Off Course-On Target

More on Mashups

Last week I was honored to do the opening keynote for the symposium on Mashups put on by the New Media Consortium.  NMC, in collaboration with Educause, recently released the 2008 version of "The Horizon Report" which is "... a five-year qualitative research effort that seeks to identify and describe those emerging technologies that are likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations." 

There is a full download of the Creative Commons PDF version here, which I recommend reading.  The report covers key emerging technologies, critical challenges, significant trends, and what they refer to as "Meta Trends", which have emerged after 5 years of producing The Horizon Report.

The Symposium on Mashups was a fun experience in and of itself, since the event was conducted entirely online using a parallel combination of the virtual world of Second Life and a more "traditional" online environment using Adobe Breeze. Sessions, where conducted live, lasted generally about 45 minutes with about one-third to one-half of that time devoted to dialog with participants using said audio tools.  And to add some additional uniqueness, I delivered the keynote from my "floating office" (a.k.a. the good ship Learnativity) while anchored near La Paz in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico.  I connected up via a combination of a web connection via my laptop data card and a cell phone for the audio portion.

For the past few years, I've been emphasizing and championing the power and potential that a more holistic perspective of mashups can offer, and you can refer back to some of my previous posts, such as "Mishmash of Mashups", "Mashed Up Snowflakes" and "The Future is a Monstrous & Marvelous Mashup", to get more about my views on this topic.

For this most recent opportunity with the NMC audience, I had the benefit and challenge of an audience who were very well versed on the topic and practice of mashups, but were still focusing and limiting their use of mashups to that of technology and content.  My objective was to take advantage of their expertise and experiences with mashups, and help them see how mashups can best be understood and used as an almost universal conceptual model that can be applied to almost everything and everyone.

In the slides below, I suggested that a simple definition of mashups should be something like, "A mashup is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole."

| View | Upload your own

Therefore mashups are also another powerful implementation of the LEGO block model of modularity. In the Q&A session, I highlighted the importance of understanding that mashups require the use of modules rather than raw resources.  This concept focuses on the challenge of using components that are "just right" in size by ensuring that they are as small as possible, but not one bit smaller. I suggested that, in my experience, optimum size  is when two fundamental criteria are met:

1. Each component is large enough and complete enough to exist on its own.
2. By itself, each component is too small to be useful.

For example, each LEGO block is complete and exists independent of any other block, yet any one block is unlikely to be useful all by itself.  It is therefore important to note that mashups are not the same as creating something new "from scratch".  Buildings today are largely "mashups" because over 85% of the materials used to create a building are pre-built components, such as windows, door units, light fixtures, heating and ventilation components, cupboards, etc. These are then delivered whole to the building site.  Manufactured goods such as computers and cars are no longer created in factories that build them from raw materials. Instead they are assembled from pre-existing components, such as hard drives, keyboards, engines, wheel assemblies, etc., in flexible manufacturing plants. 

We are already seeing how large shrink-wrapped software applications are being replaced by unique collections (mashups) of small modules of code in the form of widgets, utilities or the combination of two pre-existing applications, such as Google Earth and your database of places visited, pictures taken, or customers served.

Mashups have huge economies of scale and speed of creation because they are are new assemblies created from pre-existing components or "blocks". And yet, each assembly will most likely be unique, because that specific collection of components has never been assembled that way before.  Therefore mashups offer the promise of enabling truly exponential scaling and mass customization or personalization, which is at the heart of my passion about a future based on the Snowflake Effect, where everyone of us can increasingly have just the right people and things at just the right time, in just the right context, etc.

Based on the questions in the discussion segment at the end of this session, as well as the follow-on comments I've received, I think that most of the audience seemed to really understand how mashups can be and are being applied to everything from software code to events and conferences, projects and even people.  By "people", I'm referring to such things as the finding just the right combination of people for a successful project team, or the mashup of your skills, knowledge, and abilities (also known as the description of your real job!).

Now that we have more and more examples of mashups around us, I'm hoping that many more people will see this as a conceptual model, rather than any one form of implementation.  As you consider this much broader view of mashups, what applications and uses can you see?  How are you perhaps already applying the concept of mashups to a more diverse range of problems and solutions?

Getting back to the NMC keynote, I had just enough time to close out the session by telling a short version of my story about "flapping", which cautions against the trap of trying to design innovative new solutions by copying old models.  I've received a tremendous follow-up response from many of the attendees, telling how powerful this perspective was for them and how much it helped them, both in the rest of the sessions at the NMC Mashup Symposium as well as back on the job.  Please see "Confusing Flapping with Flying"  for the full story. You too can see how much you are flapping versus how much you are flying.

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Getting it Right

On Oct. 16th, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote called "Getting it Right" to the Autodesk Bay Area Manufacturing User Group or BAMUG. I was matched with fellow Autodesker Jay Tedeschi, who followed me on the stage and did a great job of putting my big picture and long range views into very clear context for these manufacturing design professionals. You can read more from Jay on his blog "The Gear Box".

My reference to "right" was two-fold:

• First, it refers to mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect: getting just the right stuff, to just the right people, at just the right time, in just the right context, in just the right ..........
• Secondly, it refers to the shift of human skills and value to right brain dominant skills and abilities.

As the slides below show the main topics I covered, including:

• How to avoid the "Perfecting the Irrelevant" syndrome
• The Snowflake Effect
• Skills of the future moving to the right side of the brain
• Applying the Long Tail to design
• The future of design

| View | Upload your own

Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure to be with Dan Pink and will have more on our meeting in a future posting. Dan is the author of one of my top recommended books right now "A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future" and I've been using his observations frequently. 

