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In the News with Knowledge, Learning, Performance, and Leadership - 2006 For the latest news, go to main news page December 30, 2006 Jerome Murat - Daily Motion This has nothing to do with news, but sometimes you just gotta share. . . Al Gore's Convenient Presentation - Business Week In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore makes a persuasive case that the world must take dramatic steps to curtail carbon dioxide emissions in order to reduce global warming. The point is not to convince you the issue is as urgent as Gore argues. Rather, it's intended to help you improve the power of your communication skills by breaking down Gore's documentary, which is really a great slide presentation in film form. The Third-Generation Web is Coming - Stephen's Wb Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents. Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 - Fastforward the Blog These tools may well reduce management's ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company's leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed. KMPro Journal KMPro KMPro has release their second edition of the 2006 KMPro Journal - Volume 3, Number 2 Winter 2006. Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation) - New York Times "Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it - and we are losing that ability." December 26, 2006 A tale of two experts on m-Learning - The People's Guide to mLearning I want to raise a flag here in regards to self-directed learning. We can't yet guarantee that we have such learners (to the contrary). So just providing access is not sufficient, we need to push support. I think we can do one more thing, and we should: help individuals learn to learn. Hence my involvement in the Meta-Learning Lab. That can be accomplished through a layer on top of our learning systems. Imagine, a learning system that not only meets your immediate needs, but develops you over time! Welcome to 2007, the Year of Innovation - Seattle PI The challenge is not that the U.S. is slipping in maintaining an innovation culture, but that the rest of the world is catching on and catching up. The competition is intensifying for ideas and talent. Innovation efficiency is a game of diminishing and finite returns. You can never do better than no cost, even if you were able to get materials and labor for free. In real-world terms, you cannot, no matter how energetically one slashes costs, cut them to the point of China, or after that Africa, or after that whatever the next low-cost emerging economy is. The alternative is, to borrow a fashionable term, top-line growth. That's where innovation -- coming up not just with more efficient ways to make products but new products -- can contribute. Cycling to knowledge - Knowledge-at-work. Enumerative description is an interesting way to capture local perceptions and experience of situations. Expert(s) gather to look for invariance across their domain and select the questions that best define the current situation. E&P top 10's missing number 1 - Innovation in College Media Those interested in journalism will want to read the Editor & Publisher story on the top newspaper stories of 2006: Strupp's Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2006. In it, Strupp tags "The Internet coming of age" as the top newspaper industry story -- yet, that is old news. America's New Digital Divide - Micro Persuasion In 2007 our challenge is to bridge the digital divide that exists between the technophiles and the technophobes. It's staring us right in the face wherever we go. Consider how many of your friends blog or post to Flickr or even know what the heck del.icio.us is. December 23, 2006 The Youngest Grocer In America YouTube After the only grocery store in Truman, Minn., closed earlier this year, 17-year-old Nick Graham bought and re-opened it to help save the struggling community. Note: CBS News video. The interaction between genes and environment - ADC Many have alluded to the importance of the environment on the developing brain. As a neuroscientist, I root and endorse that view in the bump and grind of brain cells. You are born with most of the brain cells you will ever have. It is the growth of the connections between the brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. What is exciting is that the environment will influence the configuration of those connections. So even if you are a clone‹that is, an identical twin‹you will have a unique pattern of brain cell connections. Also, see Taxi drivers' knowledge helps their brains grow. Brain Gain: Mental Exercise Makes Elderly Minds More Fit - Scientific American The research holds out hope that simple mental exercise may play a key role in staving off dementia and other cognitive declines that currently afflict at least 24 million people worldwide. But it is not as simple as continuing to do the crossword or sudoku puzzles that you love, the brain must be continually stretched and challenged. To drive this effect, you have to practice things that you don't like or things you don't regularly practice. Another Guru Sharing the Same Old Myth - Will at Work Learning And here's another example of a well-respected industry analyst lazily sharing the biggest myth in the learning field. How does a brain do what it does? - Baltimore Sun Like animals, Minsky observes, people exhibit instinctive reactions: They hear a sound and turn toward it. From parents (or other "imprimers") they learn to react as well, looking both ways before they cross the street. Deliberative thinking allows human beings to consider alternatives before making a decision. Reflective thinking permits an evaluation not only of external phenomena but of activities inside the brain. And self-reflection thinking makes it possible to consider a decision in light of a person's self-image. Confusion and conflict, Minsky maintains, force us to use some (cognitive) roads less traveled by. Positive reinforcement, by contrast, can lead to rigidity. December 18, 2006 The best pictures of the year - MSNBC 2006 Year in Pictures - slide show with audio. Virtual experiences can cause embellished, false memories - Physorg.com Although learning through interactive experiences with a product is vivid and can enhance knowledge, it can create an illusory sense of competence. While interactive experiences are generally better for helping people retain information, they often cause people to imagine features and functions that don't exist. Understanding Mobile 2.0 - Read/Write Web Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have Internet access. What is more, the World Bank estimates that more than two-thirds of the world's population lives within range of a mobile phone network. Mobile is going to be the next big Internet phenomenon. Gestures Offer Insight - Scientific American According to McNeill's theory, the process of speech production and the process of gesture production have a common mental source in which a mixture of preverbal symbols and mental images form the point of origin for the thought that is to be expressed. This growth point, as McNeill calls it, represents a kind of seed out of which words and gestures develop. Key Predictions for IT Organizations in 2007 and Beyond - Gartner Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. December 17, 2006 Person of the Year: You - Time Magazine The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. Definitions of Informal Learning - Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning The notion of informal learning is becoming increasingly important. In a corporate context, learning is much more than formal training. And, our academic learning also comes from different informal channels; e.g. through games, simulations, experiments, story-telling, discovery. Survey: Not All Workers Consider BlackBerry a Ball and Chain - eWeek Even though workers acknowledge that their wireless devices are eroding the boundary between the office and their outside-work lives, the survey found them focusing more on the benefits than drawbacks. Web 2.0 and the AJAX - Open Source Tecnnology Web 2.0 is a strange thing in that it doesn't really exist. You can't buy Web 2.0; you can't buy a Web 2.0 programming language, and you can't buy Web 2.0 hardware. In many ways, the phrase "Web 2.0" is a marketing phrase like "paradigm shift" or "the big picture". Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds - c/net In a 1945 paper, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek described how prices set by a free market are really "a mechanism for communicating information" about the probability of future events. December 13, 2006 Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Stephen's Web Stephen Downes weighs in on Will Thalheimer's Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers. Knowing Knowledge - How to Save the World George Siemens' online book Knowing Knowledge is fun to read: It's laid out like a Tom Peters book -- full of graphics and different type fonts, and some wonderful quotations1. It has a kind of stream-of-consciousness style that's a bit McLuhanesque. New Cool Tool Rundown - e-Clippings (Learning As Art) Including podcasting, 3D building and data comparison. Widening Performance Gap in the Back Offices of Large Global Corporations - Garp Achieving world-class performance in four core operational areas - information technology (IT), finance, human resources (HR) and procurement - companies can reduce annual SG&A costs by $60 million per billion in revenue. To achieve these gains, world-class performers demonstrate strength in five best practices categories: strategic alignment of business goals and operating procedures; complexity reduction; technology enablement; business processing sourcing; and cross-functional partnering. Measuring the Value of HR - HR Magazine In 2001, American Standard's Fred Poses (CEO) and Larry Costello (Senior VP for HR) were seeking substantive evidence on the actual impact of the company's major strategic initiative for managing its talent. December 12, 2006 Convergence Learning - The Learning Circuits Blog The Convergence Learning Model is founded upon cognitive sciences and operates on