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Archive for November, 2008

Learn to Adapt Links for November 29th

  • Dust-up at Training Zone — Internet Time Blog – Jay Cross once again stirs up a great debate with his zealous rhetoric. While I’m not as strident in my views as Jay when it comes to the supposed panacea of informal learning (why can’t we blend social learning in with other modes of learning, Jay?), I do appreciate his stirring up great debates!
  • Measuring Skills for the 21st Century – From the report on building proper measures: “Today, they say, college students, workers, and citizens must be able to solve multifaceted problems by thinking creatively and generating original ideas from multiple sources of information—and tests must measure students’ capacity to do such work.”

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 21st through November 25th

  • Get Rid of the Performance Review! – WSJ.com – Samuel Culbert posts an argument against the common practice of performance reviews. This echos a sentiment that I have long held. Reviews really only serve bureaucracy and passive-aggressive accountability. High performers don't need them and low performers should be dealt with immediately through a PIP (instead of passing the confrontational buck to the end of the year). Let's improve performance by managing it instead of reviewing it!
  • The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On – Stephen Downes provides a vast overview of the state of education (it covers more than just online) by revisiting his essay of ten years ago.

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 19th

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 18th

  • Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web? – O’Reilly Radar – Tim adds thoughts to the building evidence that the Web (which should now really be considered the Cloud) is going mobile. The iPhone has freed our interface design limitations and the Cloud content and services will continue to become more accessible on all devices as we incorporate a more device agnostic philosophy to our product development.
  • Are Our Technologies at War with Each Other? – Andrew McAfee – Andrew weighs in on the debate Venkat and I started on his original post and my response, both of which got reposted by Social Computing Magazine. (Had I know the debate was going to get such attention I wouldn’t have shot so passionately from my hip ;o)

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KM vs. Social Media: Beware the Warmongers

In a stark example of ageist bigotry parading as insight, Venkatesh Rao is trying to instigate a war that does not, and need not, exist.  He believes that knowledge management (KM) advocates and social media (SM) advocates are at odds with each other.  His divisive post imagines a war between KM and SM.  Evidently, after encountering resistance to his polarized view of SM, he authored the dense tirade as a call to a war that does not exist.  His post brings to mind William Randolph Hearst’s quote, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” (Although that is history and Rao dismisses the importance of such institutional knowledge.  He’s doomed to repeat a great deal of history, I suppose.)
I see no reason why we should respond to Rao’s call to war.  His evidence in support of war are little more than petulant responses to people’s inevitable resistance to change.  He supports his opinions with fallacy in an attempt to create generational conflict.  My personal favorite: “…RSS and Mash-ups are culturally Gen X ideas…” I wonder how Dave Winer, the primary inventor/advocate of RSS, would feel about that statement since he falls solidly in the Boomer generation that Rao seems to disdain.  Statements like “The Boomers don’t really get or like engineering and organizational complexity,” beg a cultural flame-war.  But I will resist.  Instead, let me make a case for KM and SM peace.
A few bad apples don’t spoil the whole bunch. All change champions encounter resistance – sad fact of the human condition.  And many entrenched incumbents can be especially resistant to the status quo.  But we paint with too broad a brush if we let a handful of stubborn dinosaurs define an entire group of people.  I have been in KM for over a decade and have been active in SM since the term was coined.  And amongst the advocates of both, I see many more examples of integration than I do of segregation.
Social media actualizes the idealism of KM. In the workshops I deliver on Enterprise 2.0, I often refer to it as “KM 1.53”  This alludes to the fact that the goals of E2.0 are nearly identical to the goals of KM.  E2.0 (SM in the workplace) delivers the platforms and tools necessary to reach the KM ideals we have sought for years.  While the inherent ungoverned disorder of social media seems radical to some KM administrators, most KM advocates welcome these tools in their quest to free information and improve performance.
Most KM practitioners recognize the value of SM.  I have presented keynotes and workshops on SM at KM Australia and KM Asia.  At both, I have found many more eager adopters than resistant dinosaurs.  Based on my experience, most KM practitioners are excited about SM tools and platforms and are looking for ways to incorporate them into the current KM strategies as soon as possible.  As for the less structured aspect of SM, the response to my “Abandon Your Content Management System – KM in the age of GooTube” presentation at KM Australia was very positive.
Rao ended his post with his prediction of how the war will end.  Please read it yourself, but I would summarize it as: the old resistant people will die and the young righteous people will prevail.  I will close with my prediction of how the peace will continue:  Our technology and society will continue to evolve; people will continue to be resistant to (but finally adapt to) change; youth will continue to disdain their elders until they become tempered by wisdom; and the opportunities to learn and prosper will continue to grow for those wise enough to do so.

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 11th through November 12th

  • TogetherLearn – From the site: "togetherlearn is a turn-key platform where knowledge workers can collaborate, solve problems, converse, share ideas, brainstorm, learn, bond, talk, explain, communicate, conceptualize, tell stories, help one another, teach, serve customers, clue in partners, keep up to date, meet, flirt, shout, forge partnerships, build communities, and distribute information."
  • A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation – O’Reilly Radar – Good post from Tim O'Reilly regarding innovation and the drivers behind it. It reminds us that collective intelligence is strong in problem solving and knowledge gathering, but there are other drivers at work behind successful innovation
  • Enterprise 2.0: Identify Problem, Find Solution, Then Tools | SocialComputingMagazine.com – Stephen Collins (who I had the great pleasure of teaming with to deliver Web 2.0 learning in Australia) posts an insightful entry on how technology is only the enabler for successful Enterprise 2.0: "Enterprise 2.0 is about the tools least of all – it's principally about people and organisations, the cultures within and among them…"

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 7th through November 8th

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 6th

  • Web 2.0 Summit on blip.tv – Who needs to shell out the big bucks to attend when you can watch for free? This year's focus promises to expand beyond typical Web 2.0 focus to start looking at how technology can solve real world problems (i.e., how blogging will end world hunger ;o)
  • eLearning Learning – Tony Karrer put together a great feed aggregation site that pulls together e-learning blog posts from across the Web.

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Learn to Adapt Links for November 5th through November 6th

  • Eduslide.com – Eduslide offers either a public learning content management system (LCMS) to create, upload and control access to e-learning content, or a download of the open source version.
  • Open APIs reach new high water mark as the Web evolves | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com – Dion reviews the power of open API's: "Late last week an important milestone for the Internet was quietly reached as the number of available open Web APIs crossed the 1,000 mark, according to the popular API tracking service, Programmable Web."

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Learn to Adapt Links for October 31st through November 4th

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