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.