three impetuses: the psychology of learning, pedagogical change, and technological advancement. Transparent Design - Cole Camplese: Learning & Innovation My wife was our Manager of Instructional Design back at the Solutions Institute and she had this crazy idea to release the entire CMS content basis as the learning environment, not just the polished html output of the course content. In other words, she wanted to let students and faculty to see not only the content, but all the instructional design and media notes that we managed along side the content in the repository. Assessment Mistakes by E-Learning Developers - Will at Work Learning Almost all of us---as far as I can tell---are just not getting valid feedback on our instructional-development efforts. Note that though 48% said they did Level 2 learning evaluation on their most recent project, probably most of those folks delivered the assessment in a way that biased those results. This leaves very few of us who are getting valid feedback on our designs. Many companies still not ready to embrace Web 2.0 concepts - Business.ca Employees are increasingly concerned about finding the information they require. As a result, some of the Web 2.0 types of approaches are quite popular. Things like blogs, for example, have a way of making sense of what's going on. log(N) = 0.093 + 3.389 log(CR) (1) (r2=0.764, t34=10.35, p<0.001) - Cognitive Edge Recognise it? Well of course, it's the best-fit reduced major axis regression equation between neocortex ratio and mean group size for the sample of 36 primate genera taken from Dunbar's 1992 paper which was popularised, and not unduly trivialised by Malcolm Gladwell into a natural limit on human group size of 150 (or 147.8 to be exact). December 9, 2006 Alvin Toffler: The Thought Leader Interview - Strategy + Business Mr. Toffler wrote that the years to come would be marked by information overload, an acceleration of technological change, and a resultant social upheaval that he likened to mental illness: "Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon." The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 - SOA Web Services New Web 2.0 software that was released or extensively overhauled since January 1st, 2006. For more on Web 2.0, see What is Web 2.0 ? From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Internet Time blog The Well was an amazing place to toy with ideas. The community included reporters, writers, journalists, inventors, astronauts, deadheads, scientists, rabble rowsers, radicals, hackers, and more. I remember staying up into the wee hours reading Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly (from Biosphere II!), futurist Tom Mandel, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Christopher Locke, and many, many others. Flamewars were commonplace. Dialog was continuous. In Mobile Denial - Training Day I keep hearing about the "mobile workforce," and keep seeing people picking out tomatoes in the grocery store with one hand while changing the dial (or whatever it is) on their iPods with the other. I've also heard "texting" people is big. Media 2006: The Year in Traffic - eWeek From video sites to social networking to social news, 2006 saw several power shifts in online traffic and influence. Netscape relaunched as a social news site, YouTube dominated the online video space, and Flickr continued to innovate. December 7, 2006 2006 Industry Report - Training Magazine The year 2006 was one of growth for the training industry. Most organizations reported healthy increases in their training budgets, with an average budget increase of 7 percent over last year. Today, companies are spending $1,273 per learner on training, including staff salaries. Why Workflow Sucks - ebiz The problem stems from the fact that most Workflow products were flawed, and as a result, the problem in the gene pool has rippled through to the new BPM species. So what was wrong with workflow? It's quite simple when you think about it; most workflow products assumed that work moved from one resource to another. One user entered the loan details, another approved it. But business doesn't work like that. M-Learning (mobile learning) - ELT Notes Useful set of mLearning links. Top 10 Freeware Apps for M-Learning - Mobile Learning Ten of the most useful, free software applications you can use to design and deliver mobile learning. 101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity - Campus Technology Some of the best examples of how campus IT is meeting the connectivity challenge. December 5, 2006 Tom Wujec: Using images to think and innovate - Business Inovation Insider To demonstrate the power of using image visualization to convey ideas, Tom created visual representations of different sessions at the event. How The Internet Saved Literacy - Forbes The Internet has shortened the feedback loop on writing and has made readers more active participants, says Matt Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. "Reading is more intimately associated with writing," he says. Learning During Sleep? - YubaNet Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep. Youth speak out on digital divide - BBC As students from around the world gather in Hong Kong for the fifth annual International Telecommunication Union's Youth Forum, two young people talk to the BBC News website about telecoms and technology in their particular countries. Web 2.0: Is it changing the world? - The Pacer If one stops to think about how Web 2.0 drastically impact college and high school students alone through Myspace and Facebook it becomes obvious that we of the future generations of the work force and leadership of the world are becoming increasingly connected to people outside our normal circles of influence and in time can become truly global. December 2, 2006 A Wider World: Youth, Privacy, and Social Networking Technologies - Educause Lawrence Lessig's four factors of the Internet-technology, the market, the law, and social norms-offer a means to analyze this medium. Business Intelligence: Training That Sticks - Manage Smater It's important to train at the level of the action, not the abstraction. Business is fundamentally about actions and behaviors. Mobile Learning Redefined - Ubiquitous Thoughts It's not about the new technologies... It's making use of what they [students] already have in their pockets. Is Microsoft driving innovation? - Don Dodge The Wall Street Journal asks "Is Microsoft Driving Innovation or Playing Catch-up with Rivals?" People tend to confuse invention with innovation, as the WSJ has here. They use the words interchangeably, but they are very different. Study: 1 in 5 parents say kids online too much - CNN About 80 percent of the children say the Internet is important for schoolwork, although three-quarters of the parents say grades have not gone up or down since they got Internet access. November 29, 2006 Earning A Seat At The Table - Training Day If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone from the training sector complain that senior management doesn't get it or doesn't support training, I would be a rich man. Design Models As Emergent Features: An Empirical Study In Communication And Shared Mental Models In Instructional Distance-Educator.com The design and development model actually informs the activities of the group, but that it is interpreted and adapted by the team for the specific project. Thus, the actual practice model of each team can be regarded as an emergent feature. 2006: The Year of Living Globally - eWeek Although international commerce has been going on since the beginning of civilization, what's different now is instant communication between scattered locations that makes an office on the other side of the world look like it is next door. US Mobile Learning Market Reaches $460 Million in 2006 - PR Web The market for Mobile Learning products and services across all the buyer segments is growing by 27.2% and will exceed $1.5 billion by 2011. Should the CLO Focus on Talent Management Education? - CLO Some organizations only think of talent development in terms of who are the future leaders of the organization, and really it¹s much, much broader and deeper than that. November 27, 2006 Knowledge Solves Manufacturing's Rubik's Cube - Desktop Engineering Product development is like Rubik's cube. Each face representing IP, product, or process knowledge. All of which must come together in the right series of steps to develop a manufacturable product. Shoveling on Digg - Business Week As much as I like the idea of Digg--a site where a community chooses the most interesting or relevant news--I must confess that I just don't use it that much. Putting the pod in podcast - The News-Gazette Instead of simply recording lectures and making them available to students to download, D'Arcy and Eastburn have chosen to assemble weekly podcasts, each about five to seven minutes long. In each, they summarize the week's lesson, address common points of confusion and pose critical questions. Business Intelligence: Are You in Training or Talent - Manage Smarter "The training department is a gray elephant," he says. "They focus on classes and students, and their metrics are how many people are in there, and that's it." Is Web 2.0 Darth Vader? - ZD Net Bill Thompson's essay on The Register warns that "Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist should immediately dismiss as unsustainable." November 25, 2006 Web 2.0 happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web - ZDNet Web 3.0 is another name for the Semantic Web, which has been anticipated for some time now. We are entering an era when communities of end users not only build content, but also can quickly and easily assemble their own applications to leverage the content in new and innovative ways. What Matters in Student Learning? - Innovation Online Results reveal that student performance is significantly influenced by community attributes, but not school attributes. Of the things that did matter: household income, parent education, among other community variables. And the things that didn't matter: teacher certification, teacher experience, spending per pupil, and school size (though teacher certification showed some