Innovative Minds, Internet, Information, & Bored

Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike - New York Times
Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who've done work in a related area but not in your specific field. Make it possible for someone who doesn't report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.

The Disappearance of IT By Nicholas G. Carr - CIO Insight
The network -- the Internet, that is -- has become, literally, our computer. The different components that used to be isolated in the closed box of the PC -- the hard drive for storing information, the microchip for processing information, the applications for manipulating information -- can now be dispersed throughout the world, integrated through the Internet and shared by everyone. The World Wide Web has truly turned into the World Wide Computer.

Info Overload Costs Economy - Wired
After years of naming a product or person of the year, Basex Inc. decided to name "information overload" as problem of the year for 2007.

Bored? - Scientific American
Most people blame boredom on the circumstances, but psychologists say this emotion is highly subjective and rooted in aspects of consciousness -- and that levels of boredom vary among people.

Mirror Neurons, Brain, Performance, Schools, eLearning, & Gladwell

Mirror Neurons -- Rock Stars or Backup Singers? - Scientific American
The reversal of the mirror effect was found: watching index-finger movement resulted in more electrical activity in the pinky, and watching pinky movement produced more activity in the index finger. The brain learned new sensory-motor associations, and it is these associations that underlie the mirror neuron-like effect.

Top 10 ways to un-bake your brain - jonathanfields - awake @ the wheel
Stress is GOOD. . . when there's a reason for it. But, when that stress becomes chronic, the exact opposite happens.

My Unfashionable Legacy - strategy+business
You have to build the authority to insist on accountability and performance -- including in sisting on getting it from your superiors -- but you also have to give up authority to anyone who is capable of wielding it effectively. And you have to accomplish all this in corporations that set up incentives (such as stock options) that punish long-term investment and favor short-term measures: cutting head counts, selling off underperforming businesses, and cashing in on quick gains.

6 Things That Are Right with Schools - Parent Resources

1. inspiring teachers
2. inspired students
3. a commitment to educate everyone
4. fine facilities and equipment
5. caring, sensitive administrators
6. plenty of choices

Corporate eLearning's Dirty little Secret - WE DON'T USE eLEARNING! At least not very much - corporate elearning strategies and development
Actually the part that seems crazy to me is that training departments are creating internal training to train themselves on the tools of their trade.

A child's view of the $100 laptop
What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out.

The Contrast Triangle (Rare Optical Phenomenon)
A psychological effect. The dark "triangle" between the moon and the surface of the ocean. Place your hand over the bright, reflected moonlight in the ocean, and the dark area disappears!!

NONE OF THE ABOVE: What I.Q. doesn't tell you about race - The New Yorker
Malcolm Gladwell discusses the Flynn effect

Learning Financials
Learning Tree Swings to 4Q Profit

Plato Learning 4Q loss wider than expected, revenue falls short

Performance, Crowdsourcing, Learning, Design, & iPods

I'm Not Really Running, I'm Not Really Running... - New York Times
All maximum performances are actually pseudo-maximum performances. You are always capable of doing more than you are doing.

Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project? - Computerworld
Whether it's to increase loyalty among customers speed up development time or cast outward for innovative ideas, companies are trying on many styles of 'crowdsourcing'

Humans Appear Hardwired To Learn By 'Over-Imitation' - Science Daily
Children's ability to imitate can actually lead to confusion when they see an adult doing something in a disorganized or inefficient way. Watching an adult doing something wrong can make it much harder for kids to do it right.

Is good design just a formula? - Ravi Vora
The function of design is to make the product more usable and improve the usability of the product's function. Yet, as we all know, great design is innovative and different. The simpler and better the design can be, the more enjoyable and easier it makes our lives.

What Did the Professor Say? Check Your iPod - New York Times Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time. You don't need to train them. They are very expert at clicking back and forward to the exact spot they want. They don't listen from start to finish.

eLearning, Hybrid Learning, Web Design, Leadership, & Blogs

US eLearning Market Reaches $13.6 Billion in 2007 - PR Web
The current industry is growing at 22% with new buyers demanding new types of products. Free Executive Overview.

HYBRID LEARNING MODEL - CETL
The Hybrid Learning Model describe learning activities as a series of understandable and universal set of learning events where the teachers and students experience and roles are clearly defined at each stage.

Understanding Web Design - JEFFREY ZELDMAN
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

The New Psychology of Leadership - Scientific American
Strong leadership arises out of a symbiotic relationship between leaders and followers within a given social group—and hence requires an intimate understanding of group psychology. When a shared social identity exists, individuals who can best represent that identity will have the most influence over the group's members and be the most effective leaders.

PDI Pulse on Leaders Study Shows 27 Percent of Boss-Rated High Potentials Also Have a High Risk of Derailment - CLO
High-performing individuals are used to success but often don't take the time to consider how it is achieved or how their actions impact others.

Republic.com 2.0 - Larry Prusak
The Daily Me: the great number of blogs, etc. on the web and the fact that most of us only read a tiny bit of this and then just what we know will confirm us in our beliefs. This can lead to "excessive confidence, extremism, contempt for others, and sometimes even violence."

Training, Innovation, KM, & eLearning

2007 Industry Report - Training Magazine
U.S. organizations shelled out $58.5 billion for training this year (including payroll and training budgets). These numbers are up 4.8 percent

Haman's Innovative Investigator Questions (2007 Version) - Alex Chua's Blog
Gerald Haman devoted over 16 years to fine tune and perfect just six questions. Indeed that's a long time, but innovators discovered the questions keep getting better

The Convergence of Learning and Knowledge Management - Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning
Learning and KM solutions have to fuse; that we should speak about union and fusion of the two fields rather than intersection or complementary relationship between them and that the two fields are increasingly similar in terms of input, outcome, processes, activities, components, tools, concepts, and terminologies.

Growing pains: The emergence of 'e-learning' - HR Zone
E-learning still has a long way to go if it is ever to take over traditional training methods, but as part of the learning and development armoury it offers some tempting benefits and many agree that its strength is that it isn't trying to replace the tried and tested methods.

TRIZ, DFSS, Brainstorming: Which Methodology is Best? - Design News
Do you believe in structure, brainstorming or a combination of the two? Obviously, both have merit, but what is the best way to consistently come up with innovation that matters technologically and commercially?

elearning, PACTwiki, Creativity, Instruction, & mLearning

What Steve Jobs Can Teach You About Designing E-Learning - Articulate
People can only retain so much information at one time. So, its important to design your elearning courses (even simple ones) so that the learner can recall as much as possible.

PACTWiki - Guy Wallace
A resource and resource guide for all PACT Practitioners adopting and adapting the "starter-set" of PACT concepts, models, methods, tools and techniques.

Talks Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law - TED
Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument."

Religious wars - Clive on Learning
Training, like education, has for too long endured the unnecessary battle between two camps, which could be characterised as the 'left brainers' and the 'right brainers'.