In this presentation to the BAMUG, I noted the connections between Dan's thought on the future of right brain skills and how this ties directly to design. For example as Dan notes in A Whole New Mind:

“...businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today's overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent, physically beautiful and emotionally compelling." or as Dan also puts it, "the MFA is the new MBA“

MFA = Master of Fine Arts

MBA = Master of Business Administration

Given that the everyone in the audience at this BAMUG meeting were mechanical engineers (or other design professionals in the manufacturing industry), I pointed out how dramatic the effect of this shift will be on them individually and their professions. 

Their jobs and skill sets have traditionally been focused on very left brain activities, such as analysis, and these are the very things that are becoming increasingly automated by the software they are using. 

I was able to show how Computer Aided Design or CAD programs that this audience uses, such as Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical and Autodesk Inventor, have been increasingly automating more and more of these left brain skills—reducing or eliminating the time the designer needs to spend looking after them. Therefore the role of the engineer or user of these programs is to look after increasingly more right-brain dominant activities, such as synthesis, seeing patterns, making bigger picture design choices, and problem solving. 

Quite contrary to some of the dark bleak visions of the future predicted by futurists and science fiction writers, in which humans would be relegated to menial tasks and the "machines" would be doing all the "thinking" and be very "intelligent", a very different and very bright future is emerging—one where there is more reliance and focus on the role of the human brain to deal with these very right-brain-oriented skills of recognizing patterns amidst the chaos, seeing the bigger picture, developing holistic solutions, etc.

Meanwhile, the computers and machines are looking after more of the left-brain skills of analysis, and sorting through immense numbers of possibilities. Both sides of the brain and both sides of the human/machine relationship are very necessary. From where I sit, we are seeing a steady migration and matching of which side does what. 

The only danger I can see, and it is a very real and growing one, is to miss this shift to the right and miss the chance to be both more human and more valuable than ever. 

I'll come back to this theme of the shift to the right in future postings. For now, check out some of Dan's points, take a step back, and assess how this trend is affecting your job, your industry and your brain. Just the act of doing so is a great way to exercise the right side of your brain—so limber up, you've got everything to gain.

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del.icio.us tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Technorati tags: Autodesk, Inventor, AutoCAD, mechanical, engineer, right brain, left brain, whole new mind, Dan Pink, exponential change, BAMUG, CAD

Adding Arrows to our Communications Quiver

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Well, seems that the Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-chak-cha) 20 x 20 format for slide-based presentations is really catching on! Pecha Kucha restricts you to exactly 20 graphic slides for exactly 20 seconds each, which amounts to a total of six minutes and 40 seconds.

I received a lot of responses from all over the world about my most recent posting on this topic "Power of 20/20 PowerPoint", and after my most recent PK presentation in Chicago, USA on Tuesday night.  I've also been contacted by an author in Japan who is putting together a book on Pecha Kucha, so stay tuned for more.

Interestingly, this topic exemplifies some of the other topics we've been discussing at Off Course - On Target, such as hype cycles and decision support. So in response to several of the questions I received and with some concern for other trends I'm seeing surrounding the adoption of this Pecha Kucha 20x20 model, I thought I'd provide the following additional thoughts and suggestions.

Life is a giant Boolean add function!

As with most formats, Pecha Kucha (PK) is best used as a new way to present ideas, assist with communication, etc. We need be aware of the hype aspect surrounding PK. I've found it quite common for people to fall in love with a new "thing" and start to insist that it be used in all circumstances. I've even seen whole companies or groups make it a policy that PK be the only format allowed! Of course, in due time, they will change back to a more balanced approach, following the natural flow of the "hype cycle" I described in an earlier post.

We humans seem to have this built-in tendency that whenever some new big thing comes along, we immediately react by focusing on all the "old" things that are now "dead", eliminating or subtracting them from our lives. Wasn't TV supposed to kill radio? Wasn't e-Learning going to "kill" the need for teachers, books, etc.? If we can learn from history though (let's hope!), we'll find that we rarely completely eliminate anything. Life is like a giant Boolean add function!

For me, PK is a fabulous new choice that we have in our arsenal of tools for expression. Just as we are beginning to learn (well some of us are) how to make a good decision about when to use e-mail, when to use a phone call, when to use Instant Message or Twitter, when to meet in person or send a handwritten note (remember those?), we need to be better at knowing WHEN PK is the best choice for a given situation and skilled at using the PK format well.

New and innovative ideas and technology are often very disruptive, so there is no question that they cause change and upheaval, but they rarely eliminate what has gone before. Television has certainly changed the role of radio, but when I checked as recently as this morning, radio was a VERY viable medium, and one that is in fact enjoying a great amount of innovation and growth. Consider, for example, HD radio, satellite radio such as XM radio and Sirius and Internet-based radio, such as Pandora, Last.FM, and Public Radio International (PRI).

Therefore, just as instant messaging (IM) didn't eliminate e-mail or phone calls, neither will PK eliminate more "traditional" forms of presentations. Instead, PK will help us improve one of the most powerful and requisite skills we have and need—the ability to communicate effectively, and to share our ideas. And if we can really learn from history, we will skip right over the early phases of the hype cycle and get right onto the "slope of enlightenment" and "plateau of productivity stages!

