Off Course-On Target

444 Steps Leading Onward and Upward

The university campus where I gave the keynote to the first Latin American Conference on Learning Objects (LACLO) is located at the base of a hill. On top of this hill is the original lighthouse for the area. Since another part of the city's work is to improve conditions, they created a set of wide and winding stairs all the way up the hillside to the lighthouse—444 steps in total. This I know, because each one has a numbered tile on it, and I climbed up and down each one on a beautiful equatorial evening. However, putting in these steps cut a path through hundreds of small, ramshackle homes where many of the city’s poor were living.

In many other cities, this would have meant that these people were evicted, but in Guayaquil the government did two very different things: they rebuilt the frontages of all the houses that were now on either side of this walkway, and they provided training for each of the families on how to start and run small businesses. As a result, when you climb up the stairs, there is a wonderful variety of shops, restaurants, bars and bookstores all the way up. What a great model for all of us to learn from!

Till next time,

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Personalization Pervades Even Taxes (in a Very Good Way)!

Personalization is a word I use a lot and it is the best summation of what I see as the "grand vision" for learning and performance. I'm constantly finding more and more examples of just how pervasive personalization is becoming in our world.

My recent visit to Guayaquil, Equador showed me yet another example in the form of personalized distribution of taxes—of all things! In this photograph, which I took on my brief walk along the riverfront "Malecón," is a set of individual sheets of thick clear glass framed in stainless steel and each measuring about 1.5 meters by 3 meters tall (about 4 ft. x 10 ft. for you measurement challenged Americans! :-) )

As you can see, each glass panel is edge-lit to create a striking visual sculpture. What you can't see in the first photo is that each plate is engraved with hundreds of thousands of names of the individuals who have essentially "paid" for the very expensive riverfront renovation. Here's how it works: each citizen is allowed to direct up to 25% of their personal income taxes toward any number of projects. This is, IMHO, just brilliant!

What you are seeing is a dedication to each and every person who chose to direct some percentage of their income taxes to creating this Malecón river walk. Contrast this with the much more complex, often corrupt, and largely unknown process of most other countries. This same mechanism works for corporate or business taxes. For example, the University where I gave a recent keynote address is able to set up mutually beneficial projects with businesses. As  part of the agreement, the business will direct a percentage of its taxes to the university.

For me, this is a wonderful confirmation that the dream of mass personalization of our world is being realized and delivering unexpected results everywhere and for everyone.

Till next time,

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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Fun Fact

Last time I mentioned that the overarching message I took away from Zen was the fundamental role of what Robert Pirsig called "quality." And the book has been an inspiration in other ways as well. One of the fun little facts about this book comes from the Guinness Book of Records. According to Guinness,  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance holds the record as the bestselling novel rejected by the greatest number of potential publishers (121).

This is a great reminder of how important it is to stick to your beliefs and not let others persuade you otherwise. Of course this determination needs to be balanced with the resistance of using it as an excuse not to change or not to recognize when you’re wrong. But then life is really all about the art of balancing and the skill at constant course correction to stay on target.

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The Equator Educates Wayne: Zen and the Malecón

One of the greatest benefits of being able to travel to so many countries where I can be with such interesting people from all over the world, is getting to constantly learn about new things.  While I was unfortunately only able to be in Guayaquil, Ecuador for 2 days, I came away with some outstanding new lessons that are worth passing on to you.

One of Guayaquil's recent achievements is a complete renovation of the city's riverfront, which they call the "Malecón". It is complete with encapsulated prior monuments, children's play areas, parks, water displays, etc. In some ways it is a common story of a city taking an area that was run down, dirty, and crime infested, and rebuilding it. But what was most impressive to me was the attention to detail that is everywhere.  It reminded me of the overarching message that Robert Pirsig so impressed me with in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Though I read it so many years ago, it remains one of the most influential of books (HIGHLY recommended). 

What I took away from Zen was the fundamental role of what he called "quality" and it was everywhere I looked. As I took advantage of the warm equatorial night to stroll the several kilometers of the Malecón in Guayaquil, I saw quality everywhere: the individual quality of the light fixtures from both a construction standpoint and by  the large variety of their designs which reflected the overall marine and water theme.

Quality was also in the hedges, which incorporated brightly painted steel sculptures that were of an abstract wave formation. It was present even in the treatment and variety of materials used for the walkway itself, from wood planks to intricate patterns of concrete to tiles.

Each of these "quality" touches were not necessarily crucial to the overall effect and without them, this would still have been a very "nice" treatment.  But with them, it became something truly special. This was reflected in the feel you could not miss in the laughter of the young children running and playing, the smiles of their parents, the new romance radiating from the couples young and old snuggling on the benches, and even in the way the police personnel, most of them women, were completely integrated into the scene and busy chatting with those walking and sitting.

More to come about my education at the equator...

