12.30.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/30/2006

Jerome Murat - Daily Motion
This has nothing to do with news, but sometimes you just gotta share. . .

Al Gore's Convenient Presentation - Business Week
In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes a persuasive case that the world must take dramatic steps to curtail carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce global warming. The point is not to convince you the issue is as urgent as Gore argues. Rather, it's intended to help you improve the power of your communication skills by breaking down Gore's documentary, which is really a great slide presentation in film form.

The Third-Generation Web is Coming - Stephen's Wb
Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 - Fastforward the Blog
These tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

KMPro Journal KMPro
KMPro has release their second edition of the 2006 KMPro Journal - Volume 3, Number 2 Winter 2006.

Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation) - New York Times
"Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it - and we are losing that ability."

12.26.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/26/2006

A tale of two experts on m-Learning - The People's Guide to mLearning
I want to raise a flag here in regards to self-directed learning. We can't yet guarantee that we have such learners (to the contrary). So just providing access is not sufficient, we need to push support. I think we can do one more thing, and we should: help individuals learn to learn. Hence my involvement in the Meta-Learning Lab. That can be accomplished through a layer on top of our learning systems. Imagine, a learning system that not only meets your immediate needs, but develops you over time!

Welcome to 2007, the Year of Innovation - Seattle PI
The challenge is not that the U.S. is slipping in maintaining an innovation culture, but that the rest of the world is catching on and catching up. The competition is intensifying for ideas and talent. Innovation efficiency is a game of diminishing and finite returns. You can never do better than no cost, even if you were able to get materials and labor for free. In real-world terms, you cannot, no matter how energetically one slashes costs, cut them to the point of China, or after that Africa, or after that whatever the next low-cost emerging economy is. The alternative is, to borrow a fashionable term, top-line growth. That's where innovation -- coming up not just with more efficient ways to make products but new products -- can contribute.

Cycling to knowledge - Knowledge-at-work.
Enumerative description is an interesting way to capture local perceptions and experience of situations. Expert(s) gather to look for invariance across their domain and select the questions that best define the current situation.

E&P top 10's missing number 1 - Innovation in College Media
Those interested in journalism will want to read the Editor & Publisher story on the top newspaper stories of 2006: Strupp's Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2006. In it, Strupp tags "The Internet coming of age" as the top newspaper industry story -- yet, that is old news.

America's New Digital Divide - Micro Persuasion
In 2007 our challenge is to bridge the digital divide that exists between the technophiles and the technophobes. It's staring us right in the face wherever we go. Consider how many of your friends blog or post to Flickr or even know what the heck del.icio.us is.

12.23.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/23/2006

The Youngest Grocer In America YouTube
After the only grocery store in Truman, Minn., closed earlier this year, 17-year-old Nick Graham bought and re-opened it to help save the struggling community. Note: CBS News video.

The interaction between genes and environment - ADC
Many have alluded to the importance of the environment on the developing brain. As a neuroscientist, I root and endorse that view in the bump and grind of brain cells. You are born with most of the brain cells you will ever have. It is the growth of the connections between the brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. What is exciting is that the environment will influence the configuration of those connections. So even if you are a clone—that is, an identical twin—you will have a unique pattern of brain cell connections. Also, see Taxi drivers' knowledge helps their brains grow.

Brain Gain: Mental Exercise Makes Elderly Minds More Fit - Scientific American
The research holds out hope that simple mental exercise may play a key role in staving off dementia and other cognitive declines that currently afflict at least 24 million people worldwide. But it is not as simple as continuing to do the crossword or sudoku puzzles that you love, the brain must be continually stretched and challenged. To drive this effect, you have to practice things that you don't like or things you don't regularly practice.

Another Guru Sharing the Same Old Myth - Will at Work Learning
And here's another example of a well-respected industry analyst lazily sharing the biggest myth in the learning field.

How does a brain do what it does? - Baltimore Sun
Like animals, Minsky observes, people exhibit instinctive reactions: They hear a sound and turn toward it. From parents (or other "imprimers") they learn to react as well, looking both ways before they cross the street. Deliberative thinking allows human beings to consider alternatives before making a decision. Reflective thinking permits an evaluation not only of external phenomena but of activities inside the brain. And self-reflection thinking makes it possible to consider a decision in light of a person's self-image. Confusion and conflict, Minsky maintains, force us to use some (cognitive) roads less traveled by. Positive reinforcement, by contrast, can lead to rigidity.