Getting Started with Pecha Kucha

I suggest following these guidelines for those getting started:

• Stick to the PK model of exactly 20 slides, automatically timed (not in control of presenter) for exactly 20 seconds each. PowerPoint has a built-in timer function that can manage this.
• Limit the preamble or explanation to an absolute minimum (30 seconds?) before the 20 second count begins and before the first slide comes up. If you need more than that, you've missed the point of the PK model!
• Only use great graphics for the slides. No bullet points, no text, no cheesy clip art. I recommend photographs that can either be created by the PK presenter or are increasingly easy to find on the web at photo services such as Flickr (mind the copyrights and licenses, please). Providing the assistance of people who have a good eye can be a big help.  As with many things, putting a PK presentation together is a big part of the fun and the challenge.
• Go after a range of presenters from those who are experts or at least prolific presenters to those who you never hear from or who dread having to give a presentation. My experience is that everyone benefits tremendously from tapping into the spectrum between these two extremes.
• Put as much thought as possible into creating a conducive environment for this style. While a standard audience/presenter format with stages, podiums, and seats can certainly still work, the nature of PK is that it is very mentally stimulating, so having a venue that puts people closer together and encourages discussions before, during, and after the individual presentations is very helpful. 
• Consider turning your PK gathering into a very social event such as with a club or pub type of atmosphere—casual chairs, floor seating, and drinks provided. At some of our Autodesk events, we even created a version of martinis we call "Pecha-katini" to help lubricate the conversation!  If you check out the PK web site you'll also see that this very social form of PK is happening in cities all over the world, and you may want to attend one.  Lots of variations possible, be creative!
• Use standard, though often ignored, good practices for writing or speaking. Talk about what you know. Even more so, talk about something you are passionate about. This can still include "serious" or business topics, but can also include more personal interests such as hobbies, life experiences, former careers, or things that drive you.

Basic Benefits

Although all of us can appreciate the value that comes from reducing presentations from their typical 60 minutes or more down to six minutes and 40 seconds, I've found even greater value from the PK model in such things as:

• Essence. The PK style forces presenters to really put some deep thought into the absolute essential points they want to convey. With only 20 slides and only 20 seconds to spend on each one, you the presenter have to make what seems like difficult choices (every one of our ideas is great right?!). As a presenter, I find this reduction process very valuable because it tends to help me convert more of my tacit knowledge into explicit forms and helps me make tough but clarifying choices about what the true message really is. For audiences, this kind of critical thinking on the part of the presenter tends to produce much greater value, leaving only valuable "nuggets" of information. I've found, for example, that PK style presentations generate a LOT more discussion afterwards between the audience and the presenters. When used at conferences as an opening evening, PK presentations often become a constant follow-on reference for the remainder of the event... and long afterwards. 
• Graphic communications. Here is a phrase we all know, but seem to practice very little. Most slides have WAY too much text, too many bulleted points, and rarely use effective graphics. Perhaps the PK 20x20 format uses the old adage that  "a picture is worth a 1000 words" to pack so much into every 20 seconds?  Forcing the issue to the extreme by requiring presenters to only use graphics necessitates the thoughtful selection or creation of an image that that effectively captures each of their 20 points. It's not always easy to accomplish, but when done, it is definitely effective.
• Pursuit of passion. As I mentioned in my getting started list above, PK seems to work best and seems to lead presenters to find and speak on topics they really know and really care about.  Isn't that a common trait of just about every great presentation you've ever heard? Yet how often do we sit through presentations that are almost as uninspiring to the presenter as they are to the audience?  I'm not sure I understand just why, but the PK format seems to have a natural affinity that brings out the passion in presenters. It seems to be especially effective for those who rarely make presentations or speak up or who don't think they have much to contribute. PK helps them find their "voice" and acts as a vehicle for transporting their message to others. Powerful stuff!

Serious Play = Serious Fun => Serious Performance Improvement

How might we get even more power out of this fun new format?  Let's develop MANY more styles and formats for this very useful way of sharing and communicating using audio, graphics, slides, etc. 

The point of PK is effective communication, converting tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge, as well as helping to transfer, share, and build upon our ideas and transforming them into reality. Don't we want and need as many choices as possible to accomplish this more effectively?  So let's experiment more with the PK 20x20 format.   

After some initial experience with the PK 20x20 format, start playing with the format. Try to find delightful deviations and innovative improvements—with the end goal of capturing, sharing and creating ideas faster and better. In addition to the obvious choices of trying even fewer slides or using less time per slide (2 slides 2 seconds anyone?), consider breaking outside our self-imposed cognitive boxes on presentations. 

• Who says that there has to be any talking at all? Music perhaps?
• How could you incorporate video into this type of format? 
• How about a "game" (serious fun) where 20 slides are chosen by the audience or someone other than the presenter who has to then say or do something in 20 seconds to add value to each slide?
• How about 20 people doing one PK presentation, where one person speaks per 20 second slide?  Now THAT would be an improvement on the snoozer "panel presentations" we've all been through, wouldn't it?!

We had a great example of just this kind of serious play and serious fun on Tuesday at the Autodesk Leadership Summit I mentioned earlier. Pete Kelsey **, a good colleague at Autodesk, along with fellow Autodesker Andy Ramm, did a great job of this kind of out-of-the box thinking and experimenting with PK. They created and delivered a PK on the history of blues music (one of my favorites!), which was a particularly fitting and relevant topic since we were doing this in the current home of the blues—Chicago.

But not only did they do their PK as a duo, Andy did all his "talking" via his guitar, as is typical in blues music, while Pete provided the spoken explanations. They still followed the same 20x20 format with some great images of major blues artists and evocative images of the life and times that produced this musical genesis of one of the most popular music styles today. But they also added the power of music, not only to demonstrate the topic (blues music), but to communicate their message to the audience. It was very effective and a great example of the type of experimentation that we need to do more of. 