promise). Interested in learning how to develop mashups? - ZDNet There are a lot of different definitions of what a software mashup is (there are also other types of mashups, like music). But I stick to the one where the final piece of software is derived from the functionality and/or data of two or more disparate sources that have been woven together Why does the fashion industry thrive in spite of rampant IP "piracy"? - ars technica The fashion industry has what they term a "low-IP equilibrium," in which clothing designs enjoy almost no copy protection and designers frequently turn large profits by copying each others' work. In spite of the lack of IP protection, the fashion industry remains vibrant and profitable, mostly through the effects of Induced obsolescence and Anchoring. The problem with innovation... - CIR There are all sorts of barriers thrown up against taking the innovative steps needed to meet challenges facing us, for example, staving off competition from lower cost economies. However, many organisations fail to grasp how vitally important the role of innovation is today. Worse still, they realise how important it is, but for whatever reason, their inventions often fail to be implemented. October 21, 2006 Crowdsourcing Creativity - Micro Persuasion Crowdsourcing was first coined by Wired Magazine earlier this year. It's a process where businesses faced with tough challenges don't try to come up with all of the answers themselves. They tap into the collective wisdom of millions of amateurs around the world to come up with a solution. Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge - Stephen Downes Stephen Downes has published a paper for the ITFORUM discussion group. He turned it into a wiki for all to read and edit. Bramble Bushes in a Thicket - Cognitive Edge A book chapter on the relationship between narrative and learning networks. Malcolm Gladwell on Neural Networks That 'Solve' Complex Problems - How to Save the World Although neural networks (collectors of massive amounts of data that then seek 'meaningful' patterns in that data that can be used to infer causality or at least correlation) have been around for years, most students of complex adaptive systems believe that complex problems (like global poverty, global warming, or lack of innovation in big business) can never be 'solved' because there are simply too many variables (perhaps an infinite number) to allow any kind of exhaustive correlation or useful predictive models to be built. Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth - Wired In 2000, Steve Jobs' candy-colored iMac was leading the charge for Apple's comeback, but to further spur sales, the company started asking, "What can we do to make more people buy Macintoshes?" October 16, 2006 Multi-ontology sense making; a new simplicity in decision making - Dave Snowden Ontology is derived from the Greek word for being and it is the branch of metaphysics which concerns itself with the nature of things. In this article it is used to identity different types of system, each of which requires a different approach to both diagnosis and intervention. Conversation as a Core Business Process - Jay Cross Consider for a moment that the most widespread and pervasive learning in your organization may not be happening in training rooms, conference rooms, or boardrooms, but in the cafeteria, the hallways, and the cafe across the street. How Much Information? - SIMS Around the world about 600 million people have access to the Internet, about 30% of them in North America. With the world's population at 6.3 Billion, that means about 9.5% have internet access. It seems the world is not so flat for a majority of the population. Knowing Knowledge - George Siemens George Siemens new book is available as a wiki. Knowing Knowledge is an exploration of knowledge - what it is, how it is changing, and what it means to our organizations and society. The Rules of Distraction - Slate Longer browsing sessions during class tend to lead to lower grades, but there's a hint that a greater number of browsing sessions during class may actually lead to higher grades. Will the eBook finally replace paper? - The Hindu Textbooks are seen as a major growth market. Only 900 of the 150,000 titles MBS Direct handles are eBooks at present, but McKiernan says there's a lot of interest, not least in the distance learning market. "Students are very mobile and it?s easier to store books on a laptop than carry them around." Most eBooks are the same price as the printed version or lower, in some cases 50% cheaper. Via Online Learning Update. E-learning firm has retained losses of 27m pounds - The Post.IE WBT Systems, the e-learning firm that was recently bought by Horizon Technology Group, had retained losses of 27.1 million pounds at the end of 2004. October 15, 2006 New Systems for Sharing Learning Goals - HeadspaceJ I think the intersection between learning goals and social software is heating up. The popularity of 43 Things must be contributing to the interest. Go and Learn - Fast Company Although we might not ponder the educational value of these everyday appliances, the gear we use to communicate and play can also be used to learn; we just don't yet think of them as learning tools. Mobile learning is the great invisible elephant in the room, in our pockets, in our purses, and in our cars. Distance learning booms - The Journal Gazette In the past few years the number of students taking courses via the Internet or another distance-learning method has skyrocketed. Free Hugs ReUpload - YouTube The Tipping Point: A Visual Demonstration: A wonderfully-crafted and moving YouTube video about 'free hugs' shows how public sentiment reaches a tipping point and then shifts dramatically as a result of it. Via How To Save the World. The Amazing YouTube Tools Collection - Quick Online Tips A collection of several YouTube third party tools which enhance your YouTube experience. Quote of the Week - Steven Pinker "Another major discovery of cognitive psychology with implications for general education is that the untutored mind is prone to systematic fallacies and biases. Most physicians, for example, make whoppingly inaccurate estimates of the probability that a person has a disease given a positive test result and the disease's base rate. The mind seems to have trouble grasping basic statistical facts such as that a person with the typical signs of a rare condition probably does not have the condition, that exceptional cases will regress to the mean, or that relaxing the standards for reporting an uncertain event will increase both hits and false alarms." October 12, 2006 Media-Convert Media-Convert is a free web application that allows you to rip a movie to your iPod: Mac or PC. Can Internet communication sustain us? - CNN Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers. Experiential Learning - You Tube The Real Learning Company's unique approach to experiential learning. Wanted: Authentic Leaders - Forbes Authentic leadership--which includes judgment about pace, framing and what and how to disclose information--is a commitment to serve the growth and adaptability of those you lead. What is the worth of words? -- Will it matter if people can't read in the future? - MSNBC Perhaps, in that not-too-distant future, we might wake up one morning to read an editorial like this: December 25, 2025 - Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it. October 8, 2006 Changing the Rules: Lessons from a Starfish World - Chang This Such seemingly dissimilar groups as the Apache Indians, music swapping programs, Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous and Al Queda have one thing in common: they are all starfish. Each of these resilient groups succeeds because they are absent any hierarchy (head) and conventional organizations (spiders) best watch their backs. Go and Learn - Fast Company Although we might not ponder the educational value of these everyday appliances, the gear we use to communicate and play can also be used to learn; we just don't yet think of them as learning tools. Mobile learning is the great invisible elephant in the room, in our pockets, in our purses, and in our cars. E-learning comes of age - Computer Business Review Online Research firm IDC forecasts that ongoing compliance-training efforts will spur 27% compound annual growth in the e-learning system market over the next four years, with e-learning product sales growing from $6.5bn in 2003 to more than $21bn by 2008. Engage me or enrage me - Management-Issuers More managers and leaders ask me "how to engage" and "how to innovate" than any other questions. And of course these are two sides of the same question - because innovation engages and engagement innovates. eLearning Guide - US News and World Report This Guide lays out detailed information gathered directly from more than 2,800 traditional colleges and virtual universities. Includes articles and top 20 lists. October 7, 2006 Generation Y Discusses the Baby Boom - Motley Fool With nearly 78.2 million baby boomers driving our economy and 330 of them turning 60 each hour, there's clearly a transition on the horizon with fiscal implications all around. Google Launches Universal Gadgets - Wired Google Gadgets have gone universal. The search and services company announced today that anyone can put its Google-powered widgets on any site or blog. YouTube for Grownups - Forbes Patient surfers willing to wade through the often puerile contributions will be rewarded with hard to find screen gems, nostalgic news reels, instructional videos and even well-produced, albeit homemade, knee slappers. The Best: Movies in the Public Domain - Wired Need a movie for your training session? Many can be found on the archive.org. Empathy pays off at work - Seattle PI In this job market, it's not just who you know, or even what skills you've mastered. It's how well you understand other people that will get you ahead. October 2, 2006 Rise of the web's social network - BBC While most social networking sites do not discriminate, and allow anybody to log on, a few sites have cropped up with a very particular sort of user in mind. Is Gagne Relevant for eLearning Courseware Design? - eLearning Technology As instructional designers, we