH - Youtube in Melbourne School - Stephen Hutcheon counters Catherine Munro - Learn Online
Youtube is a class act - a refreshing look at the positive adaptation of undeniably popular communication into some Australian school curriculum. Supporting Article
Tag:YouTube

Social sites becoming too much of a good thing - San Francisco Chronicle
Social networking sites have steadily attracted more people this year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. But between August and September, traffic to almost all popular social networking sites fell.
Tag: Social Networking

Add graphics to your blog, book, or presentation - Creating Passionate Users
People pay attention to graphics. They respond to graphics. They learn from graphics. If you want your readers/learners/audience to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible, use visuals. Note: for another view on graphics.
Tags: Graphics Learning

The Red Balloon (1956) - Le Ballon Rouge - The World of Kane -
A masterpiece in short film making. A red balloon follows a little boy around the streets of Paris. Directed by Albert Lamorisse, who also created the popular board game Risk.
Tag: The Red Balloon

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/10/2006

November 10, 2006

24/7 Innovation - Creating an Infectious Culture of Innovation - Dan Keldsen
The basis of all of my creative thinking work is about how to get people to get new dots, get new experiences, look at problems through a different lens rather than the way they've always solved it in the past.
Tag: creative thinking

Jim Carroll: How to put a ripple in a flat world - Innovation Insider
"Folks who have "gone flat" or who "get flat" seem quite dispirited: they have been relentlessly focused on cost, yet there is so much more to the future than becoming a low cost operator. Yet that's what innovation is all about: doing much more than simply "surviving" into a world that has gone flat, into a world in which you are thriving through innovation.
Tags: Flat World Ripple

The Influence of Interactive Video on Learning outcomes and Learner Satisfaction - The Boggs e-Learning Chronicle
Results of the experiment showed that the value of video for learning effectiveness was contingent upon the provision of interactivity. Students in the e-learning environment that provided interactive video achieved significantly better learning performance and a higher level of learner satisfaction than those in other settings.
Tag: Interactive Video

Response Cards to Facilitate Active Learning in Lectures - Will at Work Learning
Lectures can be modified in different ways to increase the amount of active learning---to ensure that learners are more fully engaged, have a more robust understanding of the learning material, are more likely to remember what they learned, are more likely to utilize the information at a later time.
Tags: Lecture Response Cards

An innovation process and software framework - Innovate on Purpose
Increasingly, firms value consistent, collaborative information that enables a business process. This means that the existing software applications that support "innovation" will have to consolidate and support the entire process in one component framework or integrated solution.
Tag: Innovation Framework

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/7/2006

Buzztracker
The world news mapped. Via The Open Learner.

The online book: team authors, and it's never finished - The Christian Science Monitor
"Collaboration is increasingly a part of our everyday lives, and rarely do we work on something in a vacuum," says Jen Mazzon, a senior product marketing manager with Google. "Because [Google Docs] makes collaboration easier, people might be more likely to share things and to get input from person x, y, z who they frankly before may not have bothered with."
Tag: Collaboration

What is the worth of words? - MSNBC
It's time to acknowledge that in a truly multimedia environment of 2025, most Americans don't need to understand more than a hundred or so words at a time, and certainly will never read anything approaching the length of an old-fashioned book. We need a frank reassessment of where long-form literacy itself lies in the spectrum of skills that a modern nation requires of its workers.
Tags: illiteracy literacy multimedia

Best Inventions of 2006 - YouTube - Time Magazine
They thought they'd built a useful tool for people to share their travel videos. They thought people might use it to pitch auction items on eBay. They had no idea. They had opened a portal into another dimension. The minute people saw YouTube they did its creators a huge favor: they hijacked it.
Tag: YouTube

US Self-paced eLearning Market to Top $10 Billion in 2006 - The Industry Analyst reporter
The market for eLearning will grow by 30.8% over the next five years.
Tag: eLearning Market

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/2/2006

Managing Those Creative Types - Gallup
But it can be hard to evaluate creativity. What tends to happen is that companies give the toughest problems to the best people, but then they can't evaluate who's best because the best people -- the most productive people, the brightest people -- have the toughest problems to solve. That makes it hard to compare because people are working on different kinds of problems.
Tags: Managing Creativity

The Tao of Holding Space - Parking Lot
"The Tao of Holding Space" - a collection of interpretations of the 81 short chapters of the Chinese classic Tao te Ching as they apply to my experience of holding space.
Tags: Tao Holding Space

The Fundamentals of Performance Management - Gallup
Three keys to creating a system that eliminates costly variation in employee performance. Engaged employees stay on the job longer, and they are safer, more productive, and more profitable.
Tags: Performance Management Engagement

Microsoft to give students a hand at math, science - Seattle PI
The major goal is to get kids excited about math, and help their parents realize how important it is for their children to do well in the subject. One idea being floated is to have Microsoft employees volunteer to meet with kids to explain how they use math on the job, such as in developing the Xbox videogame player. If kids can see real-world applications for the advanced math skills they'll learn in school, it can get them more enthused about the subject.
Tag: Education

U.S. Adds Wiki to Spy Arsenal - Wired
The wiki could lead to more accurate intelligence reports because the system allows a wider range of officials to scrutinize material and keeps a complete, permanent record of individual contributions, including dissenting points of view. That might help avoid errors of the kind that led to the widely criticized 2002 national intelligence estimate that said Saddam Hussein possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Tag: Wiki

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 11/1/2006

Realizing the High-Performance Enterprise - CRM Daily
P&G holds two- to three-day leadership council meetings every quarter where each and every top development employee is evaluated. Lafley, who personally tracks 500 employees, likens the process to the depth chart used by a World Cup soccer team.
Tag: Performance

Five Questions... for Lance Dublin - eLearn Magazine
Lance Dublin was founder of Antioch University/West, one of the first accredited online universities. He later created consultancy The Dublin Group, and currently works as an independent management consultant.
Tags: Lance Dublin eLearning

Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization - User Interface Engineering
Art vs. engineering. Aesthetics vs. usability. Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. The debate between design (of the visual sort) and design (of the technical sort) remains ongoing. A website, however, can't take sides: it needs both to be successful.
Tags: Visual Design Interactive

Computing, 2016: What Won't Be Possible - New York Times
Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960's asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six - hence, the term "six degrees of separation."
Tag: Social Networks

ABC News courting next generation on Internet - Yahoo
The webcast is similar to the broadcast in some ways. Gibson sits in the same studio; the control room is the same. It's treated as a full-on broadcast, though it's much leaner personnel-wise, with senior producer Tom Johnson and another producer assembling and writing the newscast with help from others as time permits.
Tags: ABC News webcast

iPods cast a wide net for learning - The Age, Australia
In one podcast pilot at Deakin, only 25 per cent of on-campus students are now attending lectures. Might podcasting promote absenteeism? Professor Farley believes not. "The average student needs to work 15 hours a week to survive and that's got to eat into their lecture time. Then you have the graduate students sent off to places with their work . . . the distinction between on-campus and off-campus students is one we're moving towards dropping."
Tag: Podcasting