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There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission.

With just hand gestures and taps, videos are moved, grouped, and displayed across the workspace.  They can be collected and then splashed along curves and shapes with a sweep of your hand.

I’m going to have to think on this for a while.

“In my day, sonny, we had to make do with a 300 baud modem and a Commodore 64. You kids just don’t know how good you have it.”

I’m really not much of an instant-messenger person, but I use it because the younger folks that I work with pretty much expect to be able to talk to me any time I’m at the keyboard. I can barely manage one session at a time, but they have several windows open and can somehow keep it all straight. (I’d end up gossiping to someone about themselves, I know it.)

But when I read that the Smiley has turned 25, I had to smile. Originally an “in” way to to show you were in the know the technology, it got old long ago. But most of the new IM clients allow you to pick from hundreds. One person that I “talk” with even uses animated GIF Smileys that roll, jump and generally make fools of themselves.

Do we need this to let people know what we’re thinking? How we’re feeling? I hear often from people that in our connected world, the other person can’t possibly know if we’re joking — or angry, or amused, or fearful. Without the personal interaction, they say, there’s just no way.

I suspect that James Michener just might be surprised at that. Or Ernest Hemingway. Or Shakespeare. (First artist to be known by one name, I think.) They managed to communicate a raft of emotions and feelings without a single parenthisis or colon.

Let’s see if we can go 25 years without them, just to see.

The Girlz Of Destruction is a team of ten “grown-up” girls from around the world who compete in first-person-shooter video games. They’ve now found a physical home in Sweden, where they practice on their own LAN and are building a physical “community” as well. (Sweden has very big pipes, and this is a benefit.)

Because my wife is a network geek, and a grandmother, I knew all of this already. Geek girlz rock.

 That’s not how adults want to learn.  Much like pre-schoolers, they want to decide what they want to play with.  And who they want to play with.  And which type of toys to use, how long to play with that toy, and who to share with.

 A new concept in conferences is a BarCamp where the participants decide the topics and agendas at the beginning of the first day.

 Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications has a great list of 11 tips on running an un-conference.  He’s 50% of the the driving force behind Northern Voice, the Vancouver blogging conference that just completed it’s third yearly assembly.

Virtual Worlds
Catherine Winters (Second Life)
Jeff Henshaw (X-Box Live)

• Halo II has over 500 million hours of gaming on X-Box Live
• People can rate you after playing with you online, and offensive actions can cause severe complaints
• SL offers the ability to find those people you might have something in common with, and interact with them
• You go to similar places to meet people — ifI’m intersted in bowling, I won’t go hang out in a coffee shop

The Social Web for Karmic Good
Lynda Brown, William Azaroff, Alexandra Samuel and McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves

• Social media to make change in the real world – how does it intersect with the idea of economic benefit?
• It could be part of your competive edge — providing resources for the community, and you’d stand out in a crowd
• Will this drive a more entreprenurial model for NPOs?
• What is the social / environmental impact for our business — how can we partner?
• Need to find out what these groups want — is it all financial?
• If you’re going to be a world thinker, you’ve got to include the world — you need to communicate globally
• Think about return on interaction, not investment
• How do we know when we’re really inclusive? Is it when “we’re” inside the bubble?
• Don’t hold on to perfection too closely — it’s an iterative process
• It takes time for the concepts to trickle down — people in the arts are trying to understand

(You know you’re in trouble when someone in the front row is asleep.)

Legal Rights and Liabilities for Bloggers
Kevin O’Keefe

• It’s not the damages, it’s the cost of defense — insurance will cover that
• It’s not likely to get sued, and a simple retraction will usually solve the issue
• Posts can be seen worldwide, and can have a wide effect
• Be concerned about liabilities in other countries
• If someone defames a third party in comments on your blog, you (as the blogger) are not liable
• Lawyers get paid to be creative — try to find particular legislation or cases that may support them
• Legislation protects personal info from improper disclosure
• Trade secrets — value is secrecy. No value if disclosed
• Blogging while working — loss of productivity? Or personal and professional growth
• You have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom to be employed — employers can fire you at will
• A blog is closer to a Rotary meeting than a web site — help your employer understanding what blogs are
• Newspaper publishes letter in print, they can be responsible. If it was comment online attached to an article, no liability
• Save a draft, and consider an angry price
• Consider insurance
• Consider resources like EFF
• Resources on lexblog.com