12.18.2006

knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/18/2006

The best pictures of the year - MSNBC
2006 Year in Pictures - slide show with audio.

Virtual experiences can cause embellished, false memories - Physorg.com
Although learning through interactive experiences with a product is vivid and can enhance knowledge, it can create an illusory sense of competence. While interactive experiences are generally better for helping people retain information, they often cause people to imagine features and functions that don't exist.

Understanding Mobile 2.0 - Read/Write Web
Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have Internet access. What is more, the World Bank estimates that more than two-thirds of the world's population lives within range of a mobile phone network. Mobile is going to be the next big Internet phenomenon.

Gestures Offer Insight - Scientific American
According to McNeill's theory, the process of speech production and the process of gesture production have a common mental source in which a mixture of preverbal symbols and mental images form the point of origin for the thought that is to be expressed. This growth point, as McNeill calls it, represents a kind of seed out of which words and gestures develop.

Key Predictions for IT Organizations in 2007 and Beyond - Gartner
Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007.

12.17.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/17/2006

December 17, 2006

Person of the Year: You - Time Magazine
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.

Definitions of Informal Learning - Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning
The notion of informal learning is becoming increasingly important. In a corporate context, learning is much more than formal training. And, our academic learning also comes from different informal channels; e.g. through games, simulations, experiments, story-telling, discovery.

Survey: Not All Workers Consider BlackBerry a Ball and Chain - eWeek
Even though workers acknowledge that their wireless devices are eroding the boundary between the office and their outside-work lives, the survey found them focusing more on the benefits than drawbacks.

Web 2.0 and the AJAX - Open Source Tecnnology Web 2.0 is a strange thing in that it doesn't really exist. You can't buy Web 2.0; you can't buy a Web 2.0 programming language, and you can't buy Web 2.0 hardware. In many ways, the phrase "Web 2.0" is a marketing phrase like "paradigm shift" or "the big picture".

Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds - c/net n a 1945 paper, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek described how prices set by a free market are really "a mechanism for communicating information" about the probability of future events.

12.13.2006

knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/13/2006

December 13, 2006

Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Stephen's Web
Stephen Downes weighs in on Will Thalheimer's Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers.

Knowing Knowledge - How to Save the World
George Siemens' online book Knowing Knowledge is fun to read: It's laid out like a Tom Peters book -- full of graphics and different type fonts, and some wonderful quotations1. It has a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that's a bit McLuhanesque.

New Cool Tool Rundown - e-Clippings (Learning As Art)
Including podcasting, 3D building and data comparison.

Widening Performance Gap in the Back Offices of Large Global Corporations - Garp
Achieving world-class performance in four core operational areas - information technology (IT), finance, human resources (HR) and procurement - companies can reduce annual SG&A costs by $60 million per billion in revenue. To achieve these gains, world-class performers demonstrate strength in five best practices categories: strategic alignment of business goals and operating procedures; complexity reduction; technology enablement; business processing sourcing; and cross-functional partnering.

Measuring the Value of HR - HR Magazine
In 2001, American Standard's Fred Poses (CEO) and Larry Costello (Senior VP for HR) were seeking substantive evidence on the actual impact of the company's major strategic initiative for managing its talent.

12.12.2006

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

Convergence Learning - The Learning Circuits Blog
The Convergence Learning Model is founded upon cognitive sciences and operates on three impetuses: the psychology of learning, pedagogical change, and technological advancement.

Transparent Design - Cole Camplese: Learning & Innovation
My wife was our Manager of Instructional Design back at the Solutions Institute and she had this crazy idea to release the entire CMS content basis as the learning environment, not just the polished html output of the course content. In other words, she wanted to let students and faculty to see not only the content, but all the instructional design and media notes that we managed along side the content in the repository.

Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Will at Work Learning
Almost all of us---as far as I can tell---are just not getting valid feedback on our instructional-development efforts. Note that though 48% said they did Level 2 learning evaluation on their most recent project, probably most of those folks delivered the assessment in a way that biased those results. This leaves very few of us who are getting valid feedback on our designs.