I hope this posting encourages you to try out this format and have some serious fun playing with it. What ideas can you can come up with for ways to experiment, extend, and improve  on this fun and effective presentation format? Share them with the rest of us so they can become  arrows in our quiver of ideas that we can use to practice being on target, and help us make more  effective use of our collective intelligence!

 

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** Pete Kelsey has a blog that you should check out if you have any interest in civil engineering, roads, bridges, geography, mapping, etc.  His blog goes by the great title of "The Dirt: Map it, Move it, Manage it, Roll in it". In addition to his GIS topics and technology, you might also find it valuable for the experimenting that Pete does in this blog with things like self-created video. Pete is a fellow world traveler, spending most of his time on the road going to some truly interesting locations (Easter Island, Guam, and Seoul in the past few weeks, for example) and packing a really unique point of view wherever he goes. Definitely worth checking out.

The Power of 20/20 PowerPoint

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While catching up with this month’s Wired magazine, I noticed a short article with a very clever and descriptive title of “Get to the PowerPoint” from one of my favorite authors, Daniel Pink. Seems that Daniel has recently been introduced to the fun form of presentations known as Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-chak-cha), which you may recall from my recounting using this format back in March and the great time I had. You can read about my thoughts on doing a Pecha Kucha style presentation and more details of this format and its history in the previous OCOT posting "Fast, Fresh and Furious".

Daniel found this Pecha Kucha to be much more than just a novel form of presentation, as did I.  As he put it, the simple 20/20 format of Pecha Kucha, (20 slides each displayed for precisely 20 seconds each):

".... turned PowerPoint ..... into both art form and competitive sport."

As is often the case, simple things are often the most profound and valuable. This certainly seems to be the case with PowerPoint slides where everyone is given but six minutes and 40 seconds (20x20) from start to finish, when every slide is given equal time, and then you're done! Think of how much time would have been saved and how much productivity would have been gained if even a fraction of the slide presentations you've sat through were compacted into this size, and presenters were required to boil their messages down to such succinctness. I got a kick out of Richard Nantel of Brandon Hall Research who was so taken by the economy of PK that in a posting earlier this week he suggested:

"I believe the designers of pecha-kucha should be awarded the Nobel prize in economics."

And YES, I'm quite aware that many of you may be wishing this for MY presentations!

I don't think that all topics or presentations are suitable for this format. But I have found it to be both liberating and humbling to approach presentations with this new insight into how often it is true that less is more. And I'm doing my best to practice what I preach! I'm honored to be touching down in Chicago tonight (Aug 28) just long enough to do an encore performance of one of my Pecha Kucha presentations at an Autodesk Leadership Summit. Then, at the Learning 2007 conference in October in Orlando, Elliott Masie and I will be hosting a Pecha Kucha Night as well as encouraging attendees to use this format elsewhere in the event.

Continuing my perpetual theme of the value (and rarity) of experiential learning, I strongly encourage you to try this out. Many of these events are done in a social context in the form of a Pecha Kucha Night. This format has worked well for the ones I've been involved in because they stimulate some great conversations when the PK presenters mingle with the crowd afterwards. The format also works well for helping to find and mine some of the gold nuggets that are hidden away within some of the more introverted and quiet individuals. Better still, think about scheduling an event or grab an opportunity to try out this PK style on one of YOUR next presentations.

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BTW, Daniel is the author of a book that I HIGHLY recommend called "A Whole New Mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future"  His views on the future are very much aligned with mine.  I think you'll find a lot of insights in his book that will change the way you see the world of the future and will show you how to excel within it. I'm looking forward to joining Daniel on the stage at Learning 2007 at the end of October and will have more to report to you after that fun experience.

Context, attention, vanity and other powerful drivers of the future

On June 23, 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, I was honored to give the keynote presentation at the second annual Contextualized Attention Metadata Workshop (CAMA 2007). This event, part of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007), was very well organized by Erik Duval, Jehad Najjar, and Martin Wolpers,all from KU Leuven University in Belgium, and was additionally sponsored by the ARIADNE Foundation, ProLearn and MACE, each of which are worthwhile projects in the European Union. I recommend you check them out.

I suspect that Contextualized Attention Metadata may be a bit foreign to many of you and so taken straight from the workshop description, here is what it’s all about:

Contextualized attention metadata (CAM) captures the data on attention that a user spends on resources in a specific context. CAM enables us to better support the user in dealing with the information flood. Using CAM, filters can be devised that present new information only in the relevant context, for example by prioritizing incoming email based on the attention previously given to the topics of the email. Furthermore, CAM data can extend and amend user profiles thus enhances personalization in existing systems. CAM streams are collected from all applications that a user may interact with, including digital libraries, office suites, web browsers, multimedia players, computer-mediated communication and authoring tools, etc.

However you describe it, CAM is relevant for most of us in everyday situations, because CAM is one of the fundamental enablers for the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization that I’ve been championing for many years. CAM is at the heart of what will make it possible for...

just the right stuff (content, code, etc.)...

to reach just the right people...

at just the right time...

on just the right device/medium...

in just the right context...

in just the right way.

I’m sure you can add a few other words after “just the right” to improve this even more, but you get the idea.