• Ten case studies — what tool are they using, how has it changed their classes
• Publishers weren’t excited about the book existing online as a wiki — but that wouldn’t allow interaction and sharing
• Some chapters are open, and some are closed
• It’s not proprietary, and there’s a loss of control for the publisher
• We need to have a community around it for it to work
• Atlassian Software Systems (software for the project)
• You don’t have to put something down in print to show that you’ve “published”
• Publishing online will become wildly richer with the application of community
• You no longer just see the finished product, but the process that you went through to get there
• Wikipedia — You Either Get It Or You Don’t
• Peer review during writing, allows input from other authors
• Readers can give feedback either in comments or in changes
• People who might feel uneasy in a physical situation are more willing to speak online
• There’s a radical rethinking on how you build a website, by using a wiki — must be very simple
• Book chapters belong to authors under Creative Commons

John Willinsky Teaching English Language Arts

• Raising a generation of “rip, burn, download” with no concept of Intellectual Property
• We need to have educators think about it as “go public”
• Water is Taught By Thirst (EmilyDickenson)
• Using Adbusters in the schools
• They bring materials into the classroom (through the Wiki) that would otherwise never apply — a sharing of IP
• Wiki becomes a cumlative index — class ended in December, but the students are continuing to work and add value
• Students continue discussion with external blogs
• Using software we’ve designed for peer review in the intellectual community for “hot-not fashion“
• “I didn’t come here to learn wikis, I came here to learn to be an English teacher” (student)

D’Arcy Norman weblogs.ucalgary.ca

• Creation of groups and blogs for learning
• Not a top-down learning environment, created by students
• Self aggregating community

Chris Lott http://www.chrislott.org/wiki/

Chris works as resident “disruptive technologist” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Center for Distance Education, with a special emphasis on using social software for online learning, specifically to create a rational constructivist learning environment and functional classroom community of learners embedded in the real world community of practice.

• The third space — being an active learner for life
• Students will retain the records and archive for
• We need to disrupt the academy
• Computers are stupid, students are smart
• If the instution sponsors it, it’s a long time committment
• Information fluency is the next step from literacy

Jon Beasley-Murray Posthegemony

• Good to maintain tension between Higher Ed and Blogs
• Students can maintain blogs and disagree
• Critical thinking against the university as much as for it
• Risks of blogs from a tenure perspective “my university would never hire a blogger” attitude
• One of the great promises of blogging is that universities will be faced with student disagreement

Sylvia Currie

• SCoPE Induviduals who share an interst in education, research and practice
• Blogging to enhance the learning experience
• How do you design the experience for education and collaboration?
• Grade 1 and 2 blog from teacher in MooseJaw

• The tools of control go to those who keep the lines of communication open
• Letting go of the ego of “everybody has to come to us
• Using VOX for “your world online”
• anil@dashes.com
• http://dashes.com/anil
• Has anyone every read an entire “New Yorker”?
• Twitter – kind of provides a buddy list for text messaging
• David Snowden in Knowledge Management
• I like the idea that it’s around forever — for my mind, it makes me do better
• People post more pubicly when they can post privately as well

There’s an example at Thinkubator.

 He had no idea who I was.  He’s only met three thousand people since I last saw him, so I don’t know why.

Today is the “unconference” where topics are voted on in the morning, and we all run around during the sessions.  Tomorrow is a little more organized.

 I just met Luke from SocialText.com, who builds and manages enterprise wikis.  He sounds like someone I’ll be able to do some business with.  We agreed that while Sharepoint 2007 does have wiki capability, it was disappointing.  No big surprise.

 Off to a session on community.

D

“What started out as an exercise to list and categorize Web 2.0 in the enterprise topics expanded into all things Web 2.0 for the simple reason that crossover is inevitable. I also hold a strong belief that the boundary between consumer and enterprise technology is blurring, therefore it would be illogical to exclude purely consumer oriented services and products.”

There are sections on Blogs and Content Management, Collaboration, Voting/Bookmarking/Tagging, Feeds, Media, Statistics, Online Storage and Social Networking.

The funny part was that this was to be provided by “your senior leaders” and the actual worker bees didn’t seem to be involved at all.  Now if you google “best practices” you get more than 96 million hits, so it’s safe to say that nobody even understands what this is, any more.  But I’d like to offer my definition.

1.  Best practices come from the people actually doing the work.

2.  Best practices are not “best” in all situations — context is all.

3.  Best practices are a moving target.

4.  Best practices are only the best you’ve found so far.

5.  Anyone using the phrase “best practices” should be feared.

And in passing, you should know that “blog” currently has 2.5 BILLION hits on Google.  The rest is left as an exercise for the student.

I just saw a site called The Adsense Game that takes you through the process of creating and configuring an imaginary web site to learn how to use Google’s Adsense tool.  You pick the type of site, add elements, and watch the hits happen and your bank account get fat.

