Aha Moments in 2007

The Big Question is back...

December Big Question - What did you learn about learning?

I'm going after this just a little bit different. I wanted to go back and figure out what things really struck me during 2007....

So I first went back to what I wrote about last year:

Some of the more specific memories from 2006:

• I started my blog in February 2006.


• I started using del.icio.us and Yahoo MyWeb to save bookmarks - locally saved favorites seem rather limited now.


• I had a real "aha experience" after using add-ins to provide features inside my blog. Boy were they easy to use. It's all pure service. And this experience kept coming all during the year with Wikis, and more (Incredibly Cool! Vision of Future of Application and eLearning Development)


• I found myself no longer recommending the use of RoboInfo or other similar programs for reference materials. Wikis are way better even if the end-users don't edit.


• I had a very interesting disagreement with a client about the technical direction for their solution - they wanted local editing via a Word add-in locally installed - I advocated providing a pure web delivered solution. I lost the argument. In the long run, they'll lose. No one should advocate putting stuff on a desktop anymore without a dang good reason.


• I found myself using Wikipedia early in research tasks on all sorts of topics.

But by far the most vivid memory of 2006 comes from a comment made during a panel that I was moderating on eLearning 2.0. We had discussed Wikis, Blogs and were embarking on Second Life. Someone from the audience in all sincerity said:

“This stuff is freaking me out.”

She is right on the money. It is freaking us out. We know something pretty special is happening right now.

If you are a glutton for more of this, take a look at:

• Does eLearning 2.0 Make a Difference?


• Authoring in eLearning 2.0 / Add-ins & Mash-ups

Wow, what a great list from 2006, I'm glad I have that saved somewhere. ;)

So how about in here's a random list of things from 2007:

• My 10 year old son edited Wikipedia - A Fourth Grader Wikipedia Update and added value.
  
  
• Some people are really not getting the impact of different tools. Getting Value from LinkedIn, Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He is Wrong!, Spending or Wasting Time on Web 2.0 Tools?,
  

• But the good news is that it appears that more and more people are getting it (More eLearning Bloggers, Facebook Fridays and I'm definitely Pushing Harder Now and we need to adopt the attitude - eLearning 2.0 - Just Go Do It.
  
  
• We are going to be going through Disruptive Changes in Learning. and unless you innovate (Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning) you are going to fall prey to alternatives be it do-it-yourself learning or start-ups.
  
  
• A purely virtual conference (Free Online Conference - Corporate Learning: Trends) with amateur organizers, gorilla marketing through social networks, and a wiki for it's main page worked out pretty well. And I'm sure it could be better.
  
  
• Social networks through my blog or LinkedIn are great ways to get specific help for yourself and for others... Making Learning with an LMS Fun? Help Needed!, Help - Pace in Industry, LMS Selection Presentation, Writing, Learning, Knowing - Help Needed.
  
  
• Courseware is being pushed towards Good Enough because clients value speed more than quality in many cases.
  
  
• It's hard to find out how people are using Web 2.0 tools inside organizations.
  
  
• Adoption is going to be personal/consumer first - organizational adoption is going to lag: Web 2.0 - Consumer vs. Enterprise Use. Companies are going to have a big problem trying to handle this: More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments.
  
  
• Signs of the times: End of an Era - Authorware Dies, InfoWorld Folds Print Magazine
  
  
• When you name your kids, consider personal search - Personal Search - and Naming Your Kids.
  
  
• The way people find you can be amusing: Top Ten Subliminal Searches.
  
  
• I'm not very good with Back Channel Use - and I should learn how to do it better.

But probably the biggest sign of the times for me is that I personally find myself working on helping lots of organizations figure out how social media, new technologies, etc. affect them and their users.

Cisco - Enterprise 2.0

I don't know how I missed this, but thanks to Bill Ives for covering it on the FastForward blog -More Web 2.0 Stories, Part One: Cisco Goes All Out on Enterprise 2.0 points us to:

Mike Gotta - Cisco: Learning Internally Before Delivering Externally and Money's Cisco's display of strength

[Martin] De Beer a year ago set up an internal wiki called I-Zone that has so far generated 400 business ideas. "Better still," he says, "another 10,000 people have added to those ideas." His team measures which notions draw the most activity and cherry-picks a handful to unveil at Cisco's quarterly leadership-development program. Normally at such gatherings, promising up-and-comers from across a company hear lectures, bond, and ponder case studies. But De Beer decided to use these sessions to take the most promising I-Zone ideas and pound them into real-world business plans. Three of the nine notions so tested are now in active development.