And this is NOT just a vision. Examples are already appearing, such as:

• Finding just the right music to listen to (Pandora, Last.FM, Musicovery, ZuKool, etc.)
• The latest dating technology, which is very good at helping you find just the right person and by changing the context of romance works equally as well for finding just the right person for any other purpose.

If you consider this capability from a broader perspective, you start to see how powerful “just the right” can be as we get better at having just the right:

• Things to read at just the right time
• People to call when you have a question
• Individuals for your project team

And I’m sure you can come up with many more examples.

This concept is easy to grasp, but turning it into reality is a healthy challenge. Figuring out what is “just right” for each of us at any given time and in any situation is no small task, and yet, progress is being made. Focusing on CAM will make it happen that much faster.
Below, you can view the slides I used to support some of my comments at the workshop and download them directly from my Slideshare site.

As you can see on slide 19, I emphasized some of the most predominant R&D efforts in this area, and noted my “wish list” of items that need more research, tools, utilities, and services for CAM:

• Pattern recognition capabilities
• Implicit and Inferred metadata capture
• Visualization to process CAM to expose patterns (to both humans and machines)
• Equivalent of the music genome project for content and context
• Context REMOVAL (from content)
• Synthesis and automation of “objectives”
• Metadata automation
• Online/offline solution for CAM (e.g. ability to track my actions, behaviors, and activities, whether off line or online, as much on the desktop as the browser
• Standards for interoperability and mashups of CAM
• Optimizing discovery

Fortunately, I was able to stay for the rest of the workshop as well and thereby benefit from the other speakers and papers that were presented. You’ll find a full list of all presenters and their papers as well as all the slides and mp3 files of the presentations on the CAMA 2007 site.  But let me highlight just two that I think you’ll find particularly interesting:

What I took away from Joe Pagano’s presentation, "Measuring audience attention across multiple channels for a new Web site" was their finding that every site is unique (the Snowflake Effect) in terms of how best to attract the most attention. In the example cited in the paper, they measured audience attention across multiple channels for a new web site Chronicling America, introduced in March 2007. Interestingly, for this site and audience, “online word of mouth”(OWOM) referrers were the most significant sources initially driving discovery of this site (see the following chart).

In particular, what they called  “genealogy sites” (e.g. obituaries) scored the highest, followed by blogs, referrals from the Library of Congress site, e-mail, and lastly, search. It is likely that over time, search will become more effective as the more links to the Chronicling America site help to increase the site’s ranking, and this pattern is already suggested in the chart.  However, as Joe concluded, it also shows how OWOM plays a critical role, especially in the initial phases of the introduction of a new site or new content.

Seth Goldstein, co-founder and chairman of Attentiontrust.org and one of the original investors of and advisor to del.icio.us, started the event with an interesting review of his observations of the CAM landscape from a more commercial perspective.  As Seth and the attentiontrust.org site put it so succinctly:

Seth stressed the importance of adopting and respecting the fundamental principles of attention: property, mobility, economy and transparency. He also made the interesting remark that “attention is now media”.  By this he means that streams of attention, where people choose to stream/broadcast/share their attention to things like music through Last.FM, to web sites through del.icio.us, and to photos through Flickr, are now growing exponentially.

You can see a tangible form of this “attention funnel” in Reblog, which is an “RSS aggregator for reading and republishing”. Reblog makes the process of filtering and republishing content from many RSS feeds easy and fast. Rebloggers subscribe to their favorite feeds, preview the content, and select their favorite posts. These posts are automatically published through their favorite blogging software, creating an attention funnel. Seth posted an intriguing blog entry last year about how “APIs are the printing presses of social media”.

However, one of the more provocative observations that Seth made was his assertion that what drives online behavior is “vanity and popularity [which are] more powerful than things that help me” and that “publicity is trumping privacy.”  Attention is one of the scarcest of all resources and we all want more of it!

You can think of this as “attention in reverse.”  Most of the work on attention is based on YOUR attention, what are YOU interested in, paying attention to, etc. Seth was noting the inverse; in his opinion, an even more powerful force is our interest in “Who’s paying attention to ME?”  We see this with such things as the great importance given to knowing how many people are reading my blog, visiting my web site, watching my YouTube videos, who has the most online “friends”, etc. 

One recent example you might like to look at is atten.tv, which lets you either broadcast your clickstream to the world or watch what others are clicking on, all in real time. Seth sometimes refers to all this as the "Attentron”, which he describes as “watching people’s browsing patterns as entertainment.”  Seth has created his own version of this with Trakzor, which is a community driven MySpace tracker that lets you see who’s checking you out. This capability is also available on Facebook. And while it is all rather wild at this early stage of development, it is worth noting that Yahoo! purchased mybloglog.com, which lets you see who else has been looking at your blog.

While I agree that this “attention in reverse” is a version of the very real human traits of ego and vanity, I’m not yet convinced that these are more powerful forces than the value we place on people and other sources of assistance—things that help us. But I do believe that “enlightened self interest” is both a powerful and very positive driver. The capture and management of context and attention metadata is key to harnessing this power and getting us ever closer to the vision of “just the right” and the Snowflake Effect.

My recommendation is to keep your eye on developments in these areas of context, attention and automated metadata and to do as much “learning by doing” as you can so that you have experiences of your own to reflect upon as you try out whatever versions and applications of attention and context tracking you prefer.