Handheld Learning 2007: Keeping up with Change (Marc Prensky) - Learn 0n-the-go
What educators need now are frameworks and paradigms for deploying mobile technologies to engage learners and enhance learning; open, scalable mobile learning products and systems that educators everywhere can use, deploy and develop to allow learners to create, share, and reflect; and content that works across mobile platforms.

Brain cells, Miscellaneous, Sensemaking, Education, & Web 2.0

ADULT BRAIN CELLS ARE MOVERS AND SHAKERS - Johns Hopkins Medicine
It's a general belief that the circuitry of young brains has robust flexibility but eventually gets "hard-wired" in adulthood. As Johns Hopkins researchers and their colleagues report, adult neurons aren't quite as rigidly glued in place as we suspect.

Everything is Miscellaneous - KM World
In the book, I use the "miscellaneous" to mean the aggregation of everything, with the important difference that with the digital miscellaneous, we find all sorts of ways that the things are alike, all sorts of connections and relationships.

New forms of sensemaking - e4innovation.com
The multifaceted possibilities of modern technologies represent a quantum leap in the ways in which we can interact information. Knowledge can now be represented in a multitude of different ways - beyond linear text.

The Science Education Myth - Business Week
Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support.

Growing Pains: Can Web 2.0 Evolve Into An Enterprise Technology? - Information Week
Forget outsourcing. the real threat to IT pros could be Web 2.0. While there's a lot of hype and hubris surrounding wikis, mashups, and social networking, there's also a lot of real innovation--much of it coming from increasingly tech-savvy business users, not the IT department.

Data, Innovation, Creativity, Salaries, & Goals

KM: still a long road ahead - KM World
An inordinate amount of time, approximately a quarter of the normal working week, is being spent gathering, collating and massaging data versus analyzing it and acting on it; UK managers spend an average of 11 hours per week; U.S. managers spend an average of 12 hours per week.

Innovation Nation - Forbes
Innovation has become the new currency of global competition as one country after another races toward a new high ground where the capacity for innovation is viewed as a hallmark of national success (Book Excerpt).

Teaching a new generation - CNN
Former Young & Rubicam CEO Peter Georgescu talks about why schools need to incorporate creativity in their curriculum.

Exclusive Salary Survey: Payday - Training Magazine
Despite a see-sawing economy that could make even the most cast-iron stomach queasy, salaries for trainers remain rock-solid at $81,940 in 2007

Learning the abc's of channel management Accelerate
Companies need to focus on achieving three goals: aligning channel strategy with execution; managing operational and supplier/collaborator behavior transformation; and matching the right capabilities to achieve the desired benefit. From the Fall 2007 issue.

Learning Theories, Innovation, eLearning, & Leadership

Your Learning Theory Explored - Elliott Masie
Stanton Wortham, a leading researcher from the Wharton/University of Penn program on Learning Leadership explores learning theories and our occasional contradictions.

Five Common Mistakes in Innovation - Business Week
If you work for Steve Jobs, innovation seems like second nature. If you don't, the only useful lesson seems to be to quit your job and go work for Apple. Rather, search inside yourself for moments of greatness, determine which activities spurred these moments of greatness, and then figure out how to do more of that.

How Long Should an E-learning Course Be? - eLearn Magazine
What is a good length for a module? Through countless hours of instructional design, field testing, and client feedback, I have found that 30 minutes is about the maximum, and less than 15 is too short.

Workplace Coach: Avoid the baby boom gap -- invest in new leaders today
Effective leadership today requires more than technical skills, expertise and solid work ethics. Collaboration (versus the old-school style of authoritative management) is essential for effective management of today's cross-functional operating groups and teams.

As Offshoring Gets Realistic, Can IT Workers Relax? - eWeek
"Globalization is an inevitable thing." While this article is directed at IT workers, it applies to just about all of us.

Behavior, Science, Knowledge, CEO Challenges, & Group Dynamics

Why do you do that? - Seattle PI
The survey found that past behavior wasn't the predictor of future behavior, but rather the commitment to the resolution is what drove change.

Explorers & Crusaders - The Daily Transcript
You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. Usually the former are seeking the truth, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality.

Three Types of Knowledge Workers - Incredibly Dull There are essentially three types of knowledge workers: Knowledge Generators, Knowledge Consumers, & Knowledge Brokers.

Business Intelligence - Inside Training
CEOs top challenges include excellence of execution and finding talent.

Group Dynamics in Cyberspace - eNotAlone
Given the special psychological features of cyberspace, online groups can be quite different than in-person groups. Text-only communications, equalization of status, and the opportunity for altering or hiding one's identity are all unique monkey wrenches tossed into the online group process. Via TRDEV.

Is there really wisdom in crowds? - Cognitive Daily
A physicist says his students are constantly getting misinformation about physics from Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is fine for basic factual information you might find in a newspaper, when you get to the level of serious academic research, the information quality breaks down.

Online Communication, Learning, Long Tail, & Change

Online communication is not second best - Clive on Learning
We know online communication is practical, in that it allows us to keep in touch with each other at a distance, but we would normally consider it a second best to face-to-face communication

RSS Really Simple Stupid - e4innovation.com

• Conceptual - where I understood the concept of RSS feeds but couldn't/didn't use them,
• Applied - where I could use RSS feeds but it didn' t transform me/change my practice,
• Transformative - where the use of RSS feeds has actually changed the way I do things.

Virtual Slide Rule - ENGCOM
See how calculations used to be done before the days of electronic calculators. Find out about an important piece of engineering history. All pieces of the slide rule are draggable.

Good News, Bad News about Facebook Application Market: Long Tail Rules - O'Reilly
The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! If you are interested in Chris Anderson's the Long Tail, be sure to read the comments in the article.

Social Networking Meets Corporate Learning - CLO
Assume you could develop a learning program that attracts millions of learners, holds their attention for hours, impels them to contribute often and come back with their friends.

The Future of the Future Overcoming resistance to change - KM World
Think of the movie, The Karate Kid. Wax on, wax off; wax on, wax off. Complete transformation can only occur when the desired change in behavior becomes habitual, to the point where you no longer have to think about it.

Science, Six Sigma, Behavior, Karl Kapp, & Facebook

The Really Hard Science - Scientific American
Between technical and popular science writing is what I call "integrative science," a process that blends data, theory and narrative. Without all three of these metaphorical legs, the seat on which the enterprise of science rests would collapse.

Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis -The Wall Street Journal
Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets.

The Death of Six Sigma? Overview of the Enterprise Process Performance Improvement Model - Pursing Performance Blog
Just as TQM - Total Quality Management zealots saw the demise of their star in the 1990s, Six Sigma may be loosing some its advocates. It is too bad because both had something of real value to offer.

Human behavior linked to spontaneous brain activity - ars technnica
Spontaneous brain activity is more than simply a physiological artifact; it helps account for some of the variability in human behavior. In that sense, they argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.