need to use models like Gange, but we also need to be creative. It takes me five seconds to add a little extra cheese and garlic salt to my kids Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, but man does the extra stuff make all the difference in the experience. Technophilia: Get a free college education online - Lifehacker There's one important catch: Most of these courses cannot be taken for any type of degrees or credentials. But remember, Bill Gates was a Harvard dropout. High-tech campus offers art, tech gear industry pros envy - San Diego Union Tribune When Canyon Crest Academy opened, students were so eager to attend that they endured classes in trailers. Two years later, with the completion of the $103 million construction project, the cutting-edge, high-tech campus is providing students with art and technology equipment that industry professionals drool over. Steve Wozniak on The Colbert Report - You Tube (video) Podcasting, computers, books, and pranks. September 30, 2006 Most reliable search tool could be your librarian - ZD Net Using the keywords "Martin Luther King," the first result on Google and AOL--whose search is powered by Google--and the second result on Microsoft Windows Live search is a Web site created by a white supremacists group that purports to provide "a true historical examination" of the civil rights leader. Video Fixation - Forbes YouTube is at the forefront of a new video revolution on the Net. The upstart's birth coincided with a magic moment in Internet history, when online video became cheap enough to give away. Broadcast television is over half a century old; cable TV is in its 30s. Now a new type of video network promises to radically change what we can watch, who can create it and who will profit. The New Face of Learning - edutopia What happens to traditional concepts of classrooms and teaching when we can now learn anything, anywhere, anytime? In this new interactive Web world, I have become a nomadic learner; I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no linear curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. via elearnspace Knowledge-Based Systems Defined Insurance Networking News The type of KBS that is often referred to as an "expert system" is technically known as a rule-based system. The expert systems moniker was attached to this technology because it was initially used to provide the same level (i.e., quality) of answers that a human expert would be expected to deliver for a given situation. Despite inferiority, Zune likely to see modest success - Apple Insider Although Microsoft Corp's forthcoming Zune digital media player is somewhat bulky and lacking appeal, its likely to see "some modest success" due to Microsoft's vast resources and the company's willingness take a loss with each unit it sells, one Wall Street analyst says. September 28, 2006 The New Science of Change - CIO Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get people to alter the way they do things. New research reveals why it's so hard and suggests strategies to make it easier. The Principals of Play - Metropolis "At the time I was working on issues of language and literacy in education, and also the learning of content like math and science, where things get pretty complicated," Gee says. "I was struck by the fact that games are very complex, and often long and difficult. I wondered why kids spend so much time on tasks in these problem-solving spaces yet we have so much trouble getting them to do the same thing at school." Picture Books - Learning Circuits If the visual carries the same narrative weight as the text itself, then it often becomes superfluous, and if it replaces the text, then it almost seems to become a shorthand for language itself. Ethics and Mobile Learning: Should We Worry? - e-Learning Queen As a student, instructor, or e-learning institution administrator, are there ethical issues in mobile learning? If so, are they the same as ones one might expect in e-learning? The Mobile Phone is a Knowledge Retention Tool - Green Chameleon Should KM look for ways to keep connections intact when people leave the organization so that the knowledge is still fairly accessible, rather than to collect it all when they are around? Danah Boyd on social networks - ibiblio Danah Boyd, in a video, gives an in-depth talk on social networks and why people are using them. September 26, 2006 Modelling Excellence - A Lesson For HR In China - Online Recruitment The video takes an arrangement of Pachebel's Canon in D and really pushes it to the limit. Jimmy Hendrix he is not. He's actually better. Q & A with an Innovative Operator - MS Executive Circle When I worked at [American Airlines subsidiary] Sabre, I spent $1 million on a CD-ROM project that failed. I was sure I would be fired. Instead, my boss said 'what did you learn? Let's sit down and talk about how not to do it again.' Thoughts on Leadership Development - Gautam Ghosh Business Leadership can be developed along three axes: Business, Functional, and Technical. The Neuroscience of Leadership and Brain Fitness - SharpBrains Leaders would benefit from engaging others in ways based on innate brain predispositions. Buzzwords say all the wrong things - Signal vs. Noise Buzzwords are often a mask. People who use them are covering up their ideas - or the lack thereof. They are overcompensating. They don't have anything substantial to say so they try to use impressive sounding words instead. September 25, 2006 The Skinny On Web 2.0 - Infomation Week Web 2.0 is all the Web sites out there that get their value from the actions of users. Groups and Networks - Stephen Downes A drawing that depicts the often unnoticed assumptions that inform our understanding of groups, inform our sometimes slavish devotion to groups, and shows how these contrast with my own understanding of how interaction ought to occur, in networks. It's not just a web theory (though it is that), it is a theory about life and society in general. Techies hot on concept of 'wisdom of crowds,' but it has some pitfalls - USA Today Internet types love sweeping ideas that come in the form of book titles that morph into catchphrases that can be dropped like little bombs into conversations to show how smart they are. 5 (Really) Hard Things about Using the Internet in Higher Education - eLearn Magazine Using the Internet as an educational tool can be really hard‹and it is not clear that things will get much easier in the near term. This article identifies five particular things that have particularly vexed my colleagues and me when using the Internet in our undergraduate and graduate classes. Preserving the print metaphor - Howard Owens Newspaper Web sites should not think of themselves as newspaper Web sites. They should forget the print product even exists, and concentrate on constant and continuous, Web-first, written-for-the-Web stories. 15 World-Widening Years - Information Week In just 15 years, the World Wide Web has gone through many iterations: document-sharing tool for researchers, key source of news and information, shopping mecca, multimedia playground, and incredibly popular means of socializing and self-expression. How did the Web get so far so fast? September 16, 2006 How We Understand: Adding Meaning and Value to Information - How to Save the World The word 'understand', which does not appear to have a precise counterpart in any other language, literally means "comprehend (=grasp) and appreciate(=be able to evaluate) sufficiently to pass on to others". CEO Guide to Technology - Business Week Networking technology gives companies a new set of tools for recruiting and customer service‹but privacy questions remain. Knowing Knowledge - George Siemens Knowledge is changing. It develops faster, it changes more quickly, and it is more central to organizational success than in any other time in history. Whiteboards Done Right - Training Magazine During a brainstorming session or a training course, you can draw on it, write on it, erase it, but whiteboards have come a long way since their dry-erase days. Improve performance through feedback and reinforcement - Pahrump Valley Times When speaking about his employees, Henry Ford said, "Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is a success." September 13, 2006 The 19 Best Elearning Blogs - Articulate From learning theories to content design, metadata to LMSes, survey data to industry trends, these blogs have it all. Is Wikipedia 'knowledge' merely third party hearsay? - ZD Net Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, is a master communicator and salesman. The quality of the product that he touts, however, does not match the quality of his orations. Wikipedia: Maybe It's Democratic After All - Business Week Insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content. E-learning gets legal lessons in battle over patents - The Colonist Stephen Downes,"I would say it's the phenomenon of multiple simultaneous inventions. It occurs through thousands of people at the same time, and it's ludicrous to imagine a race to the finish line." Digital Divide? It's Still There - Wired Many more white children use the internet than do Hispanic and black students, a reminder that going online is hardly a way of life for everyone. September 10, 2006 Mobile Internet Population Grows - ClickZ The mobile Internet is growing, with over 34.6 million mobile users in June. That's according to the "U.S. Device Census Report for Q2 2006" from Telephia. Building Partnerships Inside and Outside the Organization - Leader Values Why the leader of the future will need to be a builder of partnerships. Six different types of partnerships will be explored: three inside the organization (direct reports, co-workers and managers) and three outside the organization (customers, suppliers and competitors). Writely or Wrongly, a Failing Grade, So Far, for a Promising Tool - Dave Pollard The collective work-product of Writely, like that of most wiki tools, is truly ugly unless some uber-editor comes in and does clean-up work. Same is true in my experience with eRooms, Lotus TeamRooms, and Groove. A world of knowledge - Edmonton Journal The nature -- and depth -- of what encyclopedias offer has evolved in the computer age. While