This whole process has been an eye opener even for Chambers. He used to tell his staff, "I do strategy; you do execution." "He was amazed," says Ron Ricci, a former consultant who since 2000 has served as Cisco's internal culture keeper. "He said, 'We just did three billion-dollar market opportunities without my knowing about it.'"

This sounds a bit like IBM's innovation jams which have been very successful in generating ideas and discussion across the organization.

In September [2007] it launched a website that is a microcosm of everything evoked by the phrase "Web 2.0." There's a Ciscopedia, where people can build an evolving body of lore about anything fellow Ciscans might want to know.

This sounds similar to what Intel did with Intelpedia - which has been really great at providing support across a wide cross section of activities at Intel. Several training initiatives have made good use of content being created on Intelpedia.

There are text blogs and video blogs, discussion groups, and "problems and solutions links." There's an internal version of MySpace, which provides not only title and contact info but also personal profiles, job histories, interests, and videos. Soon it will show whether a person is reachable by, say, office phone, cell, IM, or telepresence, and offer a one-click connection.

Fantastic. Great way to find expertise and resources. Capture best practices. And support personal learning and networking.

And there's more. "We're going to use social bookmarking to allow us to take the pulse of the organization," says Jim Grubb, who built the website (and whose day job is putting together John Chambers' demos). They'll do that by aggregating the tags employees create into "tag clouds" when they click on sites. Tracking these will allow a Cisco honcho to get a snapshot of the current hot-button issues for marketing or finance. If an employee is tagged as the go-to person for virtualization, say, he could earn a bonus for this previously unacknowledged expertise. That's down the road. Asked for a here-and-now example, Cisco marketing head Sue Bostrom laughs (proudly) and recounts the six-month online campaign to develop and select a five-note "Cisco sound" for TV and Internet ads. "Ten thousand employees voted," she says, "and 1,200 partners also participated."

Great description of what organizations can do.

Getting Value from LinkedIn

For a person who I generally think is pretty smart Thomas Davenport (his book Thinking for a Living is generally quite good), I find him saying some pretty weak things. A couple months ago, I took him to task in Thomas Davenport and Blogging - He is Wrong!

In his book he tells us basically that blogs have

detracted from productivity, not increased it. ...

He misses the value proposition of Blogging as a Learning and Networking tool.

Now Davenport is at it again with a post (on his blog no less - I guess he doesn't want to be productive himself) - LinkedIn Is Not a Social Network. In this post, he says:

I’ve been on LinkedIn for several years. I never initiate a “connection,” but I dutifully accept invitations to connect, even when I don’t know the person. When I do know the person, I often wonder why, if they really want to connect with me, they don’t just send me an email or call me on the phone. I can safely say that I have gotten nothing out of the site other than emails saying that so-and-so would like to connect. Occasionally people I know have asked me through LinkedIn for access to my connections -- which an email notifies me of -- and I wonder why they didn’t just send me an email themselves. It’s a funny world.

He never initiates a connection? What!?!

Either Tom doesn't get it, or Tom doesn't ever need to find expertise on a topic. Maybe he should look through his network for something like "social networking" to find some expertise on the topic as he's thinking about the possible value proposition?

I've met fantastic people through LinkedIn. The key ingredient is being able to formulate what you are looking for. Most people I've met through LinkedIn are quite willing to spend time talking with me about the particular issue. I never abuse it. I've done my homework first. But there's nothing like drilling down on a topic with a person for 30-60 minutes.

Or maybe Tom should ask a question on LinkedIn such as "How do people get value from LinkedIn?" to help him learn how to formulate requests? He would get wonderful responses on this.

Tom also wonders "why people didn't just send him an email" when they are making a connection. It's because, the person making the request has done a search on LinkedIn and is routing it through you.

I'm really convinced Tom has never tried this before. Once you've done this a couple of times, it's pretty clear how it works and how you get value.

Note: I personally no longer ever go more than to a 2nd level connection. One hop away. That way the person doing the introduction knows both people. With a few hundred connections, depending on the specific need, you often have quite good people only one hop away.

Tom did say in his post...

let me state that I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling. At a conference a while back on social network issues, a speaker asked the audience, “How many of you are on LinkedIn?” Virtually all of the 100 or so attendees raised their hands. Then he asked, “How many of you have gotten anything valuable from LinkedIn?” Only one person had his hand raised. I didn’t know him, but I’m guessing he had used it to look for a job.