FIVE QUESTIONS. . . For Karl M. Kapp - eLearn Magazine
Karl M. Kapp, of Bloomsburg University, is well-known for his applied work in the area of learning strategies and technologies. His latest book is titled Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning: Tools and Techniques for Transferring Know-How from Boomers to Gamers.

For U.S. workers, anxious times - CSM
While most economists believe that freer trade has been very positive for the US and world economies, concern about workers left behind has been growing. Even some of the strongest proponents of free trade are calling for more programs to help workers adjust to the pressure of a global job market - if only to prevent a protectionist backlash that might hurt the economy.

The Fakebook Generation - The New York Times
Facebook purports to be a place for human connectivity, but it's made us more wary of real human confrontation. When I was in college, people always warned against the dangers of "Facebook stalking" at a library computer - the person whose profile you're perusing might be right behind you. Dwelling online is a cowardly and utterly enjoyable alternative to real interaction.

Presentations, ISD, Blendeded Learning, Lego, & mLearning

Learning from Bill Gates & Steve Jobs - Presentation Zen
Mastering the large keynote presentation on stage still alludes Bill Gates. His keynotes are not terrible, they are just very average and unremarkable.

Another Nail In The Coffin for ISD via ADDIE? Or Simply Another Alternative? - The Pursuing Performance Blog
Much has been written in this decade about the death or dying of ISD - Instructional Systems Design via ADDIE.

Five Innovative Examples of Blended Learning - CLO
In its early stages, blended learning meant the mix of classroom (brick) and e-learning (click). Now it has come to mean a mix of a number of methods, to include coaching, simulations, etc.

Rebuilding Lego, Brick by Brick - Strategy+business
How a supply chain transformation helped put the beloved toymaker back together again.

Mobility Movement - ManageSmarter
The same devices you find irritating in meetings—personal digital assistants (PDAs) that keep employees thumbs twitching and cell phones whose disco ringtones interrupt your PowerPoint—can be a boost to training.

IBM Seeks US Patents For Offshoring US Jobs - Slashdot
IBM and other corporations are seeking patents for inventions covering the offshoring of US jobs.

Web Design, Thinking, Political Beliefs, & mLearning

77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer - Vandelay
From button-makers to web 2.0 tools.

7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make - Lifehack.org
The brain isn't a flawless piece of machinery. Although it is powerful and comes in an easy to carry container, it has it's weaknesses.

Are We Predisposed to Political Beliefs? - Scientific American
A new study, led by Amodio, indicates that political bent "is not just a choice people have, but it seems to be linked to fundamental differences in the way people process information."

Mobile Phones, Mobile Minds - Teachers TV
A look at the world of young people with mobile phones, and the impact on schools and education. re mobile phones a force for good, or an example of technology gone awry? (Video - 27 Min.)

Six Sigma, Innovation, & eLearning

The Big Idea: Six Stigma
Programs such as Six Sigma undermine individual contributions to the company. After all, it's hard to feel as if you're doing something meaningful when the language of the workplace reduces you to a cog in an inhuman profit machine.

The Secrets of IT Innovation - CIO
Innovation is a process that takes knowledge and uses it to get a payback. Invention without a financial return is just an expense. Ideas are really the sexy part of innovation and there's rarely a shortage of them.

Engaging Interactions For eLearning
Interactions break up the monotony and improve the learning experience for the end-user. After covering new material in a course, a learning interaction (or from here on, simply an interaction) gives the learner a chance to actually do something and (gasp!) apply their knowledge!

Rapid Authoring, Engagement, Design, & PowerPoint

Rabid Authoring - eel-learning
Is Rapid Authoring simply the dropping of ADDIE in favour of quickly reiterated prototypes or indeed of making it up off the top of your head and getting it out there same day? If that's the case why are we saying it needs instructional design?

Worker Satisfaction Is Overrated - eWeek
It's amazing how engagement has come out of nowhere to become one of the biggest buzzwords in the HR industry.

Foundations of Interaction Design - boxes and arrows
Somehow, products, services, and systems need to respond to stimuli created by human beings. Those responses, need to be meaningful, and clearly communicated and in many ways provoke a persuasive and semi-predictable response. They need to behave.

Technology and Its Discontents - strategy+business
A lot of people talk about the need for a new kind of business model and the spinout from universities and the small firm and the entrepreneurial small firm. That's been the talk of the last 20 or 30 years, has it not? And yet, here we have IBM, which is a terrifically old company and has gone through many generations of technologies, but it is obviously the same corporate entity, the same high-level innovator.

Hear no evil, see no evil: business e-mail overtakes the telephone - Network World
From a productivity point-of-view, the research shows that instant messaging, blogs and softphones are considered most disruptive, and could negatively impact productivity if not managed properly.

Ineffective uses of PPT
Common PowerPoint mistakes (video).

Multimedia, Human Cognition, Learning, & Facebook

Leveraging multimedia for learning - Ruth Clark
What works most effectively in reaching learners in digital environments? Fortunately, we can rely on over 20 years of research on the learning value of many of the multimedia features available to you today.

Human Cognition is More Reactive Than You Think - Will at Work Learning
The learner-centric movement of the 1990's and 2000's has relied too heavily on the notion that the learners always know best, and that they are in conscious control of their learning and we just need to let them make the best decisions.

Top-Ten Teaching and Learning Issues, 2007 - educause
The EDUCAUSE Advisory Committee for Teaching and Learning (ACTL) has identified the key technology-related teaching and learning issues in higher education for 2007.

Opinion: Facebook is killing personal blogging - Tech Digest
I signed into Vox the other day, for the first time in months. It looks like everyone in my personal neighbourhood has been similarly lax too - only one of my friends has blogged in August, and several last posted in May. It's like a Web 2.0 graveyard.

ee-Learning, Gobbledygook, Millennials, & Leadership

Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning - innovate
The term is a hybrid one that brings together two kinds of learning: electronic and experiential.

The Gobbledygook Manifesto - Change This
The winner was "next generation," with 9,895 uses.

How Will Millennials Manage? - Working Knowledge
Nothing seems to set off managers I talk with more than the topic of managing Gen Yers, otherwise known as "millennials," those born beginning in the late 1970s.

e-Learning Market to hit $52.6B by 2010 - The Journal
According to San Jose, CA-based market researchers Global Industry Analysts, which project the global e-learning market to surpass $52.6 billion by 2010: "eLearning: A Global Strategic Business Report. However, last year, IDC forcasted that it will only be $21B by 2008. See chart.

The New Psychology of Leadership - Scientific American
In the past, leadership scholars considered charisma, intelligence and other personality traits to be the key to effective leadership. In an alternative view, effective leaders must work to understand the values and opinions of their followers.

Second Life, mLearning, Feedback, & eLearning

How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life - Wired
Ever since BusinessWeek ran a breathless cover story titled "My Virtual Life" more than a year ago, reporters have been heralding Second Life as the here-and-now incarnation of the fictional Metaverse that Neal Stephenson conjured up 15 years ago in Snow Crash.