Till next time,

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Hot Shanghai is VERY cool in Taipei

To cap off an excellent day of presentations and conversation, my hosts treated me to an evening out in the downtown "cool zone" of Taipei, where the entire city's young (20-somethings) workforce seems to go after work. Best of all, my hosts somehow managed to get us into THE restaurant in Taipei, called Din Tai Fung, for one of THE best and most beautifully presented Shanghai-style dim sum, and it was some of the best I've ever had. As you can see by the photo with the tower of bamboo dim sum steam baskets, a literal army in the kitchen is busy hand-forming each little treasure to be served.

The evening was made even more complete when the team who are creating the national metadata standard, which is based upon the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Standard, met with me back at my hotel. This exceptionally talented and energetic team has created a full Chinese translation of the IEEE LOM document, and even more impressively, a very detailed Taiwanese application profile to meet local needs. Their work is slated to become the national standard for educationally-oriented metadata for all of Taiwan in 2007, and they wanted to meet to get more guidance and suggestions for their final work on this national standard. A fabulous and dedicated team, and we talked late into the night.

A full day and most productive visit to say the least.  Keep your eye on Taiwan for a continued flow of great examples and experiences in all things metadata for both digital archives, learning and performance. Unfortunately there is still no sign of my lost voice yet, which certainly added an extra challenge to my presentations and meetings! Now I'm off to Ecuador to see if I can find my voice there. Stay tuned and I'll let you know where and when I find it.

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The Future of Metadata

My recent presentation at the 2006 International Conference on Digital Archive Technologies (ICDAT 2006) in Taiwan, dealt with the connection between content, competencies, and context, and how these domains are based upon a foundation of supporting metadata.  Below is a SlideShare version of the slides I used and if you would like to reuse or repurpose any of the slides you can download ICDAT2006.ppt

Some of my key points for the future of metadata included:

• Automated metadata generation (AMG) for producing the vast majority of metadata
• Augmenting AMG with the manual metadata from both mass contribution (consumers) and experts such as librarians, indexers and the like
• Making metadata much more transparent to the end users and remember that metadata is a means to the end of finding (rather than searching!)the "right stuff"
• Metadata "beyond text" to include the vast majority of content which is in the form of video, audio, photos, etc.
• Getting rid of the limiting default definition for metadata as "data about data" and extending it to include such things as metadata on people (e.g. competencies, skills, knowledge), places (e.g. GIS, location based), and equipment
• The power of inferred and implicit metadata, that which can be inferred from existing metadata by their relationships, such as if we know that daughters = female then all instances of daughter are also instances of female
• Capturing and automating "Attention metadata" (patterns of preferences, practices)
• The critical role and need for capturing and using Contextual metadata

After covering some of the history and current myths and misconceptions, I addressed the topic of the future of Learning Objects and covered some of the following points:

• The mass contribution phenomena of consumers providing massive quantities of metadata. Examples include all the metadata for music such as that on CDDB and the metadata being generated by the millions using Flickr and del.icio.us
• The mass customization and personalization of Learning Objects, such that we are able to have "just the right" content at the just the right time, on just the right device or medium, etc.
• Automating the assembly of content in general and Learning Objects in particular
• The inclusion of contextual metadata to enable content assemblies that are ideally matched to the unique situation of each individual

Given that I managed to do the whole presentation without a voice and yet got a rousing applause and extended session of questions afterwards, it appeared that they were able to hear me, and the comments resonated strongly with this audience.

Till next time,

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Meta fun with Metadata in Taipei

Recently, I was privileged to be an invited speaker at the 2006 International Conference on 2006 International Conference on Digital Archive Technologies (ICAT 2006) in Taiwan, which was held on the beautiful campus of Academia Sinica, the highest and largest academic institution in Taiwan. I joined a very illustrious group of local and international speakers.

The focus of these digital archives groups is on documenting and preserving the valuable assets of libraries, museums, and national archives. Metadata is their key focus. Taiwan is a world leader in metadata and this leadership was well illustrated by both the presentations and the demonstrations at this event.

Over the past seven or eight years, I've had the pleasure of working with many local and national project groups in Taiwan who have been working on metadata and Learning Objects at a very high level, so I know of their work firsthand. Their holistic approach and national scale is truly amazing. Part of my message to them was to become aware of the leadership they are unknowingly providing through example and to encourage them to extend their outreach so that more people can learn and benefit from their experiences.

Of particular note at this event was the degree to which there are some truly significant advancements both from Taiwan and from some EU projects in "getting beyond text" with metadata. There were some excellent examples of extracting and automating the metadata generation of metadata from video and audio. This included the growing efficiency and effectiveness of speech to text conversation to create fully searchable text transcripts of all audio (much like I do with my podcasts here on Off Course - On Target).

Even more impressive were the examples of being able to do not only automated face recognition of people within video, but also the recognition of "objects" such as cars and buildings. With the recent explosion of video on the Web, just start to imagine how much the value goes up when there is the accompanying metadata for all this video that enables you to find just what you need.

The conference organizers asked me to talk about the future of both metadata and Learning Objects, something that I had great fun doing, and I received a very enthusiastic response from the audience. I framed my presentation within my overarching theme of the convergence of content, competencies and context, and how each of these domains and their combinations are based upon a foundation of supporting metadata.

