Disintermediation @ Online Educa Berlin

I will be speaking at the Online Educa Berlin conference this coming Thursday, December 1. The title of my talk will be “Rapid eLearning: Disintermediate or Die." Readers familiar with this blog will be able to anticipate the focus of my comments: the world is changing much too rapidly and the amount of new knowledge being generated is much too vast to rely on training, eLearning courses, and LMSs to keep everyone informed. Disintermediation of the knowledge transfer process is the only realistic solution moving forward. And I’ll discuss the solution that our company, Altus Learning Solutions, has developed over the last seven years to do just that with companies like Cisco Systems, Applied Materials, Raytheon Professional Services, Network Appliance, and many others. Click here for a copy of my slides and here for a copy of my conference paper.

Podcasting at Cisco--A Case Study

Speaking of social media and eLearning 2.0, the next meeting of the eLearning Forum will focus exclusively on Podcasting in the enterprise. The meeting will feature an in-depth case study of how Cisco Systems has implemented Podcasting within their Systems Engineering Virtual Teams program to enhance their already robust knowledge transfer process. Speakers will include Juan Gamez, Cisco’s Virtual Teams Manager, along with presentations and demonstrations from Sebastian Grady and other members of the team from Altus Learning Systems (the company that provides the media production and knowledge distribution for the VT program). The meeting will be held November 2 at the Cisco Systems campus in San Jose. Click here for further information about in-person and remote participation.

Yahoo Leading the Movement to Social Media

Back to Rapid eLearning from my recent and extended tangent on the 'flat world,' there was a fabulous article in the San Jose Mercury News this week about Yahoo’s mission to take the lead on 'social media.' Yahoo just hired Marc Davis, a media professor at the University of California-Berkeley, to help "chart a course through the rapidly evolving world of 'social media' -- from blogs and social networking services to interactive mobile devices." Some excerpts from the article follow:

"The concepts that form the core of Flickr -- tagging, sharing and community -- are spreading through Yahoo's many departments. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and her husband, Stewart Butterfield, visited with most Yahoo departments to understand how a Flickr approach might help their products by involving users more. It's what Yahoo executives are now calling the `Flickrization of Yahoo.' Yahoo's attempts to 'Flickr-ize' its search engine have also given birth to a service called My Web 2.0, which lets people bookmark and tag Web pages that interest them."

"The next major shift is going to be about more than which search engine has the most documents. What's next is an experience that is personalized, that gets better the more I use it.''

"Yahoo's embrace of social media and user-generated Web content is evident elsewhere, too. The company launched a social networking and blogging service called 360 this year. It recently acquired Upcoming.org, a Southern California Web site whose events calendar is assembled entirely by the public. It has plans to let people create and share their own audio podcasts. And it recently began including blog content in its news section, elevating grass-roots journalism and writing closer to mainstream media."

"Increasingly, you're seeing the barriers to entry, to creating content, being lowered,'' said Jeff Weiner, Yahoo's senior vice president of search and marketplace. "Increasingly, technologies are allowing people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways heretofore unimaginable... We want to create a platform so that the knowledge in people's heads flows onto the Web for the benefit of others.''

The implications for learning in the enterprise should be clear—the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge will be driven increasingly by user generated content and the experience will become increasingly social and personalized. It will be interesting to see how the learners of the future (today actually), who have been brought up in this alternative learning reality, will respond when confronted in the enterprise with formal courseware and learning management (control) systems. We need to learn how people are learning in the real (consumer) world and rapidly adapt and adopt. Web 2.0 will inevitably drive eLearning 2.0—we just need to figure out what that really means. Look to Yahoo and others to point the way.

(And not to belabor the point, but Web 2.0, social media, and eLearning 2.0 are simply manifestations of all the flat world trends and technologies we've been talking here about for the last few months.)

Educational Space Race

There was an interesting article recently by Steve Mills in the San Jose Mercury News. He starts out quoting Friedman: ``the generation of scientists and engineers who were motivated to go into science by the threat of Sputnik in 1957 and the inspiration of JFK are reaching their retirement age and are not being replaced” And he cites the prediction of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Standards that software development and engineering will be among the Top 10 fastest-growing occupations through 2012. However, “According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, the nationwide percentage of incoming college freshmen who want to major in computer sciences declined by more than 60 percent from 2000 to 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than peak levels in the early 1980s. The proportion of freshmen women who showed interest in computer sciences as a major has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s.”

Again, world flattening forces pose both a challenge and a significant opportunity for the U.S. and other post-industrial economies. But, are we prepared top use flat-world educational technologies to maintain future competitive advantage?