Mobile Learning - The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Vol 8, No 2 (2007).

Workplace Coach: There is a skill in delivering critical feedback - Seattle PI
Regrettably, there are people who equate offering feedback as license to criticize or judge. When feedback sounds like a personal attack ("you are rude/out of control"), most people will take it personally and respond defensively. Once in defensive mode, people can't hear anything else you are saying.

Can You e-Learn at Your Desk? - Breakthrough eLearning
Some eLearning is clearly meant to be accessed on-demand, as needed, at the desk. However, I really do not think that learning that requires a great deal of thinking, reflection, discussion, and competency development works while you are trying to squeeze it in among phone calls, reading and responding to emails, and having chats with whomever happens to come by your desk. Related article - Understanding E-Learning 2.0 By Tony Karrer.

Web 2.0, Blogs, Steve Jobs, & Memes

Why We're Like a Million Monkeys on Treadmills - Micro Persuasion
Channels are where the action is at. However, it's important to remember they are just that - and they change. Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage. They faded from our horizon over time. The same thing will happen to many of today's hot sites. In fact, I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating "a Facebook strategy" as much as they don't have "an NBC strategy" or "a New York Times strategy." Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture.

The Next Big Thing: Why Web 2.0 Isn't Enough - Tech Consumer
So the latest 'big thing' has been the socializing of the Internet. We now find sites like Digg, reddit, Del.icio.us, etc. that help us wade through all the rough to find the diamond. The buzz word surrounding all of this has been 'Web 2.0'. This socializing has gone a long way to making sense of it all, but is there more? What is the next big thing? Realtors have been giving us the answer for years, although they didn't know it. The next big thing is. . . 'location, location, location'.

Learning from Dave Winer - Joel on Softweare
I don't know how many times I've read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I'm excited, I'm impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If other people disagree, they're welcome to do so... on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.

Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation - Business Week
After watching and analyzing Job's presentation, I thought about five ways to distill Jobs' speaking techniques to help anyone craft and deliver a persuasive pitch.

Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes - TED Talks
Starting with the deceptively simple story of an ant, Dan Dennett unleashes a dazzling sequence of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of "memes" -- a term coined by Richard Dawkins for mental concepts that are literally alive and capable of spreading from brain to brain.

AARs, Innovation, & Blended Learning

After-action Reviews - Kent Blumberg
The point of routine AARs is to capture lessons learned from each project, find ways to improve future performance, implement those improvements in your own area, and transfer the lessons to other parts of your organization.

Users are transforming innovation - Financial Times
Academic researchers are rapidly converging on the notion that the most effective form of user-centred innovation involves design collaborations among many, widely distributed contributors via the internet.

Blended Delivery: Mixing Modalities - Chief Learning Officer
Blended learning used to refer to the different teaching styles used inside the classroom. Today, with the introduction of synchronous and asynchronous learning, the term now refers to the range of delivery options available to learning professionals, including classroom-based, instructor-led training (ILT), synchronous or asynchronous e-learning, portable technologies and on-the-job training (OJT).

eLearning, Social Sites, Web Design, & the Silent Revolution

E learning, web-based training, - whatever you call it, it's evolving - The Center for Workplace Excellence
What used to be just-in-case learning has become just in time, and in the future we can expect learning that is 'just-for-me.'

News the Crowd Can Use - Wired
The explosive growth of social editing or social news sites such as Digg.com, Newsvine.com and NewsTrust.net , has made a pressing issue of these debates about the virtues of an unedited public sphere and the control of information. That's because social editing web sites allow users to source, debate and prioritize content without intervention from an editorial staff.

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work - Vitamin
Fashion is in one minute and out the next because we get bored of looking at the same things day after day. The same pattern will occur in web design. However, just as there are mainstays of good fashion, such as the little back dress, there are also mainstays of good web design.

Dramatic Impact: The Effect of "The Silent Revolution" - Change This
The world is not flat, nor is it round. It is indeed an interrelationship of sympathetic energy patterns. Our role is not to revolve, but to evolve, moving beyond the repetition of our previous motions, creating new visions to energize and missions to execute.

It's Time to Drop E-Learning - Training Zone
It's time to recognise that the 'e' carries the stigma of past hyperbole, puts some potential learners and managers off and smacks of a love of technology that has everything to do with content delivery, rather than individual learning.

Knowledge, Blogging, & Costco

The half-life of knowledge and the shape of education - Principled Discovery
We may know more superficially, but this seems at the expense of actually understanding anything. And how are we of value if all we can do is connect with others? Each member of the network needs to possess an area of expertise, something to contribute to that network.

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings - Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
Blog postings will always be commodity content: there's a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else's comments. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they're definitely easy to write. But they don't build sustainable value.

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart - The New York Times
Not everyone is happy with Costco's business strategy. Some Wall Street analysts assert that Mr. Sinegal is overly generous not only to Costco's customers but to its workers as well.

Coaching, Knowledge, Posts, iPhone, & Maps

Survey: Executive Coaching Sees Downturn - Chief Learning Officer
After years of increased use, executive coaching is seeing a downturn within corporations, according to a survey from Novations Group, a global consulting and training firm based in Boston.

More guidelines to improve your information literacy - Knowledge Jolt with Jack
We live in a sea of information, as Britannica's Web 2.0 Forum has made plain. Sometimes that sea is full of algal blooms. Sometimes there's raw sewage floating on it.

Internet Time Wiki - Internet Time Blog
What do you do when your best ideals are in the bottom of a reservoir? Blogs and feeds are a mighty flow of information. That flow feeds a reservoir that holds stocks of ideas worth keeping.

Flash Report: First Look at iPhone & Learning Perspectives - Eliott Masie
Elliott details the aspects of the iPhone that are high potential for learning (instructional videos, collaboration and more), some of the challenges (no current use of Flash Video) and a few trends in the mobile.

Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World - Wired
At first, the data all flowed one way, from the mapper to the user. But Paul Rademacher, a DreamWorks Animation programmer, changed that when he invented the map mashup. Today the power lies in the hands of the map makers. The only difference is that we're all mapmakers now, which means geography has entered the complex free-for-all of the information age, where ever-more-sophisticated technology is better able to reflect the world's rich, chaotic complexity.

Informal Learning, Richard Feynman, Everthing, Web Colors, iPhone

Spiritual dimensions of informal learning - Mauro Cherubini's moleskine
Focus on the three primary learning strategies: mentoring, self-directed learning and dialogue. Explores how each of these strategies can facilitate spiritual development.

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now Foundation
In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Theory of Everything - Articlemotron
If we accept new data as accurate on its face, then we are unable to form a concept of the universe around us. New data would just replace old data. Let us use the analogy of a large jigsaw puzzle. By blindly accepting new data, we would never find a starting point. The jigsaw pieces could never relate to each other. Even though all the pieces would be on the card table, we would never be able to distinguish the edge pieces for the interior pieces.