And in the spirit of all of us liking more attention, send along your experiences and observations, as well as links to your blogs, articles, podcasts and videos. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, your 15 seconds/minutes of fame (attention) await you! <g>

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Andy Warhol, photographed by Helmut Newton

Wassup with Web 2.0? A VERY BIG Picture is Emerging from LOTS of Little Pieces

I was honored to be asked to give the keynote presentation at the “Emerging Pieces of the Education Puzzle” conference on the Campus Skellefteå located in north east Sweden.  Unfortunately I had previous engagements before and after in other parts of the world and was not able to be there physically, but we did the next best thing with a live video and audio for 90 minutes.  There were several hundred educators, PhD and graduate students in attendance and we had a great discussion about the effects of so called “Web 2.0” and other changes on the future of education and learning.  The slides “Wassup with Web 2.0?  a VERY BIG Picture is Emerging from LOTS of Little Pieces” are available from SlideShare.net and accessible below.

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NOTE!  see the note at the end of this posting about an exciting new feature of SlideShare! which now let's you download all the slides themselves as well as viewing them here.

In the presentation and ensuing conversations we had via live video, I put the emphasis on my observation that Web 2.0 is “a phenomena” and NOT a technology".  It is all about putting the focus on US as humans and our behavior FAR more than it is about the enabling and necessary technology.  Picking up on just a few of them, some main topics I covered in the talk included:

• Design patterns for Web 2.0  (slide #15) I’ve long been a champion of the profound work that Christopher Alexander did when he developed a “Pattern Language” for architecture that provides a set of common themes and relationships that are repeated in virtually every different form and age of architectural design.  In his book “A Pattern Language” Alexander writes:
  "Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice."
  Those of you who are familiar with my concepts and models will see how well this aligns with my visions of mass personalization and uniqueness.
  Tim O’Reilly used Alexander’s model to create a list of “design patterns” for Web 2.0 and you can find these in his paper “What is Web 2.0?”
• I put together a list of “Continuing characteristics of the continuum” (slides 16 & 17) referring to my comments on the importance of recognizing Web 2.0 as being a phase or stage of a continuum and the need to see the continuing trends within this phase that will continue into the next.
• Mashups (slide 32) as a much more universal and ubiquitous trend and model that is applicable to almost everything and not just software code as is most typically assumed.  Examples include the use of a mashup model for everything from content to events to project teams.  I included the fun “DIY Web 2.0 Startup” graphic that was featured in Wired magazine last year.  For more of my thoughts on mashups see the previous posting “The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup”
• Exponential growth, where I noted how almost all change is and always has been on an exponential growth curve.  More on this in the podcast and transcript “Living in a World of Exponential Change”
• Feedback loops which are one the fundamental components of enabling mass customization and personalization.  Current examples include the “thumbs up/thumbs down” type of feedback seen in things like StumbleUpon and the rating of your music preferences in the likes of Pandora. 
  These feedback loops need to become a universal and ubiquitous presence in literally any and all “consumables” (reading, listening, watching, etc.) and also branch out to include gathering inferred feedback and the “natural feedback” we are continuously providing based on what we do, decisions we make, etc.
• Harnessing the collective intelligence of the groups and communities around any topic, industry, issue.  The notion popularized by the research of James Surowiecki  and his 2004 book which coined the term "Wisdom of the Crowds".  Dan Farber had some good observations about this in his recent post and video “Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Wisdom of the Employees”  including a video of the panel interview he facilitated at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

I’ll leave you to look through the slides for more of what I covered and do let me know if you would like to see more details on any of the characteristics and points I make in the slides.

Finally, two of the most recent and best examples of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and beyond are Joomla! and Zude.  Rather than try to explain Zude check out this interview and demo.

This is NOT an endorsement of either of these applications but rather to provide you with what I believe to be GREAT examples of the tipping point that is developing around my theme of “MC2: Mass Customization x Mass Contribution”.  Have some “serious fun” spending some time to “play” with both of these and I’m convinced you will start to see how these enable and encourage almost anyone from your grandmother to your 4 year old nephew to be able to be both a content producer and consumer and do it all THEIR way.  I am particularly intrigued by the combination of both these types of “applications” with something like Joomla!! providing the functionality for content management however formal or informal, and something like Zude providing the functionality for assembling just the right stuff, just the right way, just for me.  Keep your eye on these types of functionality and I’ll be reporting more as I do so as well.

I ended my keynote to the group in Skellefteå Sweden with a brief overview of my concept of the Snowflake Effect and the coming age of mass personalization and uniqueness.  Based on just what I was able to cover under this banner of Web 2.0 it seems to me that the forecast for the future is filled with everything from snowflakes to snow storms and outright blizzards.  No need to dress warmly though, just starts to similarly prepare to live, learn, work and prosper as the unique snowflake you are and with all the other snowflakes (and a few flakes) surrounding you!

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** SlideShare now let's you download the actual slides!
BTW and as a great example of Web 2.0, SlideShare has just announced a new feature I and most others have been asking and waiting for, which is the ability to not only see the slides but to also download them as either PPT slides or PDF.   Providing direct access to the individual slides themselves is of particular important to me as I put all my content into the Creative Commons and the whole value proposition is for the share and reuse of my content and so that I too can benefit from the changes and improvements that others make to my content.   All my slides will be posted with this feature from now on.

Anybody can download the file- whether a SlideShare account owner or otherwise. Go to the slideview page and look for the ‘Download file’ link at the bottom right corner of the slideshare flash player. Screenshot above.

Mechanical Snowflakes in Salzburg

If it's Tuesday… this must be Salzburg?!

I was recently asked to make a detour to Salzburg to do the keynote for Autodesk “TechCamp”, the annual meeting of all the partners in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) who are serving the manufacturing and mechanical CAD division.