See the other postings to see or download the slides and learn more of my Taipei adventure.

Till next time,

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Off Course - On Target: The Story

Some of you may be wondering why I decided to name my blog "Off Course - On Target". Of course with me, as you might imagine, there's a story. In fact, it goes back to a serendipitous meeting I had with Charles Garfield.

He and I were both keynote presenters at a conference. Being strangers in a strange land, so to speak, we went out for dinner the night before the conference. Charles told me a fascinating story about his work as one of the chief engineers on one of the Apollo space missions. He related the story of one of the greatest hurdles they ran into…a hurdle so big that it almost led to the cancellation of the Apollo missions themselves.

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DOWNLOAD Size: 7.3 MB Duration: 10:19 Transcript: 318 KB

In this podcast, Off Course—On Target: The Story, you get some background behind the name of my blog and this podcast series, and I start you on the path to learning how to become more open to new ways of thinking, how to recognize when and how to act on new ideas, and how to be more innovative, inventive, effective, and productive.

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Consensus: How to Create and Maintain a Better World - Part 2

Being good at consensus requires being a great listener. Consensus is also the practice of true semantics, which contrary to popular misconception, is NOT about words but rather, about getting to meaning, as in "I know what you said, but what did you mean?" It's about listening for understanding.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from my parents was that "we judge ourselves by our intentions, and everyone else by their actions." I've learned how true this is and also how valuable it is to try to reverse it. So I work at trying to see how my words and actions are interpreted by others and not just assume that my intentions are obvious. Equally, I work at trying to understand the intentions of others, which are often quite contrary to what could have been assumed from their words and actions alone. Doing this with groups as I work on building consensus has proved extremely valuable.

Developing consensus with others usually involves finding common ground—removing or setting aside our individual or situational context to discover the underlying principles that are usually there when we get past the language and specifics of our unique applications and situations. Being able to abstract and synthesize from a large volume of input is equally essential. This process typically enables the real essence to bubble up and become evident to everyone involved.

Of course, finding consensus takes time to work through. In our hurried world, this can be an added challenge when everyone seems to be looking for quick fixes and instant gratification. But in my experience, consensus has always produced results and benefits that FAR exceed the expectations of those involved and is seen as a huge payoff for the investments made.

Negotiation is also a good skill to have. And yes, this is about compromise, but NOT in the form of giving in or backing away from achieving great success. This kind of compromise is about being able to look at the big picture, look at the consequences of our actions, and create solutions that will be lasting and successful because they work for all.

If any of this raises your curiosity, then you might do a quick personal assessment of some of these related skills and qualities. How good are you at listening for understanding—asking good questions that lead to greater and deeper understanding for you and others. What opportunities do you have to put consensus to work?

My greatest hope is that in the not too distant future, we can say that, rather than standards, it is consensus that we have in great abundance.

It may seem like this is a long and winding way from that strange power receptacle in my hotel room a couple of posts ago! But that shouldn't surprise you if you've come to this site before, since this is yet another example of how Off Course - On Target is where unexpected paths lead to great discoveries. I hope that this brief detour to explore consensus leads you to some great discoveries and value that you can take with you and use. Either way be sure to let me know about it.

Till next time,

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Consensus: How to Create and Maintain a Better World - Part 1

Last time, I talked about how the RJ-11 plug reminded me about the great thing that standards offer and how the power of consensus makes this all possible. In my experience, consensus seems to be either unknown or misunderstood by most. The Ball Foundation suggests that "Consensus is mutual agreement among team members that all legitimate concerns of individuals have been addressed by the group and everyone agrees to support the decision." and Merriam Webster has this wonderfully simple definition:"group solidarity in sentiment and belief."

In practice, consensus is about developing a collective decision that every member agrees to support with their words AND their actions. How often do you see that? Too rarely to be sure but whenever it IS seen, it seems to create great and lasting success, joy, and results.

To me, consensus is an extension of and an improvement upon "just" democracy, because consensus is not based on simple majority voting or our input as individuals. Rather, it is the requirement to think, work, and act as a collective, to consider the big picture and the consequences for all. In its true form, consensus requires that EVERYONE in the group helps to develop a plan that they can then support afterward. With the more typical majority vote and other forms of group decision-making, the decisions of the group are often followed by a complete lack of support by those who voted for it.

Another phrase associated with developing consensus—one that is pretty accurate in my experience—is that this process involves "herding cats". In my experience, it also has a few goldfish thrown into the mix!  :-)  But isn't that our reality? We're not all the same. Like our parents might have said, we are "snowflakes", each of us unique.  Not just us as individuals, but each of our projects, our organizations our every situation is an instance of true uniqueness. Yet, is not our diversity and eclecticness the great thing about being human? As we have more and more choice in our lives, more options, and more challenges, isn't there an escalating need to be very proficient and skilled at developing consensus among our groups, be they national, cultural, professional or personal?

In both the present world and the one that is looming, I have to believe that consensus will be one, of if not THE key, determinant of our ability to create and maintain a better world.

More on this later...gotta run.

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