Ultimate HTML Color HEX Code List - COLOURlovers
HTML 3.2 specifications identified sixteen colors that can be used by name to define color in HTML and CSS. But don't worry you can use more than sixteen colors in HTML. . . you'll just need to know the six character HEX values and they are all listed on one page.

A method to the iPhone madness? - c/net
The iPhone really could change the future of computing. It's quite possible that June 29, 2007, will one day be remembered as the day that the average consumer realized what mobile computing was all about. Or it could be marked as the day Apple overestimated its reach and watched its remarkable 10-year renaissance begin to wane.

Phone Launch, AT&T Vs. Apple Store - GIZMODO
A quite telling story about the difference in customer service between the two companies. Day one revealed what all Apple aficionados fear. That AT&T, through the depths of its incompetence, could derail the iPhone.

Innovation, eLearning, Ruby, & Editing Photos

June 26, 2007

If Linux Is Not Innovative, What Is? - The Blade
How does one determine innovation in the first place?

The Rise of Rapid E-Learning - Training Zone
Mike Alcock, MD of Atlantic Link Ltd, argues that the landscape of e-learning has changed out of all recognition as a result of rapid e-learning authoring software. He also argues that with e-learning consultants beginning to use the tools themselves to aid collaboration with clients, the industry will look entirely different again in five years time.

When eLearning Doesn't Work - TechLinks
Creating a good, engaging course is a skill. And unfortunately not all companies have instructional designers and great graphics people within their organization. Most organizations just have a need to transfer knowledge to the employees on information critical to their company and job function.

How Ruby can enable the Web 2.0 Platform - What Not How
Broadly, the shift we are seeing is from the one-way, static document delivery of Web 1.0 towards the two-way, dynamic data exchange of Web 2.0. How do we program the Web platform to animate all this data?

How to Edit Your Photos Online - The Chris Pirillo Show
Fauxto only requires three things: and Internet connection, a web browser, and flash.

Devil's Advocate, elearning, Web 2.0, Innovation, China

How to beat the Devil's Advocate and create an innovation culture - Leadership & Change
Nine simple words, "Let me just play Devil's Advocate for a minute," have torched many a fledgling concept, writes Tom Kelley, author of "The Ten Faces of Innovation." The Devil's Advocate is "the biggest innovation killer in America today."

E-learning: Boom or bust? - Canadian Business
E-learning may be changing how education reaches students, and how employees receive training, but it's less clear that the much-hyped tool has lived up to its potential as a business opportunity. Supporters continue to extol e-learning's benefits in the Internet age. Critics see it as a bud that has yet to flower, or could even spring weeds.

Does Web 2.0 matter? - ZD Net
Just as the electrical grid and socket transformed industry and society in the 20th century, Carr posits that the emergence of massive scale computing utilities and widely available, abundant computing power will be transformative in the 21st century. Centralized supply of computing power will bring enormous scale advantages, driving the price for services down.

'Blog', 'cookie', 'wiki' top list of hated Internet words: poll - China Daily
British pollsters YouGov questioned 2,091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement.

The Art Of Innovation Speech by Guy Kawasaki - Phil McKinney's Blog
Video of great speech from Guy around the "Art Of Innovation" (55 min).

Saturday Links of the Week - June 16, 2007 - how to save the world
Yet More Chinese Atrocities: This week brings news of widespread forced slavery in China's construction trades, mines, and even Olympic trinkets manufacturing. The victims include young children, and are mostly peasants -- the poor, powerless and dispossessed.

Web 2.0, Tufte, Design, & Talent Management

Web 2.0 Backlash - elearnspace
I haven't read Andrew Keen's new book - The Cult of the Amateur. But I will. I've been following his blog for about a month - not because I agree with what he's saying, but because I believe we need to be intentionally diverse in our information habits. We have an unprecedented ability to filter ideas...the diverse perspectives of a newspaper can now be recreated in mono-voice blog reading habits.

Quality and Web 2.0 - eLearning Technology
The publishers and peer review assured the quality of what is produced. In Web 2.0, quality theoretically comes from public review and scrutiny. This is exactly the issue many of us face in the development of training. We are the experts. We validate the quality of the content. Without us in the mix, how do we know that the content being created by learners is accurate, of high quality, appropriate, etc.

The Minister of Information - New York
Tufte envisions Beautiful Evidence as the fourth book in a five-volume series, and I ask him what No. 5 might be. "No more staring at pixels on the screen. More staring at ... what's going into Real-land." In other words, that new book may not be a book at all. "Movies, books, DVDs-I don't know. It's called 'walking, seeing, and constructing,' and it's now in Spaceland. No more representations. Instead of designing with Adobe Illustrator, I'm designing with a Komatsu excavator." The beginning of that change in focus appears at the end of Beautiful Evidence, in a digression about the display of fine art, including photos of his own sculptures. He says his ultimate goal is "to try to help people see better and more intensely. Seeing intensely" - probing the intersection where art and science and philosophy all meet. Off the printed page altogether, getting out of Flatland for good.

Design Shouldn't Always Mean Instructional Design - Tom Werner
We think that instructional design is always the most useful type of design for helping people learn. But instructional design doesn't help much in some types of learning situations.

Talent Management is Key in War For Talent - Lucas Group
Senior level leaders are more and more looking at people development, job competencies, organizational structure and retention of key talent.

Design, Safety Video, VARK, & Discussing Art

Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work - Vitamin
Fashion is in one minute and out the next because we get bored of looking at the same things day after day. The same pattern will occur in web design. However, just as there are mainstays of good fashion, such as the little back dress, there are also mainstays of good web design. While directed at web design, it spills over to ID.

Shake Hands With Danger - Internet Archive
A classic saftey film is avalible for viewing on the web. Although civiian in nature (produced by Caterpillar), it was quite popular in the Armed Forces. This is the way instructional videos were meant to be made!

Gender differences in learning style preferences among undergraduate physiology students - The American Journal of Pathology
A majority of male students preferred multimodal instruction, specifically, four modes (VARK), whereas a majority of female students preferred single-mode instruction with a preference toward K. Thus, male and female students have significantly different learning styles.

Euro-update 2: Is science art? - Cognitive Daily

The article itself is only slightly interesting. But what really shines is the discussion it provokes. Last count - 41 comments.

Creativity, Self-recording, presentations, Blogging, & PWLE

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity - Business Week
While Six Sigma was invented as a way to improve quality, its main value to corporations now clearly is its ability to save time and money. 3M was systematized in ways that were unheard of and downright heretical, even though the guidelines would have looked familiar at many other conglomerates. Early during the Six Sigma effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new process, they all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system. Innovation shall be allowed be little chaotic because that's how great ideas born.

The self-recording craze is nothing new - but now we do it digitally - Guardian Unlimited
What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That's hard to say. Maybe it's just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it's a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing's real until it's been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that.