old encyclopedias gather dust, the digital side of worldly knowledge is going through changes, too. If You Really Want the Job, Read This - Business Week From the obvious to the subtle, here are some good pointers to give you a leg up in that next interview. Includes slideshow. Who invented e-learning? A patent dispute shakes up academic computing - chron.com Critics say the patent claims nothing less than Blackboard's ownership of the very idea of e-learning. If allowed to stand, they say, it could quash the cooperation between academia and the private sector that has characterized e-learning for years and explains why virtual classrooms are so much better than they used to be. For more info, see Stephen's Web. September 2, 2006 iPods for Learning - Knowledge Jump So, what is the iPods' value in a corporate setting? For example, you could place an audio and visual guide of your organization on an iPod and send new hires on a "tour" of their own (just like the Museum of Modern Art does), rather than having them wait for a class just to sit through a PowerPoint presentation. Or perhaps record a step-by-step procedure of a task, along with a few picture and/or notes to an iPod and use it as a training device. Interview with Steve Rubel - Rocketboom Joanne Colan from Rocketboom interviews blogger Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion. Scrap Web 2.0, yes, but embrace Knowledge 2.0 surely - ZD Net Increasingly a major portion of the human experiential store is being digitized and made available to anyone. More importantly, much of the new stuff made of, by, and for humans is being created digitally and made available to anyone. Sometimes it's free, mostly it's affordable. Web 2.0 'knowledge': future of modern humanity? (I hope not) - ZD Net How about Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? Shall we accept its user-generated content as knowledge creation? How can we, when Wikipedia's own "About Wikipedia" page warns: "Because of recent vandalism, editing of this project page by anonymous or newly registered users is disabled." Top Six Drivers for Business Success - Chief Learning Officer Six "higher order" categories in order of relative importance to their firm's overall performance: agility and quality, strategy/leadership, technology, human capital, product and costs. August 29, 2006 Top 10 Best Presentations Ever - Know HR Blog Just to name a couple: Steve Jobs introduces the Macintosh in 1984 Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech in 1963 Malcolm Gladwell's Blink presentation at SXSW 2005 Tom Peters presents A Ham Sandwich in 1990 Turn Your iPod into the Ultimate PowerPoint Accessory - Micro Persuasion Whether you are on Windows or Mac with a few simple steps you can turn your iPod (even an older one) into the ultimate PowerPoint accessory. I am going to focus on PowerPoint here since it's what most people use. The process is similar for Keynote. Nature or nurture? - MSNBC Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women. That's the upshot of a provocative study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and visiting scholar at Stanford University. Via Jay Cross @ Internet Time Blog. Google Discloses Plans For Long-Awaited Office Suite, First Components Due This Week - InformationWeek "The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn't necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel," says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. "They're the collaboration component of that." Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity - New York Times In recent years, the productivity gains have continued while the pay increases have not kept up. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent. Nominal wages have accelerated in the last year, but the spike in oil costs has eaten up the gains. August 27, 2006 Warren Buffett - a video trilogy - Life 2.0 A three part video series give fascinating insights into the life and work of Warren Buffett. Web 2.0's Real Secret Sauce: Network Effects - Dion Hinchcliffe The Web is the fabric upon which an ever increasing amount of our lives is woven into. This is now most media including newspapers, TV, radio, entertainment, music, arts, etc. as well as what I call lifestyle logistics; e-mailing, IMs, calendaring, travel planning, time/task management, and more. Scientists Find Memory Molecule - PhysOrg Erasing the memory from the brain does not prevent the ability to re-learn the memory, much as a cleaned computer disc may be re-used. This finding may some day have applications in treating chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, and memory loss, among other conditions. Balance (video) - YouTube Riveting! You(r) Tube - Hindustan YouTube is the most happening thing on the Net. It's about how technology can make us reach a global audience from the comfort of our homes, and for free. August 26, 2006 A Taxonomy of Knowledge - The Atlantic Not all books are created equal. To a librarian, at least, this truth is self-evident: some books are too important to lend out at all. Fireside Chat: The Long Tail - Signal vs. Noise The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In this chat, the participants discuss the impact of the tail, mass amateurization, the role of reviews/recommendations, and how, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people. Universities put Hollywood ahead of students - Boing Boing One thing that's becoming increasingly clear from these factors is that students often need as much protection from their universities as they do from the entertainment industry's slipshod copyright enforcer thugs. Ten Toes in the Multimedia Waters - Poynteronline Old media certainly are trying new tricks. You might argue, though, that audio, video, picture galleries, podcasts, staff blogs, the deep background and interview tapes in big-story packages, are all new versions of us-talking-to-you. Using the Gillmor-Rosen terminology, these are more like enhanced lectures than true conversations. Day of the Longtail (video) - YouTube Video for rousing your 1.0 audidence before delivering your 2.0 presentation. Via Stephen Downes. Music Makes Your Brain Happy - Wired Through studies of music and the brain, we've learned to map out specific areas involved in emotion, timing and perception -- and production of sequences. They've told us how the brain deals with patterns and how it completes them when there's misinformation. August 22, 2006 Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence' (with audio) - NPR "If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter spaced typography won't help," he says. "And if your images aren't on point, making them dance in color in three dimensions won't help." The knowledge drought intensifies - On Line Opinion Unlike older - one is tempted to add, wiser - societies, today's Australians do not particularly venerate knowledge. Indeed, we have a richly contemptuous vernacular for those who work with their minds rather than with their hands or with money. Yet, paradoxically, we value highly what knowledge delivers to us. Training Top 100 Training Magazine Training Magazine's top 100 for 2006. Service keeps constant tabs on your social network - Seattle PI But these days, the notion of calling someone to make plans on a Saturday night seems downright Jurassic to a group of young, tech-savvy Seattleites. "That's so '90s," said Brian Westbrook, 28, a support manager at Expedia.com who reserves gabbing on the phone for emergencies. Innaresting. Yahoo Aims at Google's Cultural Grammar - Searchblog There's been some reports about how Google is trying to stop people from using the term, googling. When I heard about it, I was like, "Hello, gift horse, mouth!"....People don¹t often do what you want them to do, and brands are more about what consumers think, than what companies want. Trained Goldfish - YouTube Here's a delightful video of trained goldfish responding to hand gestures. August 20, 2006 Ross Lovegrove on Form (video) - TED Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac. In this highly visual presentation, he presents his recent work-from furniture to water bottles-which is organic in form and inspired by nature. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:14) The Great Unread - Nicholas Carr What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it's open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud. Human Connectivity - Blog Bytes I once read a short story called "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut that presents a striking window into the human-cyborg connection today's technology seems to be bringing us. In this story, the law required smart people to wear a noise-making device and a pain generator as handicaps to keep them from thinking or performing better than their contemporaries. Some co-workers don't have to work hard to drive you up the (cubicle) wall - Seattle PI Like family, we don't get to pick our co-workers. But we are forced to spend eight hours or more a day in close proximity with them, protected only by a flimsy cubicle wall, if at all. Breakthrough Discovery in Alzheimer's Research - SCI-Tech Today Scientists have discovered molecular janitors that clear away a sticky gunk blamed for Alzheimer's disease -- until they get old and quit sweeping up. The Expert Mind - Scientific American Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well August 12, 2006 The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time The IBM PC is 25. And here are the top PCs ever, from machines you owned and loved to systems you've never heard of. Thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of the IBM PC - Dan Bricklin As Julian tells it, to get around the secrecy restrictions during the wait, what evolved was something like this: One of us would say "Does it have slots for plugging in accessories?", and they would reply, "Well, a really good personal computer would have that, wouldn't it?", and we'd say "Yes", and they'd say, "Well, this is a very good computer." It was very funny, but we ascertained what each side needed to know quite well. How to add a Google Map to any web page in 30 seconds - Wikimapia Blog How to add a Google Map to any web