I've heard similar things as well. I believe that many people, not just Tom, must not have really tried this out. Or they've gone onto LinkedIn without a specific need. If you are just browsing around, you will be disappointed. But with a specific need, it's a fantastic tool.

And, of all people, Tom should understand this. He talks very specifically in his book about being able to maintain a network and access it when needed to derive value. Quite often I find value from my direct connections using LinkedIn - and I didn't realize they knew about the topic until I searched. It's a very efficient way of tapping into your network. I wonder how Tom does it? I'd be curious about the productivity around his approach?

Oh, and while I'm complaining about Tom. Cmon man, respond to comments left on your blog. Respond to blog posts - like this one. And stop putting things like:

If you're interested in my consulting services ...

If you know you want my speaking services ...

as the only possible reasons to contact you (on your contact page). It makes it seem like you wouldn't want someone to contact you unless they are willing to pay.

Or maybe this is starting to explain part of the reason why Tom's not seeing value in LinkedIn, blogging, ...

For more discussions on networking and LinkedIn see Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California, Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking, Pre-network with LinkedIn, Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

Big Question is Back

I just wanted to alert folks that Learning Circuit's Big Question has been revived. We've lost Dave Lee's forms, but we are going back to the old manual approach. I hope you'll join the party and submit your thoughts on the question:

The Big Question for December is:

What did you learn about learning in 2007?

If you are new to blogging, this is a great way to get your blog noticed.

Semantic Web Applications - Mundane or Interesting

A recent post by Richard MacManus on 10 Semantic Apps to Watch
discusses several semantic web applications. Richard explains semantic web applications as:

A key element is that the apps below all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users.

For example, ClearForest provides a Firefox extension called Gnosis. It is a bit of a dog, but it can "identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing." It recognizes Companies, Countries, Industry Terms, Organizations, People, Products and Technologies. Each word that Gnosis recognizes, gets colored according to the category. This technique is often called entity extraction.

What got me to post was that Stephen Downes tells us:

all this semantic goodness is now so common-place, it's impossible to see any distinguishing features...

None of it really speaks to me.

I'm somewhat in agreement that by themselves, many of these applications don't seem all that interesting. But, the title of the article was "to watch."

Take entity extraction as an example. When you combine that with relational navigation as is offered by Siderean, you get an interesting result. Go visit Environmental Health News. Do a search, such as for "cancer" and you get a page with a sidebar that looks like the one shown to the left.

It's really powerful to be able to see content organized in this fashion, especially with counts. It helps makes sense out of any body of information. Helps you navigate through it using a browse mode in combination with search. It's a very powerful tool in a lot of contexts.

The key ingredient though is having a means to extract the meaning out of the content.

This speaks to me.

Facebook Alfresco Platform

Found via Publishing Enterprise Content To Facebook -

Alfresco - a content management system has provided hooks for it to be used to deliver content to Facebook users.



This model, where Facebook becomes a platform for application development has some really interesting aspects. However, the open aspect of OpenSocial likely will win out in the long run. Especially with some of the pain of developing Facebook apps.

eLearning Guild Research Reports

In my last post on Flash Quiz Tools, I mentioned how I had used the eLearning Guild Research to streamline my effort of find the right tools.

This post is probably long overdue, but the use of the data from the guild has been a really great resource and has lead to posts such as:

• Flash Quiz Tools
• LMS Satisfaction Features and Barriers
• Course Authoring and Rapid eLearning Tool Satisfaction
• Software Simulation eLearning (w/ links to Tools)
• LMS Team Size and Time

I personally get the most value by having direct data access to the reports. That way I can slice and dice the reports as I need. However, the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:

The eLearningGuild recently announced that they would give copies of the PDF reports to all Associate Members (which is free with a profile completion). This level of membership also gives you several other nice things such as the eMag, access to data behind eLearning Buyers Guide, Training Modalities, the e-Learning Salary & Compensation Report, and the e-Learning Projects Database.

And, if I'm not mistaken this includes direct data access to the Tools Satisfaction data that I just used in my last post!

It's definitely worth the price, i.e., the time it takes to fill in the profile.

The PDF research reports include the following, but I believe that you also get access to some of the slightly older reports such as Informal Learning, Future Directions, Extended Enterprise, etc. You can click on the images to see more information about each report.

Immersive Learning Simulations
Learning Management Systems
Synchronous Learning Systems
Mobile Learning
Measurement