Useful Commute: Designing a Powerful Presentation - BNET
Michael Moon, a designer at Duarte, the firm behind Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," gives some great advice for creating a presentation that supports your message and keeps your audience engaged. Audio - about 10 minutes.

The Workplace: Can blogs become a big source of jobs? - Herald Tribune
Search "blog," "blogger" or "blogging" on the Indeed.com job board and more than 13,000 jobs come up. But narrow the search to job titles containing those words and the opportunities dwindle to just over 50.

More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments - DARnet
Tony Karrer tracks the blog posts on PLEs and work. Then he wonders. . . if people will adopt these tools and approaches over time, then as a corporation, if you want to be able to keep the content after an employee leaves, especially blog content. . . then shouldn't you make sure you provide these tools now rather than having tools adopted that are outside the firewall and personally owned where you will lose the content if the employee leaves? Which kind of confirms the point being contradicted in Jay Cross's comments: Pitting individuals against corporations is not productive. Nor is the implication that businesses are out to steal workers' intellectual property.

DIY, Social Media, PLEs, Drupal - KM, & Context

Your Design Here - Print
The more amateurs do things themselves, the more they develop a refined taste for good professional work - whether in the kitchen or at the design station. To fear that shoddy DIY work will replace good professional design is to suggest that the two are indistinguishable to the untrained eye.

10 Predictions To Help Define the Social Media Revolution - Social Computing
"To find something comparable," said Rupert Murdoch to Wired Online in July 2006, "you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media - which, incidentally, is what really destroyed he old world of kings and aristocracies. Technology is shifting power away from the editors the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it's the people who are taking control."

Fortunate learners and PLE's - growing changing learning creating
When PLE's are productivity tools to facilitate research work, learning is most likely going to be an unfortunate struggle. When PLE's are created from workflows and use cases to support informal learning, the process is more open-ended, self structured and individualized. When PLE's are intended for learning empathy and other advanced capabilities, the learning is freed from imposed structures and controls.

Capturing workplace knowledge with Drupal - StressFree
Formally recording what we have learned in the workplace is a worthwhile process that is often forgotten or not undertaken because there is no time or immediate incentive to do so.

Layers of networks depend on context - Knowledge Jolt with Jack
A common view of social nets is a set concentric circles where I trust and rely upon the people closest to me. But then this doesn't describe reality as we experience it. Because of context. And it is context that most traditional "social networking" tools have a difficult time describing.

Thinking, Instructional Design, PWLE, Manufacturing, & Google

Thinking is so over - Times Online
The idea that content on the web is "free" is mistaken: the hidden cost may be the demise of old media and entire art forms on which the free content depends. Another web idea dismantled by Keen is the concept of the "long tail" - the slow but gradual accumulation of sales by niche products such as books that could never have commanded shelf space in shops but can wait for buyers to find them on Amazon. In other words, you may never get more than 10 buyers for your little book of poetry, but thanks to the net you can publish it anyway. Somehow those 10 readers will find you. Also see, Does Internet democracy work?

Technology Skills for Instructional Designers - Experiencing E-Learning
More than any specific set of applications, though, is the desire and motivation to learn new technology, especially to learn it independently.

Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - eLearning Technology
I believe there's quite a bit of commonality among the kinds of tasks we deal with (at an abstract level) and we need to help each other figure out how we can effectively and efficiently work through these tasks as individuals, as work teams, as part of a larger ecosystem.

Rhythm - Basic Principles of Design - About.com
Rhythm in design is also called repetition. Rhythm allows your designs to develop an internal consistency that makes it easier for your customers to understand. Once the brain recognizes the pattern in the rhythm it can relax and understand the whole design.

Japanese repair culture and distributed manufacture - Pulse Laser
Distributed Manufacturing is an alternative to the mass manufacture and assembly line of Fordism. The parts can be accessed separately from the assembly, we can build our own neighbourhood factories for custom goods! Mass manufacture doesn't imply treating workers like interchangeable parts too! What's more, it bootstraps off mass manufacture and makes something different out of it.

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine - New York Times
Freshness, which describes how many recently created or changed pages are included in a search result, is at the center of a constant debate in search: Is it better to provide new information or to display pages that have stood the test of time and are more likely to be of higher quality? Until now, Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

Images, Crowds, Cognitive Bias, eLearning 2.0, & Networks

Smart image and video search - KM World
Although the brain isn't fast in comparison to computer hardware systems we have today, it has several key abilities that computers don't currently have. The brain supports heavy parallel processing capabilities, which means we (unlike current computer systems) can, in mere seconds, recognize complex patterns within images. Our brain and visual systems recognize shapes, colors, situational context and extremely fine details better than almost any other cognizant process we perform.

The Ignorance of Crowds - Strategy+Business
The bottom line is that peer production has valuable but limited applications. It can be a powerful tool, but it is no panacea. It's a great way to find and fix problems, to collect and categorize information, or to perform any other time-consuming task that can be sped up by having lots of people with diverse perspectives working in parallel. But if peer production is a good way to mine the raw material for innovation, it doesn't seem well suited to shaping that material into a final product.

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong - Health Bolt
A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality.

E-learning 2.0: Fact, Fad or Fiction? - Kineo
Is e-learning 2.0 just another "rhetorical manoeuvre", as David Jennings says from suppliers and consultants distancing themselves from the failures of the first wave of e-learning?

Networks: Technology - Forbes
The digital revolution is driving some of the most exciting discoveries in medicine and everyday consumer goods. The downside: Technology is eroding human relationships-and giving terrorists new power.

Scripting, Blogging, Flow, Living, Recruiting, & Brainstorming

Scripting for Success - Micro Persuasion
At its purest, scripting helps teams know their initial plays inside and out. This minimizes mistakes, establishes momentum and dictates the flow of the game.

With 15.5 Million Active Blogs, New Technorati Data Shows that Blogging Growth Seems to be Peaking - Business Week
Is it slowing or peaking? It may well be, as Rubel and Gartner argue that, most people interested in setting up their digital soapboxes already have. And that folks are opting to do other types of social media, including video, podcasts, and social networks, which appeal to them more.

Try Flow, Bank Serotonin and Meditate to Tap into Creativity and Avoid Braincramp - Brain Based Biz
Danica Radovanovic suggests that flow, banking serotonin and practicing meditation work to get past times when folks encounter blocks that prevent creativity.

How You Tell the Story of Your Life - Talent Development
84 hotel workers are told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Four weeks later they had decreased all of the following: weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed Hiring Machine - New York Times
"It comes down to just getting them introduced to our culture, showing them that, hey, being part of Google could be a lot of fun," said Ken Krieger, a Google engineer who had volunteered to supervise the Lego-building contest. Note: You also might want to check out Cringely's The Final Days of Google.

The brainstorm - a trojan horse of mediocrity - adliterate
Democracy is great as a way of ensuring that the will of the people is brought to bear in governing of their lives. But it pretty much ensures that blandness is the output we most readily associate with the brainstorm.