page in 30 seconds. Casual Is Working Full Time - LA Times The sartorial style pioneered by the T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing technology moguls of Silicon Valley more than a decade ago has spread even to law offices, accounting firms and corporate headquarters ‹ bastions of tradition that had kept generations of Brooks Brothers salesmen busy teaching customers how to fold silk pocket squares. Older and Cranky May Mean Smarter - 14WFIE New research suggests that older people with above-average intelligence tend to be disagreeable. August 8, 2006 Blackboard Patent - The Sky, My Friends, is Falling - Stephen Downes eCollege has dropped the gloves and come out swinging against the Blackboard patent. "As one of the pioneers of online education, we launched our first customer's eLearning program in January 1997, before Blackboard even existed," said Oakleigh Thorne, chairman and CEO of eCollege. THE GREATEST NANCY PANEL EVER DRAWN - The Woodring Monitor Sluggo falling or floating? Scientific Knowledge Is Money in the Bank - Skeptical Inquirer The scientific process is sometimes slow, but it always involves making educated guesses that eventually lead to predictions that can be observed and put to a test. If the predictions turn out to be incorrect, the test is still successful as long as scientists learn enough to modify the theory, find a better one, or uncover mistaken assumptions. Taskonomies and Information Neighbourhoods - Green Chameleon Taxonomies provide well-ordered, logical organization for well-structured retrieval, but "taskonomies" group things together that are required for any particular activity. Diversity That is More Than Skin-Deep - Leader Values Engaging diverse thinkers should be the goal of every organization for in doing so, it releases the organization to seek solutions that rise above the norm without cultural or social limitations. Organizations need to dig deeper by focusing on knowledge diversity for this is the cauldron in which creativity and success are brewed or fostered. August 7, 2006 Podiums, drum kits, and removing barriers to communication -Aug 6, 2006 - Presentation Zen "Most songs are vocally driven. Yes, it is physically possible to sing from behind the drums... But they [audience] want to see you. When you're behind a drum kit, it is very difficult to connect to people. That is why I am out in front." ‹ Phil Collins What Is a Case? - Training Media Review For students used to listening to lectures, the case method changes everything, most of all, the roles of instructor and student. No longer does the instructor assume the mantle of expertise and authority. 'Engagement' and the Underprepared - Inside Higher Ed Two new studies suggest that not only does "engagement" work for minority and academically underprepared students, but such practices make a bigger difference for such students than for students in general. The Word on Word of Mouth - Change This There's a reason the subservient chicken didn't increase Chicken nugget sales, why the Segway (a.k.a "IT", a.k.a. "Ginger") hasn't changed the world despite drool-worthy P.R., and why Richard Branson descended a New York City skyscraper in a nude suit. How the web went world wide - BBC News The web was an overlay that tried to hide the underlying complexity of the data and documents proliferating on the internet. August 6, 2006 Leadership In The Wild - Forbes Primal Quest is not just a race. It's one of the most difficult athletic events in the world. Tufte and Powerpoint - Cognitive Edge I have always loved Tufte's work on visualisation and it informs a lot of the design of Sensemaker. The counter to this which just came in the same list serve argues that because we have bad speakers powerpoint is a good idea. GETTING OUT OF EMBED: The Role of Social Context in Decision Making - Change This Decision making is an inherently social exercise. Here, Michael Mauboussin details three shocking psychological experiments that reveal just how another's action or opinion can profoundly change your own. Whole Foods faces the "whole truth" - Talkshop Recently, Whole Foods has been receiving flak from Michael Pollan, a well-known author and blogger who has accused the chain of being disingenuous in its claims of selling produce from local organic farmers. CAN ADULT NUMERACY BE TAUGHT? A BERNSTEINIAN ANALYSIS - Gail E. FitzSimons Four forms of interaction (visibility and accessibility, manipulability and annotatability, creativity and combinability, experimenting and testing) "represent the assumption that the learner will have an active engagement with the learning task and ensure that its execution and representation is in accord with constructivist learning ideas. August 1, 2006 Places to Go: The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning - Stephen Downes in Innovate At first glance this online publication looks like any academic journal, but when readers explore The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL), they are in for a surprise: They can read the articles! The journal is a member of the Directory of Open Access Journals. KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY DEBATE NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND PLATITUDES - IT News The debate about the 'knowledge economy' is full of 'slovenly thinking and careless assumptions', The Work Foundation alleges today. Politicians, businesspeople and opinion formers around the world use phrases such as 'knowledge worker' and 'knowledge economy' as speech-padding buzzwords without having 'any clear idea of who or what they are talking about', a new study argues. Clean air gardening and the future of shared experience - InfoWorld with Video For a bunch of reasons, I'm averse to gasoline-powered lawnmowers. They're loud, they're smelly, and as I learned when my dad bounced a rock off his leg many years ago, they can be dangerous. WHAT YOU THINK BUT DON'T SAY - Seed People spontaneously categorize other people into 'us' and 'them' and they do that within milliseconds of encountering other people. Innovation overload - Business Week Innovation is in grave danger of becoming the latest overused buzzword. We're doing our part at Businessweek. And so is IBM with its big innovation marketing campaign. July 29, 2006 Phylotaxis - Phylotaxis Click on the moving dots -- a new screen is then presented -- move the bottom slider from science to culture. Click on one of the small pictures. AMAZING!!! Rapid e-Learning: What Works - Learn.com Knowledge management uses collaborative technologies to encourage subject matter experts to share their knowledge and e-learning delivers skills and knowledge in a streamlined and methodical way. The intersection between knowledge management and e-learning seems to hold the solution for creating more- e-learning content in less time with fewer resources. Change Comes to Tiffinwalas - 3 Quarks Daily Anthony Bourdain's video on the tiffinwalas of Mumbai -- One error in six million deliveries -- and this is done with a semi-illiterate workforce. E-learning critical to companies - Business Standard According to Gartner, enterprise e-learning suites and management systems software new license revenue will grow at a 15.6 per cent compound annual growth rate from 2004 through 2009. According to IDC, the e-learning market is estimated to touch $28 billion by 2008. Abracadabra! - Revolver Book A free e-book telling the story of the Beatles 1966 album Revolver -- PDF. July 28, 2006 After the Bell Curve - New York Times The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 - 12 points lower. The same holds true for children born into impoverished families: youngsters adopted by parents of similarly modest means had average I.Q.'s of 92.4, while the I.Q.'s of those placed with well-off parents averaged 103.6. These studies confirm that environment matters - the only, and crucial, difference between these children is the lives they have led. (via Mind Hacks) Manufacturing Knowledge - New Horizons for Learning There is increasing evidence to suggest that memories aren't stored in individual neurons, but in the way the neurons are connected to each other. Some neurons are part of vast networks or systems; others only have small, regional connections. Some connections are well insulated and will last a lifetime; others are more fragile than soap bubbles. Is Current Schooling Brain-Based And Brain-Compatible? - Brain Connection Brain-based teaching and brain-compatible education are meaningless terms that appeared at some point during the past quarter of a century. Perhaps teaching had previously been kidney-based, and the curriculum incomprehensible. How To Manage A Virtual Workforce - Forbes As the virtual workforce grows, so do the managerial headaches. Many employees who work virtually say they frequently feel isolated and don't know if they're valued by their companies. The 3C3R Model: A Conceptual Framework for Designing Problems in PBL - Journal of Problem-based Learning This paper introduces the 3C3R PBL problem design model as a conceptual framework for systematically designing optimal PBL problems. July 27, 2006 Multi-tasking Adversely Affects Brain's Learning - Science Daily Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Teacher development key to tech success: Polling, scientific research, and sources of error - Christopher D. Sessums The poll (read: not a formal scientific investigation) attempts to shed light on educators' opinions regarding the use of computers in their classrooms and "attempts to gauge the effectiveness of computers in preparing students for the 21st-century workplace." The emerging 1% rule - Anecdote In Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, 1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups. Building Better Virtual Teams - eLearn Magazine PowerPoint is not an effective teaching tool for an online class. Good PowerPoint presentations need a real-time presenter. Yes, I could record an audio track along with PowerPoint. I know professors who report great success doing just that. I have even heard students praise such lectures. But, prerecorded lectures are not interactive. The Flynn effect is reversing - Mind Hacks American Scientist discusses the trend for changes in how well people score on intelligence tests and notes that the Flynn effect, whereby the population has been scoring increasingly well on intelligence tests over time, seems to be slowing down or reversing in some places. July 25, 2006 Study: Distractions Impede Learning - ABC News "What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful," said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The Expert Mind - Scientific American Much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. The Wrong Tail: How to turn a powerful idea into a dubious theory of everything - Slate This insight goes only so far, but like many business books, The Long Tail commits the sin of overreaching. The philosophy of business knowledge - KM World Businesspeople and philosophers actually are both interested in the same two facets of knowledge: certainty and the relation of mind and world. Businesspeople, of course, are not interested in knowledge for its own sake. They want to put it to use. Philosophers, on the other hand, would rather give us a good, pounding headache. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" - Harvard Business School The story behind Dean Kamen's Segway scooter, and his combustive meeting with the kingpins of Apple and Amazon. Excerpt from Code Name Ginger. July 23, 2006 E-mail losing ground to IM, text messaging - MSNBC E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file. Building Information Neighbourhoods - Green Chameleon I've seen it lots of times before, sometimes dashed out on whiteboards by IT managers in a state of near religious ecstasy, sometimes on the powerpoint slides of ECM/DMS system vendor salepersons. It's called ECM Heaven. Departure, Abandonment, and Dropout of E-learning: Dilemma and Solutions - James Madison University Investigation the widespread phenomena of e-learning dropout and abandonment. Tourist Remover - Snap Mania Remove moving objects such as tourists or passing cars from your photos. Take multiple photos from the same scene -- FREE. Microsoft's media player dubbed Zune Read about it on engadget. See Microsoft's the Coming of Zune. Like the tune on Coming to Zune? Go to Regina Spektor's site, click on the video tab to see the video "Us." July 20, 2006 50 ways to become a better designer - Computer Arts What is design? Design is both the process and the final product of an endeavour to fulfil a personal or professional brief. Whether you are creating a piece of graphic work, a website, or a design for a new product, the underlying principal is the same - the creative process is everything. Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content - UI Folksonomies, a new user-driven approach to organizing information, may help alleviate some of the challenges of taxonomies. Sites with folksonomies include two basic capabilities: they let users add "tags" to information and they create navigational links out of those tags to help users find and organize that information later. Way Back Machine Enter the URL in the search field and then click the "Take Me Back" button. The Way Back Machine can be pretty interesting at times as it allows you to see the growth of a website by clicking on the various archived links; and of course allows you to view dead links. However, note that when you click on one of the archived page links, that it takes you to another archived page. To get the original page, cut away the first part of the link. The Internet is old news and boring.. Deal with it - Blog Maverick The Internet is Boring. Its old news. (via Will Thalheimer) Hellodeo Record video, get code, then play it on the web. (via Stephen Downes) July 18, 2006 IBM's KM strategy - KM World With a knowledge management history that dates to 1994, IBM certainly qualifies as an early adopter. Although its focus has shifted through the years, IBM's success with knowledge management continues to thrive through its enterprisewide knowledge exchange and collaboration. Gadgets get the feel of the tactile world - New Scientist When it comes to interacting with computers, our sense of touch has been all but ignored. It's the first sense we develop in the womb, yet for most of us rumbling games controllers or vibrating cellphones are just about the only devices that make use of it. That is set to change. An author with a 'long tail' - c/net When Wired Magazine published an article called "The Long Tail," it immediately became a phenomenon on the order of Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point." Problems with Bloom's Taxonomy - ISPI (via Will Thalheimer) Bloom's taxonomy is almost 50 years old. It was developed before we understood the cognitive processes involved in learning and performance. Changing Models - elearnspace George Siemens writes on Changing Models. Tony Karrer responds, and Stephen Downes comments. And another post by Tony Karrer. July 15, 2006 New Perspectives - New Media It's not a question of, "will this new media world succeed?" It will, and in many ways it already has. The appropriate question is, "will I be a part of this new media world?" Your Attention Please - Business Week It's not just that media is splintering, as it has been for decades. The difference now is that the Internet is thrusting that trend into overdrive. Increasing Consumer Preferences By Manipulating Memory - Science Daily The first experiment found that when participants had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have seen the brand before. Participants also had higher preference ratings for the brand relative to competing brands in the same product category Citations as knowledge flow - Knowledge Jack The basic idea is that, people learn from and build upon the ideas presented by others. When these people then publish and reference their sources-of-inspiration, one can visualize the flow of knowledge (or ideas) over time. Wi-Fi More Popular than iPod? - EarthWebNews.com The survey also indicated that Wi-Fi is changing the nature of the home office. Rather than the traditional fixed office space in the den, respondents said mobile wireless computing lets them work in the kitchen, living room or their local coffee shop. July 11, 2006 Understanding Technology as Knowledge and Culture - Knowledge Board This paper is about knowledge management, and it is about technology and innovation, its about technology as the knowledge of the operations of complex adaptive systems, but most of all its about making a new start, with a fresh new paradigmatic framework drawn from a little explored aspect of complexity science, the part Capra has referred to as the systems theories of life. Friendster and Social Network Patent - blaugh Millions of fans poured into the streets in celebration late last week, when the social networking megasite Friendster.com was awarded a patent on managing real-life relationships. Until now, relationships have been difficult to maintain. The Mysterious Power of Context - Design Observer (via elearningpost) More than anything, we want to proffer the promise of control: the control of communication, the control of meaning. To admit the truth - that so much is out of our hands - marginalizes our power to the point where it seems positively self-destructive. Your Guide to RSS - Media Shift You've probably seen the letters "RSS" or the orange icon at the left on your favorite blogs or news sites and wondered what it was for. RSS is a format and a process for syndicating web content. Research Shows Handheld Computers in Classrooms Enhance Student Achievement - GoKnow Learning According to both Soloway and Norris, the research shows that in the first year of the study, handheld computer groups did 2 percent better than non-handheld groups. In the second year, handheld groups performed 13 percent better in science than non-handheld groups. July 10, 2006 Brain May Be Hard-Wired to Track Team Sports - CBC News Without the help of color, the human brain can't pay attention to more than three moving objects at once, concluded a team of neurological researchers reporting in the July issue of Psychological Science. Completing the Zen in Performance Management - Donald Clark A focus on four aspects on managing the human side of performance management: learning, reframing, flowing, and viscosity. How To Manage 125,000 Employees - Forbes Last year, someone gave Ballard a copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and she hasn't stopped talking about it. The book opened her eyes to the power of blogging to reshape business. People Power - Wired (via The Open Learner) First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford's assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world. How Much Difference Does a Generation Make? - How to Save the World We can reach the stars, we can live forever. We can create technologies, extensions of our brains, that transcend all 'real'-world limits. We just need to want to do it, and it will be done. Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin - ITP Research Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments. July 7, 2006 Knowledge and its price - Sign and Sight We live in a knowledge society, but it knows very little about itself. Information technologies allow us to organise knowledge faster than ever, yet we are regularly warned that we are losing touch of knowledge. Building blocks of knowledge - Knowledge at Work At the heart of knowledge creation lies conversation, shared language, agreement on key distinctions, naming of prime concepts, sharing of experiences or beliefs, the explication and testing of patterns. 