Jordi Portella, Autodesk's Director of EMEA Manufacturing Solutions and his team put on an excellent almost week long event that was attended by over 550 mechanical and manufacturing partners and specialists.

While this is something that I was  delighted to do, unfortunately I had to sandwich this between meetings in San Francisco on Friday and Orlando on Wednesday, so I was only in Salzburg for about 18 hours, but it was a great reminder of the phrase “short but sweet”.  I landed in Munich and took the train to Salzburg. It was one of those magical rides on a gorgeous spring day through the green hills of Austria and Germany, complete with church steeples marking the small villages and towns, and with freshly snow-covered mountains in the background.

I titled my keynote address “The Snowflake Effect: Unique is What We Seek”. I used this opportunity to highlight the trends, directions, and patterns that I feel are leading inevitably to a universal focus on the uniqueness of not only each of us as individuals, but even more so, the uniqueness of every moment, situation, and project.

Given this audience, I put this in the context of:

• Getting to “just right”, as in finding just the right people, content, context, mediums, etc.
• How learning is becoming an imperative to most organizations
• The increasingly new and expanded roles that design is playing for all of us as “prosumers” (simultaneously being producers and consumers)
• The converging patterns of economies of abundance, the right-brained economy, and the Long Tail effect

You can see more details of each of these in the slides I used as shown here:

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As I see it, the future of design will be predominated by the following characteristics:

• Project based
• Multi-discipline
• Collaborative
• Holistic and heuristic
• Right-brain dominated
• Design for the economy of abundance

And we will see the “redefining” of design to include such things as:

• Functional design
• Emotional design
• Design of everyday things in a world of abundance
• “Do good” design with such things as green design and sustainable design
• Design of and for the “virtual world”, moving beyond the design of “physical things”

My closing thoughts were that we need to be:

• Thinking more UNIVERSAL, rather than NATIONAL when it comes to the skills, knowledge, and capabilities of the future.
• Developing execution strategies that adapt and adopt these to leverage local, national, and cultural contexts.
• Shifting towards RIGHT BRAIN dominance in our jobs and skills. Our left brain still very necessary, just not sufficient.
• Ever wary that we are very busy “perfecting the irrelevant”.

I’ve previously covered some of these topics here on Off Course – On Target and will be addressing much more to do with the role of design, skills for the future, and some of these profound and powerful trends that are affecting the future for all of us. Stay tuned for more, send in your comments and suggestions and look forward to seeing you here more often.

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UNLearning in Langkawi

Is it just I or did someone hit the fast forward button on the world clock?  There is NO WAY it can be March 2007 already!  It’s been a busy start to the new year for me, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. My experience is just more proof that the adage “time flies when you are having fun” is true. I’ve certainly been having lots of serious fun with my latest travels and engagements, but I have not found much time to get this all captured and posted, but here’s to learning and improving!

This week I had the privilege of giving two keynote presentations at the National Higher Education conference sponsored by Autodesk in lovely Langkawi in Northern Malaysia. Langkawi is a collection of islands (99 during high tides, and 104 during low tides) situated just off the northwestern coast of Peninsular Malaysia, about midway north/south between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. This area is one of the fortunate places that the recent tsunami missed.

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I was involved with many education initiatives in Malaysia and Singapore, so it was particularly rewarding to be asked back by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education and to see their tremendous progress and continued commitment to higher education and education at all levels. In addition to the Minister of Education and several directors from the ministry, the majority of the attendees were deans and directors from schools of mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and architecture. They asked me to provide some new perspectives on the future of learning and education, and I put a particular emphasis on design, one of the top themes and skills of the future as I see it.

In my short keynote on Wednesday I provided a broad overview of some of the key trends I’m seeing for learning, education, training, and design including:

• Every * One * Learning” – Adaptive personalized learning for every person every day
• Exponential change – How our inability to see today’s rapid change as exponential rather than linear keeps us from adjusting to the challenges presented by technology and other factors (listen to my podcast “Living in a World of Exponential Change”) 
• The Three “C’s” – The convergence of Content, Competencies and Context

I framed my comments on the future of learning and performance in the context of higher education in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Although my slides from that presentation don't provide the context of my remarks, you can view them below:

My second keynote on Thursday "UN Learning: The New Skill of the Future?" covered new skills for the future within the context of design:
·    Learning + UN learning + RE learning (see my podcast and transcript)

• Design (redefined)
• Storytelling
• Synthesis
• Smart decision-making
• Finding (vs. searching)
• Semantics (adding meaning)
• Abstracting
• Collaboration
• Heuristics

Within the context of UNLearning, I also covered trends towards:

• A right brain economy
• An economy of abundance (see David Hornik’s article and Chris Anderson’s blog entry),
• The Long Tail effect
• Mash-ups (see my blog entry "The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup")

All of these can or are having a VERY positive effect on learning, education and design. They most certainly are positive steps toward the grand vision of personalized learning experiences for every person on the planet, which I laid out in the previous keynote and which I continue to pursue with great passion and commitment. Stay tuned for more postings and podcasts on this and other related topics. You can see my slides from the UNLearning keynote below:

You can also listen to my podcast on "UNLearning, the New Skill of the Future".
Here’s to all of us improving our skills in learning, unlearning, relearning, living, and loving.

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Fast, Fresh, and Furious: “Pecha Kucha”...the New Karaoke?