Brain Theory, Digital, Design, & Mentoring

Jeff Hawkins' TEDTalk on how brain science will change computing - Ted Blog
Jeff Hawkins brought us the indispensable Palm and Treo -- now he's turned his attention to the human brain, looking to our gray matter for clues to the next generation of powerful computers and software. More on Jeff Hawkins.

David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous" - eLearning Technology
Digital technologies are are having an impact on knowledge creation and decision making.

Design Shouldn't Always Mean Instructional Design - Tom Werner
My colleague Janet Clarey noted a Jay Cross nanocast with Mark Oehlert, posted at Learning Light, in which Mark called for better design of the use of emerging technologies for learning.

Workplace Loyalties Change, but the Value of Mentoring Doesn't - Knowledge Warton
The researchers also learned that Sun's mentoring program was least effective for the highest performers. This was an especially startling result since most mentoring programs focus on developing high performers with high potential, and led the researchers to conclude that "the better investment for Sun would be to spend the money on lower performers to help them raise their level of performance."

Informal Learning, Copyright, Job Satisfaction, & Genius

Formal & Informal Learning - Knowledge Jump
Informal learning gets 86% of all learning investments, while formal learning programs get 14% of the total investment.

Hijacked Disney Characters Explain Copyright - Wired
A movie posted on Stanford University's site called "A Fair(y) Use Tale" mashes up all your Disney favorites to humorously and effectively explain copyright law. The ten minute movie, directed by Eric Faden, came out of Stanford University's Fair Use Project Documentary Film Program.

Job satisfaction doesn't guarantee performance - Seattle PI
Three decades of data derived from thousands of employees in a cross-section of jobs -- blue collar and white collar -- prove that although job satisfaction and job performance do correlate, one does not cause the other.

Genius: 2012 - The New Yorker
Video - Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of stubbornness and collaboration in problem-solving, and how long it takes to master any challenge. Via Anecdote.

Your learning skills were at peak when you were 6 to 10 The Economic Times
Before age 12, the brain is racing to wire itself, making more connections between nerve cells that in turn enlarge vital regions. This is a time of rapid learning, the reason why it is easier to learn a foreign language as a young child than as a teenager or adult, Gilmore said. Also, see SiAm.

Generational Learning Styles, mLearning, Rapid Development, & Web 2.0

What is the "gap" in Generational Learning Styles? - The Pursuing Performance Blog Many social commentators have claimed that the younger generation of soldiers have shorter attention spans and learn best from fast paced, interactive multimedia games or simulations. While this seems intuitively correct, there is no scientific validation for the claim.

Generational Values in Workplace More Similar Than Not, Research Says - CLO
Despite recent emphasis on generational differences in terms of motivation, value systems and learning preferences at work, a research scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership has found the "generational divide" is not really that prevalent.

Issues in mLearning & Zooming in on learning in the digital age - learning elearning Digital literacy in young people spans a wide range. Some of us early 'digital immigrants' may actually be more digitally literate that the generation Y digital native. With links to Kaleidoscope Network of Excellence Mobile Learning Initiative and NZ Council of Educational Research.

5 Myths About Rapid E-Learning - Articulate
The reality is that having rapid e-learning tools and a strategy to use them is important in today's business climate. To get the most out of the tools you need to include sound instructional design and use the tool's multimedia capabilities to create engaging and interactive training.

Web 2.0 'neglecting good design' - BBC
Sites peppered with personalisation tools are in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Why Does Wikipedia Suck - Epidemix
Here's my beef: Wikipedians are at their best when they are able to use their knowledge, be it bonafide expertise or particulates of trivia, to fill in the blanks for our collective intelligence. But I find that when it comes to science topics, I often find Wikipedia more of a hinderance than a help.

Presentations, Informal Learning, Web 2.0, Generation X, Ethics

World's Best Presentation Contest Winners Announced - Guy Kawasaki
Slideshare.net announced the winners of the World's Best Presentation Contest.

The Research Evidence Against Informal Learning - The Pursuing Performance Blog
The evidence from the past 50 years of research on this issue is unequivocal - unguided or minimally guided discovery and constructivist learning programs simply do not work for more than a very small percentage of people.

2007 Business Intelligence Report (summary) - CLO
The BIB (Business Intelligence Board) reports that on average 58 percent of the learning occurring in their organizations is informal.

A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users - Pew Internet
Half of all American adults are only occasional users of modern information gadgetry, while 8% are avid participants in all that digital life has to offer.

Who Is Generation X? - CLO
When addressed in the context of the talent market, this generation often is lumped in with the millennials (or Generation Y), mainly because these two groups are presumed to have similar traits, values and life experiences.

2007 World's Most Ethical Companies - Ethisphere
"The food service industry is the largest industry in the world--and McDonald's has clearly stood apart in introducing healthier food fare, sustainable packaging, food safety, and ethical purchasing practices," say the editors in launching the index.

mLearning, Values, & Web 2.0

Introduction to Special Issue on Highly Mobile Computing - RCET
Highly mobile digital devices have become so inexpensive and ubiquitous that they are considered part of the fabric of society; however, they are not part of the fabric of schools. While schools are holding on to oral traditions, textbooks, and learning that is linear, current learners live in a different world with different media that allow for different ways to access information

Returning to Values to Make an Impact - Leader Values
Based on research there seems to be unanimous consensus that a change in values cannot occur but the work of Emile Durkheim demonstrates how a "symptom of crisis" can lead to a loss of values. Durkheim's work shows us how the present reality of values erosion can take place which puts leaders in a place where they need to understand how values arise.

Are You an Omnivore or Mobile Centric? - Sci-Tech Today
Web 2.0 and the Internet, cell phones and smartphones, laptops and PDAs, YouTube and Facebook -- Are you the kind who can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em, or wish they were never invented? If you can't live without 'em, you may be what a new study from Pew Internet calls an Omnivore, a voracious user of technology that loves Web 2.0 and social networking.

The social technography of Web 2.0 - ars technica
Mac users are almost twice as likely to generate content on the web as Dell users, according to a new report by market research firm Forrester. The report, titled "Social Technographics," identifies six different levels of social media participation on the web and breaks down the numbers between the users of two major computer brands: Apple and Dell. Via Musings from Mars.

Prototyping, KM, Innovation, Baby-Boomers, Outsourcing

Looking Back on 16 Years of Paper Prototyping - User Interface Twelve
In woodworking, sandpaper comes in different grains. Course-grain sandpaper can change the shape of the wood dramatically, whereas fine-grain sandpaper gives the artisan the control to make the details sharper. The same is true when designing. We think of paper prototyping as the course-grain sandpaper and electronic-version testing as the fine grain.

there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth - Cognitive Edge
You know its interesting to see the way in which people involved in social computing are paranoid about distinguishing themselves from Knowledge Management (KM).

Innovation Should be Change for the Greater Good - FC Now
Innovation should be about good DESIGN, about inspiration, about ART, about culture, about creativity, about nature and green.