Competing in a "Flat" World by Richard Straub

Dr. Richard Straub, Director Learning Solutions, IBM EMEA and Chairman of the European eLearning Industry Group, will be giving a keynote presentation at the upcoming ONLINE EDUCA BERLIN conference titled: “Competing in a "Flat" World - The Transformational Power of E-learning. His talk with be part of the Opening Plenary session on Thursday, December 1st. The following is a brief excerpt from his overview:

“Technology has contributed to leveling the playing field in global competition – in this sense the world has become 'flat', a notion popularized by Thomas Friedman. However, the transition towards a more integrated global economy poses some monumental challenges for many European democracies, burdened by inflexible and engrained structures and cultural rigidities An environment of continuous innovation must be created as innovation is becoming the key driver of economic success. This will require a significant transformation in the fabric of corporations, governments, education, and research institutions… The combination of a robust, industrial-strength technology implementation and an open-standards-based ecosystem for learning will provide a sound foundation for implementing true innovation in learning that results in new pedagogical models, new virtual collaboration environments, and digital content that can be seamlessly shared across the continent. With this, we may finally see our societies evolve towards a genuine culture of lifelong learning. As a ‘learning society’, Europe may be able to live up to the Lisbon objectives – even in a ‘flat’ world.”

I think this should be one of the high points of the conference and I am looking forward to the hearing his thoughts in more detail and hopefully have the opportunity to talk with him in greater depth during the conference.

China’s Looming Talent Shortage

I'm on a "world is flat" tangent these days, so here is more. The McKinsey Global Institute released a study on what it calls China’s “looming talent shortage.” McKinsey’s data lend backing to anecdotes one hears about the bidding-up of the cost of managerial labor, particularly among foreign companies, which often require English language skills of their managers in addition to leadership and technical ability. McKinsey estimates that, over the next five years, about 70% of the capable grads could be taken up by multinationals alone, never mind domestic firms. Hence, it predicts a “war” for talent. Yet, the study points to a mismatch between the educational system and the needs of the workforce. McKinsey’s study cites the example of engineering: this year, China will graduate 600,000 engineers. However, of the country’s total of 1.6 million young engineers, barely 10% could qualify for work in a multinational company, about the same number as in the U.K. The problem is that engineering programs in China focus too much on theory and not enough on projects and working as part of a team. Another flaw identified by the study relates to archaic residency requirements that mean the vast majority of places are saved for local students, denying some highlyqualifiedstudents university access. I guess this must mean that the world is not quite as flat as Friedman would have us believe. Engineering talent is clearly not an undifferentiated commodity, and there is value in looking under the covers of some of the broad statistics he cites.

U.S. Without a Flat-World Clue

Friedman tries to sound the alarm for U.S. policy makers about how the nation needs to respond to the challenges of the "flat world." Foremost among his recommendations or urgings is a pollicy that promotes education in math and science as a national priority. Unfortunately, our elected leaders don't have a clue and are in fact acting in a highly destructive manner--disadvantaging future generations of Americans even further relative to global competitors who place a very high priority on developing a technically competent workforce. The following news excerpt summarizes the misguided thinking in Washington today that values tax cuts and war over investments in social and economic security:

"Republican leaders of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce introduced a bill last week that would cut up to $15 billion from the government’s student-loan programs over the next five years. The reductions would meet the panel’s obligations as part of a broader congressional effort to reduce the federal budget deficit. The new bill increases the savings from the student loan program from the $8.6 billion cut proposed in the reauthorization bill for the Higher Education Act by reducing the subsidies private lenders receive from the government and by making it more expensive for borrowers to lock in fixed interest rates when consolidating federal student loans. The new bill incorporates that measure and adds to it, increases fees charged to lenders, and makes it still more difficult for borrowersto lock in below-market rates."

Contrast this with another news item this week: "China Luring Scholars to Make Universities Great. In an effort to transform its top universities into the world’s best within a decade, China is spending billions of dollars to woo big-name scholars and build first-class research laboratories. According to the New York Times, the model is to recruit top foreign-trained Chinese and Chinese-American specialists, set them up in well equipped labs, surround them with the brightest students and give them tremendous leeway. In a minority of cases, they receive American-style pay; in others, they are lured by the cost of living, generous housing, and the laboratories."

The World is (Still) Round

This may seem like a departure from Rapid eLearning, because it is! But I ran across this brilliant critique of Tom Friedman and felt the need to share it. Below is a brief excerpt from a book review written by John Gray, professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics (not completely coincidentally, the former institution of higher learning of none other than the also brilliant and often maligned Karl Marx):

"In any longer perspective what we are witnessing today is only the most recent phase of worldwide industrialization. In the nineteenth century the world was shrunk by the advent of the telegraph; today it is shrinking again as a consequence of the Internet. Contrary to Friedman, however, the increasing facility of communication does not signify a quantum shift in human affairs. The uses of petroleum and electricity changed human life more deeply than any of the new information technologies have done. Even so, they did not end war and tyranny and usher in a new era of peace and plenty. Like other technological innovations, they were used for a variety of purposes, and became part of the normal conflicts of history."