As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Friedman’s "The World Is Flat" is stimulating a great deal of conversation these days in the learning world. It is providing a much needed unifying theme or context for exploring and better understanding the many seemingly disparate changes we see going on around us everyday. Here are three examples of initiatives started in the last several weeks focusing on this theme.
The board of directors of the eLearning Forum recently agreed to use the flat world as overarching programming theme for the upcoming year. The details have yet to be worked out for the related topics for the individual months, but starting later this year all programs will be explicitly tied to exploring the implications of the flat theme.
The implications of the flat world will be the subject for the September conference call of the HRForum membership. Eilif Trodsen and I, representing the eLearning Forum, will join the HRForum's executive director, Aryae Coopersmith, to facilitate a lively discussion.
And the Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society is planning to co-sponsor an interview series (a podcast) with leading Silicon Valley executives and leading academics on the implications for education and workplace learning in a flat world. The initial interviews are tentatively scheduled to begin in late October and will be conducted by Prof. Geoffrey Bowker (SCU), Eilif Trondsen (SRIC-BI Learning on Demand), and myself (Altus Learning Systems).
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Monday, August 08, 2005
The Power of Us
Speaking of the world being flat, and for those of you who don’t have the time or patience to wade through 500 pages of Tom Friedman’s tome, here’s a great article that says the same thing—but in a way that seems much more immediate and personal to tech-savy readers.
My friend, colleague, and fellow eLearning Forum Board member, Eilif Trondsen, just forwarded me the link to the Business Week article: The Power of Us: Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business—and I wanted to pass it on immediately. The article discusses bright new companies (including Meiosys, Skype, Kazaa, Bit Torrent, and obviously Google) that are taking advantage of mass collaboration and disparate new technologies to shake up their respective industries—ranging from entertainment to telecommunications. And industry giants, like Proctor & Gamble and Dow Corning, are “becoming much more porous and decentralized” to speed up product innovation through the intentional “democratization of science.”
Here’s but a sampling of the excited phrases uttered by the editors of BW: there’s a fundamental shift in power happening; peer power; sweeping changes; new economic order; economics of networks; sea change in the economy; new market ecology; citizen journalists and participatory journalism; personalized products; and the cornucopia of the commons.
The discussion of “peer production” is particularly interesting and relevant to the training and learning business. File sharing, blogs, wikis, social networking systems, and many other disparate Internet-enabled technologies are, in the words of publisher Tim O’Reilly, creating an “architecture of participation.” And quote eBay’s Meg Whitman makes the power of peer production even more poignant: “It is far better to have an army of a million than a command and control system.” To contend with this “rising people power,” the article concludes, “corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant.”
Bringing this a little closer to home I would say, to contend with this rising people power, training departments and learning professionals will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. Far better to have an army of employees sharing their knowledge so that all can learn, than a command and control system of structured curricula, instructional design methodology, and learning management systems. The democratization of learning content is the next disruptive wave for enterprise learning—let’s start paddling furiously now so we can catch it and ride it into shore!
My friend, colleague, and fellow eLearning Forum Board member, Eilif Trondsen, just forwarded me the link to the Business Week article: The Power of Us: Mass collaboration on the Internet is shaking up business—and I wanted to pass it on immediately. The article discusses bright new companies (including Meiosys, Skype, Kazaa, Bit Torrent, and obviously Google) that are taking advantage of mass collaboration and disparate new technologies to shake up their respective industries—ranging from entertainment to telecommunications. And industry giants, like Proctor & Gamble and Dow Corning, are “becoming much more porous and decentralized” to speed up product innovation through the intentional “democratization of science.”
Here’s but a sampling of the excited phrases uttered by the editors of BW: there’s a fundamental shift in power happening; peer power; sweeping changes; new economic order; economics of networks; sea change in the economy; new market ecology; citizen journalists and participatory journalism; personalized products; and the cornucopia of the commons.
The discussion of “peer production” is particularly interesting and relevant to the training and learning business. File sharing, blogs, wikis, social networking systems, and many other disparate Internet-enabled technologies are, in the words of publisher Tim O’Reilly, creating an “architecture of participation.” And quote eBay’s Meg Whitman makes the power of peer production even more poignant: “It is far better to have an army of a million than a command and control system.” To contend with this “rising people power,” the article concludes, “corporations will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant.”
Bringing this a little closer to home I would say, to contend with this rising people power, training departments and learning professionals will have to craft new roles for themselves and learn new ways to operate in order to stay relevant. Far better to have an army of employees sharing their knowledge so that all can learn, than a command and control system of structured curricula, instructional design methodology, and learning management systems. The democratization of learning content is the next disruptive wave for enterprise learning—let’s start paddling furiously now so we can catch it and ride it into shore!
Thursday, August 04, 2005
A Guidebook for Free-Range Learners...
I recently had the opportunity to read and comment on a very early draft, musings would probably be more acurate, of an upcoming book by eLearning guru Jay Cross, tentatively titled: Informal Learning, A Guidebook for Free-Range Learners and Frustrated Managers. It's going to be a fun and insightful book and can't wait to see the final copy. I include this plug for Jay here for two not-so-important reasons: 1) I was looking for an excuse to use Jay's provacative phrase "Free-Range Learners" (wish I had come up with that!), and 2) he mentions my company in a section called: Instant Information and the CoPs that Produce It. Sorry, couldn't help the self-promotion, so here's the relevant quote:
"A CoP is a community of practice. Most of us are members of several CoPs but don't realize it. Think “guild” or “special interest group” or “professional group.” Cisco set up a dozen of them around issues such as security or VoIP. Once or twice a year, opinion leaders in a specialty get together for a week to share insights, hear about new developments, and listen to customers. Every moment is videotaped, for the discussions become content for those who cannot attend in person. Altus Learning Systems slices and dices the presentation so that anyone can call up sort of an in-house Google, and within a minute be looking at, listening to, or reading precisely what they requested. Instead of the frustration of wading through a presentation to find what you need, this content is indexed to the individual sentence (see example from International Conference on Global Knowledge Sharing). You can even subscribe to subjects as a podcast to listen to while driving or at the gym."
Well said Jay, thanks. Here's hoping this seminal passage survives the editing process and makes it into the published version! For more insight from the ever-creative and irreverant Mr. Cross, just mosey over to his personal website.
"A CoP is a community of practice. Most of us are members of several CoPs but don't realize it. Think “guild” or “special interest group” or “professional group.” Cisco set up a dozen of them around issues such as security or VoIP. Once or twice a year, opinion leaders in a specialty get together for a week to share insights, hear about new developments, and listen to customers. Every moment is videotaped, for the discussions become content for those who cannot attend in person. Altus Learning Systems slices and dices the presentation so that anyone can call up sort of an in-house Google, and within a minute be looking at, listening to, or reading precisely what they requested. Instead of the frustration of wading through a presentation to find what you need, this content is indexed to the individual sentence (see example from International Conference on Global Knowledge Sharing). You can even subscribe to subjects as a podcast to listen to while driving or at the gym."
Well said Jay, thanks. Here's hoping this seminal passage survives the editing process and makes it into the published version! For more insight from the ever-creative and irreverant Mr. Cross, just mosey over to his personal website.
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