WOW!  Did I ever have a fun evening last night with my first ever Pecha Kucha Night experience. Pecha Kucha, pronounced “peh-chak-cha”  or “pet-shah coot-shah” depending on who you talk to, is a relatively new presentation format that is seeing quite an underground surge of interest. It’s happening in over 50 major cities around the world. Heck, even Tasmania has one now! My company, Autodesk Inc., set up this event at our annual worldwide sales conference for all our thousands of resellers. It’s taking place in Las Vegas, so perhaps that part makes sense. Thanks to Maurice Conti (who came up with the idea) and his talented staff of helpers, it was a huge success. Here was a packed room full of several hundred curious sales people wondering just what this thing that they couldn’t pronounce was all about.

So what is it? As I mentioned earlier, it’s simply an interesting format for “presentations” but it would be better characterized by the Japanese term Pecha Kucha, which it is derived from and reflects the sound of casual conversation ("chit-chat").

As a Pecha Kucha presenter, you come up with 20 different images (photos usually), put them in an order you decide upon, and provide these to the organizers who then put them into a sequenced roll or “slide show”. They set this up with an automated timer to change to the next image every 20 seconds. The timing is automatic and the speaker has NO control over timing of the slide change. As a Pecha Kucha presenter you take the stage, tell the projectionist to “hit it” and you’re off.  Six minutes and 40 seconds later, you’re done! Time for the next person.

Pecha Kucha Nights were started in 2003 by two architects living in Japan: Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham od Klein Dytham Architecture as a venue for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. They were looking for a way to get people who are typically shy or at least busy working behind computer screens or in studios out in public to tell their stories and join in the conversation.  As Moma put it in his Wired article about his Pecha Kucha experience in Wired magazine “The solution: Give them a format, a structure, a parlor game, a chance to talk about their current interests and listen to others doing the same.”

As a forum for designers, it was perfect for myself and for Autodesk since we are both very focused on design. Last night I was honored to be invited to join seven other creative thinkers with VERY different backgrounds.

The roster included:

Carl Bass – CEO of Autodesk Inc.
Ken Bado – Senior VP of WW Sales & Marketing, Autodesk
Bruce Beasley – Internationally renowned sculptor
David Montesino – Visual Journalist, art director and 3-time Pulitzer Prize winner
Johnathan Pickus – Manager, Las Vegas Valley Water District
Sylvain Plourde –  Co-founder of graphics company 3Vis in Montreal Canada
JT Tomlinson –  Head of Automation, Cirque du Soleil

Now THAT is diversity…not only from their job titles and organizations but even more so by the Pecha Kucha “conversations” they provided!

And what did they Pecha Kucha about? Couldn’t really do it justice with just words, but what was common about each of these otherwise wildly different presentations was that each of us talked about a mixture of things we care about and what makes us who we are. So it was a wonderful blend of personal interests and projects and professional pursuits. The commonality that came through loud and clear to me was passion—connections to family, personal interests such as some amazing fine woodwork projects, pursuit of meaning, life and work experiences and an overall exploration of what motivates us.  It was truly an example of “experiential learning” and you really had to be there to understand it and to appreciate one or more of the apparently tasty PechaKutinis that were being served to one and all!
(The sessions may have been videotaped so I am working on being able to upload some for you to look at and I’ll post them here if I’m able to locate them.)

What did I learn and enjoy from the experience that you might find of value and interest? As per the title of this posting,  it was wonderfully and frighteningly fast, fresh, and furious. The tight and simple 20 image/20 second format flipped the tired lecture, PowerPoint presentation on its head and stimulated diversity, connectivity, and cross-discipline conversation and collaboration not only in the presentations themselves, but in the great conversations in between and afterwards. People I’ve run into here since then are still buzzing and talking about it.

I also appreciated how this standard format acted as a great equalizer of presenters and every one of their images since they each got exactly the same time up on the screen. Is this the new way to do all presentations? Absolutely NOT!  As I’ve said many times here at Off Course – On Target, a truly new innovation rarely eliminates or replaces what went before. Instead, it adds to our choices for powerful ways to capture, express and share ideas. I’d recommend it highly for your consideration if you are organizing or participating in events where you or others are trying to share ideas with others. Or you may just want to experience a Pecha K

More on Metadata

While catching up with my online reading after a very hectic and productive week in Berlin, I was delighted to find that my posting in October about a keynote I presented on the Future of Metadata and Learning Objects at the International Conference on Digital Archive Technology (ICDAT) in Taipei had stimulated a series of comments in other blogs. I was particularly interested in comments by Scott Wilson and Andy Powell who are very well versed in metadata, and by Stephen Downes, a prolific blogger and presenter on related topics.

I always find it interesting how others interpret what I’ve written or said. Their comments serve to remind me that posting slides from one of my talks without the accompanying audio can make it difficult for the reader to know what I intended. When I posted the slides, I tried to fill in the missing audio using supplemental text. Stephen, perhaps wisely, often posts his presentations by capturing the audio portion, and then offering it as an MP3 file for downloading.

After reading my postings again several times, I’m still puzzled as to why the slides and accompanying text were sometimes misinterpreted, but since each of their postings made several good observations and since more discussion about the important topic of metadata is much appreciated, I encourage you to read them.

• Scott Wilson's comments are at http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20061130132607

• Stephen Downes posted two comments at http://www.downes.ca/archive/06/11_29_news_OLDaily.htm and
  http://www.downes.ca/archive/06/11_30_news_OLDaily.htm

• Andy Powell joins in at http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/11/index.html

To further the discussion, over the next week or so, I plan to expand on some of these comments. Thanks again to Scott, Stephen and Andy for taking the time to read and comment on my previous postings.  I hope this will stimulate even more discussion by others.

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