Many companies still not ready to embrace Web 2.0 concepts - Business.ca
Employees are increasingly concerned about finding the information they require. As a result, some of the Web 2.0 types of approaches are quite popular. Things like blogs, for example, have a way of making sense of what's going on.

log(N) = 0.093 + 3.389 log(CR) (1) (r2=0.764, t34=10.35, p<0.001) - Cognitive Edge
Recognise it? Well of course, it's the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar's 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact).

12.10.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/9/2006

Alvin Toffler: The Thought Leader Interview - Strategy + Business
Mr. Toffler wrote that the years to come would be marked by information overload, an acceleration of technological change, and a resultant social upheaval that he likened to mental illness: "Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon."

The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 - SOA Web Services
New Web 2.0 software that was released or extensively overhauled since January 1st, 2006. For more on Web 2.0, see What is Web 2.0 ?

From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Internet Time blog
The Well was an amazing place to toy with ideas. The community included reporters, writers, journalists, inventors, astronauts, deadheads, scientists, rabble rowsers, radicals, hackers, and more. I remember staying up into the wee hours reading Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly (from Biosphere II!), futurist Tom Mandel, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Christopher Locke, and many, many others. Flamewars were commonplace. Dialog was continuous.

In Mobile Denial - Training Day
I keep hearing about the "mobile workforce," and keep seeing people picking out tomatoes in the grocery store with one hand while changing the dial (or whatever it is) on their iPods with the other. I've also heard "texting" people is big.

Media 2006: The Year in Traffic - eWeek
From video sites to social networking to social news, 2006 saw several power shifts in online traffic and influence. Netscape relaunched as a social news site, YouTube dominated the online video space, and Flickr continued to innovate.

12.07.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/7/2006

2006 Industry Report - Training Magazine
The year 2006 was one of growth for the training industry. Most organizations reported healthy increases in their training budgets, with an average budget increase of 7 percent over last year. Today, companies are spending $1,273 per learner on training, including staff salaries.

Why Workflow Sucks - ebiz
The problem stems from the fact that most Workflow products were flawed, and as a result, the problem in the gene pool has rippled through to the new BPM species. So what was wrong with workflow? It's quite simple when you think about it; most workflow products assumed that work moved from one resource to another. One user entered the loan details, another approved it. But business doesn't work like that.

M-Learning (mobile learning) - ELT Notes
Useful set of mLearning links.

Top 10 Freeware Apps for M-Learning - Mobile Learning
Ten of the most useful, free software applications you can use to design and deliver mobile learning.

101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity - Campus Technology
Some of the best examples of how campus IT is meeting the connectivity challenge.

12.05.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/05/06

Tom Wujec: Using images to think and innovate - Business Inovation Insider
To demonstrate the power of using image visualization to convey ideas, Tom created visual representations of different sessions at the event.

How The Internet Saved Literacy - Forbes
The Internet has shortened the feedback loop on writing and has made readers more active participants, says Matt Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. "Reading is more intimately associated with writing," he says.

Learning During Sleep? - YubaNet Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep.

Youth speak out on digital divide - BBC
As students from around the world gather in Hong Kong for the fifth annual International Telecommunication Union's Youth Forum, two young people talk to the BBC News website about telecoms and technology in their particular countries.

Web 2.0: Is it changing the world? - The Pacer
If one stops to think about how Web 2.0 drastically impact college and high school students alone through Myspace and Facebook it becomes obvious that we of the future generations of the work force and leadership of the world are becoming increasingly connected to people outside our normal circles of influence and in time can become truly global.

12.02.2006

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/02/2006

A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies - Educause
Lawrence Lessig's four factors of the Internet-technology, the market, the law, and social norms-offer a means to analyze this medium.

Business Intelligence: Training That Sticks - Manage Smater
It's important to train at the level of the action, not the abstraction. Business is fundamentally about actions and behaviors.

Mobile Learning Redefined - Ubiquitous Thoughts
It's not about the new technologies... It's making use of what they [students] already have in their pockets.

Is Microsoft driving innovation? - Don Dodge
The Wall Street Journal asks "Is Microsoft Driving Innovation or Playing Catch-up with Rivals?" People tend to confuse invention with innovation, as the WSJ has here. They use the words interchangeably, but they are very different.

Study: 1 in 5 parents say kids online too much - CNN
About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades have not gone up or down since they got Internet access.