Built by Joel Comm to promte (of course) his book, it’s a really slick and engaging example of adult learning.  The simulation is attractive, tips pop up to help you, and the clean design makes it pretty easy to understand what you’re doing.

Google really needs to write this guy a check.

They don’t like to share, they are easily distracted by shiny objects, and they learn much more easily with their hands on the controls — for example, toilet training.  You can lecture a 2-year-old all day, but put him on the potty seat and you’re headed for success.  Poop happens.

CLO magazine has a great article that expands on this called “Simulations Build on Adult Learning to Accelerate Skill Building and Application” and I’ve posted an excerpt below to make you want to climb up on the rest of the article and do your business.

Simulations Build on Adult Learning to Accelerate Skill Building and Application

October 4, 2006 – Kellye Whitney, Associate Editor

Simulations aren’t a new tool in enterprise learning. As with many of the technologies that have graced the learning stage in the past few years, simulations enjoyed a burst of popularity and attention that subsequently died down. But unlike many of the fly-by-night tech solutions that burst into a short-lived flame, the buzz around simulations still burns and with good reason — simulations are one of the top tools that engage learners and accelerate skill building, as well as the application of new skills and knowledge once employees are back on the job.

“We are seeing an increase in demand for simulations across the board, whether it’s an e-learning simulation, a classroom-based computer simulation or a board simulation,” said Rommin Adl, president and CEO of Strategic Management Group Inc., one of the largest simulation and multimedia training companies in the world. “We’re seeing growth in every single segment that we serve across different practice areas such as business acumen, leadership, project management and sales.”

Adl said part of the reason simulations are still hot is because they align closely with adult learning principles and offer the opportunity to learn by doing in a risk-free environment. Cost, once a huge deterrent to simulation implementation, remains a factor, but it is not as big a worry at the top of the organizational pyramid.

“It links to the strategic nature of learning,” Adl said. “If the learning is linked to some major strategic change initiative, then cost tends to be important, but it’s almost secondary to really creating alignment around the strategic change, whereas, if it’s a curriculum-based or open-enrollment type program, cost is going to be much more of a factor.”   more…

Allowing your customers to create content is really changing the nature of how information is shared about your products and services.  Take a look at “The Wisdom of the Web“.

April 3, 2006 issue – A little over two years ago, even the most sensitive entrepreneurial radar could not pick out two pairs of people on opposite ends of the West Coast starting companies that would make plenty out of nothing. In Santa Monica, Calif., dot-com survivors Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson were hatching the idea of taking on biggies like AOL and Yahoo with a Web site consisting only of stuff that people would bring to it. And up in Vancouver, B.C., married collaborators Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were just figuring out that the online game they were developing might work better as a way for people to share their digital photos with each other.

Simply put, anyone at the show can propose a session, a discussion, or some type of sharing/learning experience.  If enough people are interested — it happens.  (This idea makes most marketing drones quake in their Gucci loafers — what happend to our carefully crafted messages, to help people better understand our product planning map as it relates to the positioning of our solution-based selling system?)

I love it.  My only focus is on customers — and what their pain points are, what issues they need help with, and how to help them be more successful using our software. 

So when I saw that SAP designed a whole show around this, and followed up with a Business Product Expert Community, it really got my attention.  Anyone who does technology training and doesn’t jump on this is going to be very lonely at those big convention centers.

Here’s some information from the launch of the community, with a little PR-speak removed for clarity:

“The Business Process Expert Community is the premier online destination for sharing best practices in process innovation.

In keeping with the SAP tradition of open communication, we’re dedicated to an ongoing dialogue with our customers and partners about their needs.

Discussions with customers make it evident that it’s not simply a question of how to use enterprise services. Rather, it’s a question of who in the organization has the expertise and knowledge to do so. We’ve found that a broad range of professionals is entrusted with the all-important task of improving existing business processes and delivering new ones.

As we continue to expand the community, we’ll look to you to make it a success through your contributions. Suggest changes and improvements through forums, or express your ideas through blogs. Share your knowledge by submitting an article. With your help, we can make the Business Process Expert Community an extraordinary resource for business process innovation.”

It’s an amazing example of user-built content, that has gotten over 5 million hits in the last couple of years.

Are you using resources like this for your business, training company, or educational institution?  Hear me speak about this at the National Association for Simulation and Gaming this fall in Vancouver, Canada.

 Pretty cool, eh?

• I work for a large software company, as a very small cog
• I am often called sarcastic, aggressive, annoying — and worse — even by friends
• Opinions expressed are mine alone, but shared by all thinking people worldwide
• I’ve been involved in learning, content development and business management for a long time — and if you’re under 25 I’ll probably remind you of your dad
• I’m usually right, and my projects always amaze customers and exceed expectations

Stay tuned.