50 Popular Science Blogs - Nature While the top 5 science blogs are listed here. The imagination economy - CNN & FORTUNE Magazine The problem is that Americans' pay isn't going up. That's remarkable because the economy is booming - growth is strong, unemployment low, productivity rising smartly. Yet the latest figures show that the broadest index of pay (inflation-adjusted wages, salaries, benefits) is no higher than it was at the end of 2003. (via Gautam Ghosh) Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system - TechCrunch Blue Dot -- social network or social discovery? July 4, 2006 Why Managing by Facts Works - Stratey+Business Real knowledge in the form of empirical analysis of results is the shortest path to the best business decisions. That may seem obvious, yet few companies follow that precept. Digital Divide - Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth Podcast and PowerPoint of the Digital Divide. Knowing before doing? - Connectivism Blog In recent discussions with museums and education providers, the desire for centralization is strong. These organizations want learners to access their sites for content/interaction/knowledge. Learners, on the other hand, already have their personal spaces (myspace, facebook, aggregators). They don't want to go to someone else's program to experience content. They want YOUR content in THEIR space. Signs of the emerging knowledge economy - Eclectic Bill Part One, Part Two, Part 2.5, Part Three, Part Four (final). July 1, 2006 Lack of Necessary Workforce Skills Hinders Corporate Ability to Succeed - Accenture Respondents also reported that even functions they consider critical - sales, customer service, finance and strategic planning (cited as critical by 62 percent, 43 percent, 23 percent and 23 percent, respectively) - were not performing as strongly as they should. In fact, among those who rated these functions among the top three, just one-quarter (25 percent) assigned the highest rating to the performance of their sales function, and under a third provided the same rating to their customer service, finance and strategic planning functions (25 percent, 19 percent and 33 percent, respectively). Down To Business: Show Collaboration, Don't Just Expect It - Information Week When asked by InformationWeek Research which key priorities they will implement or support in 2006, the largest percentage of business technology executives, 67%, cited "streamlining or optimizing business processes." Impact Of Consumer Technology Hits Business World - Information Week (via e-Clippings) Here's some advice for IT departments: Get over it. Sure, consumer technology's momentum has reached a dizzying speed, but fighting it is futile and ignoring it means being left behind. A wiser approach is to focus on the opportunity consumer tech presents, both inside the company and out among customers. The first step is accepting that there's a power shift under way, with consumer tech setting the agenda. Gladwell: The New Freud? - The Frontal Cortex Gladwell ended up lumping together all sorts of research, from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task to Ekman's cartography of facial muscles to brain scans of autistic people, that, at least from a neurological perspective, were totally unrelated. Borders Are Now Harder to Define - Micro Persuasion It has occurred to me these past few months that it's far harder to define borders today than ever before. In other words, it's not as easy as it used to be to say this is species A, this belongs to species B. There's so much gray. Study: Internet partly to blame for your lack of close friends The number of people who say they have no one to talk to about important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona. June 24, 2006 The Three Worlds of Knowledge - Learning Circuits One of the most popular epistemology models (except in the behavioral sciences) is Sir Karl Popper's writtings on the Three Worlds of Knowledge. The knowledge/learning/management professions seem to prefer and stay within the realm of Michael Polanyi's concept of personal and tacit knowledge. However, Polanyi's epistemology is narrower and has a limited basis for understanding knowledge as compared to Popper¹s work, which provides a broader epistemological foundation. Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching - Educational Psychologist We are skilful in an area because our long-term memory contains huge amounts of information concerning the area. That information permits us to quickly recognize the characteristics of a situation and indicates to us, often unconsciously, what to do and when to do it. What are knowledge behaviors - Knowledge Jolt with Jack Behaviors associated with the idea of knowledge appearing in the interaction between people: sharing, helping, discussing, seeking, .... There are also knowledge behaviors aligned with the individual. Knowledge-Based Economy Already Here? Academics wondering how much is too much theory - Ohmy News The so-called "knowledge-based economy" would be a world of smart people, in smart jobs, doing smart things, in smart ways, for smart money, increasingly open to all rather than a few, according to researchers at the United Kingdom's Lancaster Institute of Advanced Studies. Neuroscience Resources - elearnspace A useful collection of neuroscience resources. June 20, 2006 Eye movement, visual memory, and peanut butter sandwiches - Cognitive Daily Experiments on change blindness have revealed striking limitations in visual memory. Yet new research shows that perhaps visual memory isn't as limited as once was thought. The Weblog Project The first open-source movie documentary about blogs and bloggers. Colleges fail to tap training dollars - Columbus Dispatch U.S. public and private em- ployers spend about $80 billion a year providing their employees with job-related training, Eduventures said. Private companies account for more than $50 billion of that, and spend about $13.3 billion on outside providers, it said. Colleges could meet the demand by customizing courses and marketing them more aggressively, Eduventures said. Cubicle Culture: How brainstorming works best - Post Gazette Some brainstorming sessions get off to a shaky start because the participants subscribe to a tenet that is provably false: "There's no such thing as a bad idea." June 13, 2006 Gates: 'Information overload' is overblown - ZD Net "I'd say in all of these cases, we are really dealing with information underload," Gates said in his talk, which kicked off Microsoft's annual CEO Summit. "We still want a lot of information." On "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier - Edge When Jaron Lanier's piece on "Digital Maoism" first went out on Edge, I knew he'd be generating hundreds of responses all over the net. After talking to John Brockman, we decided to try to capture some of the best responses here. Some Educators Fear Pull Results in 'a La Carte' Learning - Red Orbit John Seely Brown, national consultant, co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning and former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, comments that, "Maybe the time has come to take a bold move and ask, could we radically rethink what schooling, formal learning and informal learning, could be all about." Intranet 2.0: Collaboration, Self-Publishing And Tools Mash-up New Driving Forces - Robin Good The internet is evolving from a channel for content distribution to a platform for collaboration, sharing and innovation ­ the so-called Web 2.0. Intentions - The Sift Everything Expiriment Creating art and creating dreams can be a long, tedious, intentional process. But both art and dreams require a set of intentions instead of a series of responses. June 11, 2006 Connectivism and the nature of learning - Albert Ip With the advent of communication and digital technology, we interact with more people beyond the immediate physical reach. We simultaneously participate in many communities. The Art Of Motivation - Business Week At Nucor the art of motivation is about an unblinking focus on the people on the front line of the business. It's about talking to them, listening to them, taking a risk on their ideas, and accepting the occasional failure. Communities of practice: legitimate peripheral participation and lurking - Joitske Hulsebosch Legitimate peripheral participation is an analytical perspective (LPP) that has to do with opening the practice to someone who is not a core member and who has something if not a lot to learn about the practice. Wiki's -- Failure or Boon of Online Collectivism? - Will at Work Learning My main concern with wiki's is that information from real experts can be stupified to the mediocre averaging of above-average minds. The Next Big Thing: Spreadsheets? - Business Week It's kind of funny that the original killer app for the PC is returning as a key service for the Web--by one of the guys who originated it, no less. Also, see Jay Cross' post on spreadsheets. And don't forget Dan Bricklin. June 4, 2006 A Dialog with Thomas Gilbert - Learning Circuits In the great cult of behavior, the appeal is to control or affect behavior in some way. Reshaping Reality - Forbes Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally "real" constraints like geography and socio-economic status. iWriter - Talking Panda Incorporate text and audio files to create innovative learning programs. Biased Myers-Briggs (MBTI) Research Wanted - Will Thalheime CPP, Inc., known formerly as Consulting Psychologists Press, announces that it is offering research grants for research on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. May 30, 2006 CNET's AllYouCanUpload Is Disruptive - TechCrunch CNET very quietly launched a simple new photo uploading site called AllYouCanUpload last week. At first glance it doesn't appear to be very special or disruptive. But it is. Don't Try This at Home - Wired The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide - the proverbial stink bomb - went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine. Deconstructing the MySpace Threat - Stephen Downes Good post linking to and summarizing an interview with Danah Boyd and Henry Jenkins on the subject of MySpace. What are knowledge behaviors - Knowledge Jolt with Jack Shawn's list is primarily about those behaviors associated with the idea of knowledge appearing in the interaction between people: sharing, helping, discussing, seeking. May 29, 2006 Adults Who Do Not Learn - Donald Clark We learn incidentally because we are in the world. We learn intentionally because something in the world draws our interest. Knowledge Management: The Next Generation - CIO Book excerpt from Stealth KM: Winning Knowledge Management Strategies for the Private Sector by Niall Sinclair. Today, most knowledge and information workers still rely on e-mail and voice mail for communication with individuals and teams.