Boomer Reality - Manage Smater
For a couple of years, everyone was having a fit about what was billed as the upcoming workforce crisis. "In 2010," we read everywhere, "there will be a shortage of 10 million workers, and the competition for talent will be savage."

In Delhi, it's the dead end for E-learning - E-learning in India
Given the shape of e-learning in Delhi and the NCR region one cannot help but wonder whether we have over-sung the outsourcing song.

Networks, Performance, Presentations, & Innovation

The guru is dead, long live the network - Inside Knowledge
There are networks out there that are extremely influential, that do not have a single thought leader behind them.

Performance support tool - Allison Rossett & Lisa Schafer
A free web based performance support tool to help you determine if performance support is right for your project. We present statements about your audience, purpose and context. From Rossett & Schafer's new book, "Job Aids and Performance Support: Moving From Knowledge in the Classroom to Knowledge Everywhere."

Flip charts as visual enhancers - Presentation Zen
I really like the idea of "getting off the grid," stepping away from the computer and "going analog" in the preparation stage of the presentation process. Large sheets of paper and marking pens - as "old school" as they may seem - can be wonderful, simple tools for presenting your ideas or recording the ideas of others.

Quote of the week "Innovation takes place, when many normal people get access to the required tools and resources." From Neurocode

Performance, Memory, Knowledge, & Web 2.0 - 4/22/2007

First Focus on Performance and Then Enable That - The Pursuing Performance Blog
I was at the forerunner of Motorola University, the Motorola Training & Education Center where I learned to better appreciate Education alongside Training. We had to Educate, not train, leaders about "future things" that were coming down the pike AT them. (NOTE: reposted to correct link)

Cognitive Load, Working Memory, and Effective Teaching - Eide Neurolearning Blog
For the classroom, what may seem to be redundant information in a presentation, may be necessary for students with different information processing preferences.

7 Little Known Ways To Drastically Improve Your Learning - ririan project
Unfortunately most people have pretty ineffective strategies for learning. Here are a couple tips for how to maximize the amount you learn so you can use more of it later.

Curiosity and the Mind - Eide Neurolearning Blog
When students were tested later, they did remember best the questions that they had indicated they were most curious about

Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions - The Pew Research Center Since the late 1980s, the emergence of 24-hour cable news as a dominant news source and the explosive growth of the internet have led to major changes in the American public's news habits. But a new nationwide survey finds that the coaxial and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs.

Participation on Web 2.0 sites remains weak - Reuters
Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed, a study showed on Tuesday.

Implicit knowledge in complex system control - myowelt
With longer experience of system control, subjects tend to show better problem solving abiliities without showing an increase in verbalizable knowledge.

Presentations, Adapters, Performance, PowerPoint - 4/18/2007

The first-ever User Generated Presentation - Social Media Group
The idea behind it was to bring the principles of social media to the traditional presentation format - rather that having me (or anyone else) arbitrarily decide what information the audience required on the topic of social media, I let them pull what they wanted.

Interview with Thomas Friedman - Flattening World Challenges Imagination - Yale Global
Explainers - when the world gets this complex, whether you're a manager, a teacher, a professor or a real estate agent who can do modeling, there's going to be huge, huge demand for people who can explain. Great adapters -- people who are simply good at adapting to whatever new. Also has video and full transcript.

First Focus on Performance and Then Enable That - The Pursuing Performance Blog
I was at the forerunner of Motorola University, the Motorola Training & Education Center where I learned to better appreciate Education alongside Training. We had to Educate, not train, leaders about "future things" that were coming down the pike AT them.

PowerPoint: sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying - Presentation Zen
PowerPoint is a great tool for displaying visuals that enhance, illustrate, and generally magnify your narrative. It's been used effectively for years by millions of professionals from such disciplines as academia, engineering, medicine, business, education, government (mostly ineffectively in this case), design, technology, and comedy.

More Women Online - eMarketer
There will be an estimated 97.2 million female Internet users ages 3 and older in 2007, or 51.7% of the total online population. In 2011, 109.7 million US females will go online, amounting to 51.9% of the total online population.

Learning, Testing, Context, Transparency - 4/13/2007

Learning math on the streets - On the Brain
Learning is always to a significant extent context-based. We all know that "being good at school" does not automatically translate to high adaptive intelligence for any other real environment!

Tests + Stress = Problems For Students - Brain Connection
The byproduct of years of testing has caused students to believe that good grades are more important than understanding - that high scores rather than the cultivation of the mind is the purpose of schooling. Also, see This is Your Brain on Poverty and Nowadays, Even the Illiterates Read and Write.

Maximizing Your Return on People - Harvard Business Review (Laurie Bassi)
An evidence-based approach to HR is a methodology for determining which HR policies and programs will have the greatest impact on subsequent business results by using quantitative methods to identify the casual relationships between the management of people and business results.

The Future Of Learning Is Informal And Mobile - Robin Good
When you do something you have to stop and reflect, you have to learn something: wikis are about putting those reflections together in the collective action. That's important for building new knowledge, new ideas and understand what to do next. You are not saying things in a classroom out of context, you are not sitting in a formal course within an organization but you are actually there, where you need to be. You need to apply the context to the context itself. I think that's what mobile learning does: it enables us to utilize the context in a better way.

Operation Channel 9 - Wired
Channel 9 makes Microsoft look downright visionary through the use of transparency. No large company - with the possible exception of Sun Microsystems - is as far along in understanding how the Internet changes the way employees connect with suppliers, customers, shareholders, and peers.

Learning, Presentations, & Context - 4/12/2007

The Importance of Learning Slowly - Gary Woodill
Like neural networks, the brain is based on vector algebra, rather than numerical computations. Vectors have strength and direction, and many vectors, representing multiple inputs, unite to form a result. The result in the brain is strengthening or weakening of a set of neural connections, a relatively slow process.

Designing the Perfect Presentation - Business Week
In the accompanying slide show, seven keys I learned from Duarte that can be applied to any presentation.

Pearls Before Breakfast - Washington Post
Most of you have more than likey read this, if not, it is well worth the read: A test is performed of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. The experiment consists of having a world famous violinist perform incognito in the Washington D.C.'s Metro during rush hour. Will people stop, listen, and observe because they recognize something great is happening, or will they ignore him because he is totally out of context with the surrounding environment? Note - be sure to view the comments too.

Context developers get it right - Tom Haskins
Afer reading the above link on context, you might want to see how it applies to learning design.

Diversity Training: Where It's Been, Where It's Going - CLO
Traditional diversity training has focused on sexual harassment, racial disparity or some other concept specific to a particular demographic, but Hannum said, in the future, diversity training will move toward more general concepts as the workforce becomes more demographically heterogeneous and faces more religious, racial, cultural, regional, even professional differences.

Effectiveness of Reading and Mathematics Software Products: Findings from the First Student Cohort - IES
Test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using the reading and mathematics software products than those in control classrooms.