Off Course-On Target

The Search for Better Finding!

As I often say to my audiences, “There is a big difference between searching and finding.” It’s along the same lines as the difference between shopping and buying, or fishing and catching. I’m not suggesting that one is “better” than the other, just that they are VERY different and often confused with each other.  Apply this distinction to the Web, and I suspect that if we were to evaluate our current practices and time use, we’d see that we spend a LOT of time searching and not very much time finding. 

My focus (some might say, "myopia") on metadata is because I believe it is one of the keystone elements that can make for better finding of “the right stuff” (people, places, content, services, locations, events, etc.) more possible. However, other critical elements are the interface and human interaction layers and models for finding.

Today we are almost completely dependent on or limited to the use of both textual models and variations on lists or search results to find what we want. While this is helpful in many situations and is not something I expect will disappear, I am anxious to see additional ways for finding the right stuff (which is not always what we think we want). One way to achieve this goal would be through the use of visual methods and multidimensional techniques.

Don’t you find that often the most valuable things are those you discover serendipitously? Or how about those situations where you say, “Of course!” but they were not what you had directly been looking for?  Current keyword searching is not unlike trying to find a word in a dictionary that you can’t spell in the first place. It’s extremely limited, because you have to know which term to use in a search, there are no semantic “smarts” to the searching, and of course, it is all purely text based.

So I’m always looking for and experimenting with alternative or additional ways to do more finding. The good news is that these alternative means seem to be growing, yet they typically don’t get too much attention and awareness of them seems very low. I suspect this is because we are creatures of habit. We are too busy doing things the “old way”, so it is difficult to be aware of better alternatives and to go through the challenge of changing (even though these “old ways” are relatively new habits that we’ve only been doing for a few years at most!). It’s that old “UNLearning” issue, yet again!

This conundrum seems a bit like the situation, “I could really use some time management training, but I just don’t have the time.” If you suspect that you are spending a lot more time searching than you are finding, consider how much time you will save by acquiring some new finding skills and tools. With this in mind, you may want to check out some of the following ideas. This list of ideas is not meant to be comprehensive; rather, it will serve to show you the range of alternative methods, interfaces, and tools that are available. Hopefully it will also help you find other alternatives.

Rafe Needleman has a very useful Web site that will help to keep you apprised of the growing field of “webware” or Web-based solutions and technology. I highly recommend that you check out his site regularly and even consider subscribing to it. Recently, Rafe had a post called “Five Weird Ways to Search” that covers a good range of options. I’ve used most of these options, including Grokker and Kartoo, for several years now. I don’t think any of them are “it” or “the next big thing”. However, they are great explorations, and each has something to offer.

Based solely on my experiences, the two from this article that I recommend you try are Quintura and Grokker. I’ve used Quintura less, but it is a good example of tag clouds*, something that I find very useful and believe you will see much more of in the near future.

Since our human behaviors are usually the biggest barriers to change, I would STRONGLY encourage you to try these out for at least a few weeks. Do some experiential learning (which seems all too rare these days) of your own. I think you’ll find, at the very least, that it will give you some good glimpses into the future of finding and help to change some of your thinking and approaches to it.  Try out a few of these and send me details of your experiences and of any other find/search tools that you discover so we can all benefit.

*You can see a limited version of tag clouds, the collection of different-sized words in the upper left column of Off Course – On Target.

And now for something completely different!

While you are feeling experimental, try out some of these slightly “farther out” examples of finding the “right stuff”:

Rafe Needleman’s post Art meets News on Universe shows you examples (such as Universe and the Digg Swarm) of the use of visualization in searching and finding. This technique adds a social dimension to visualization by providing a viewpoint on content from a collection of others. Look past the specific content used in the example (which is silly indeed) and instead see the experience of the interface when video and floating visual choices are used. Then be sure to check out Time Trumpet.

And, in my continuing quest to wean us from a text only existence, try out the recent introduction of Nostalgia for photos. It is a wonderful desktop application for Yahoo’s Flickr. And if you like what you see with these, be sure to check out some of the other cools apps from Thirteen23.

Don’t be overwhelmed by all these new choices. Just give them a quick look and try out two or three to satisfy your curiosity in the search for better finding!

w
a
yne
=====

JOOST = Juiced TV

It seems like there is no end to the examples of metaTrends coming at us every day, such as the Snowflake effect of mass personalization, and the convergence and conversion of yesterday’s mediums into today’s media and messages.

In the span of a relatively few years, we have seen the medium of television grow from the TWO channels that I recall as a child, to the 100+ that cable TV brought with it, and then to hundreds of channels that satellite TV now delivers. But as the saying goes “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” 

Today I want to talk about one that promises to be a precursor to the rapid evolution—some would say, “revolution”—of the medium formerly known as television or TV. With the upcoming launch of a new company called Joost (pronounced “juiced”), formerly known as the “Venice Project”, we are about to see a massive mashup of nearly infinite personal choices in TV-based content. I believe this will be yet another example of another theme I’ve talked about—exponential change—because we are about to experience the exponential growth of television content. (Now THERE is a frightening thought for some!)

Joost is being brought to you by the same duo who previously unleashed the explosion of file and music sharing by creating  Kazaa, and then went on to unleash the growth of online phone conversations by creating Skype. Now a bit smarter and armed with a whole lot more resources (eBay bought Skype for a paltry $2.6 billion) Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström appear ready to have the same effect on TV content with the upcoming release their latest brainchild.

If you look closely at some these Joost screenshots, you’ll notice that it provides various options—personalized “smart channels”, search capabilities to find just what you want, a buddy list, IM, recommendations, feedback loops to “Rate It”, chat, and “Share What I’m Watching.

Check out last month’s (Feb 2007) Wired magazine to get Spencer Reiss’ coverage in “Why Joost is Good for TV”. Reiss will give you better insight into the potential power of Joost and the future of video content. As Reiss puts it, their vision may be challenging but it is clear:

“The vision: universal TV, running on a hybrid P2P platform—millions of exquisitely networked PCs fortified with traditional video servers. Free to viewers who download the player app. Friendly to content owners, thanks to industrial-strength encryption. Delightful to advertisers, adding pinpoint targeting to their all-time favorite medium. Everyone’s a winner!”

The “secret” to their past and (they hope) future success is to build systems based on distributed computing, known as Peer to Peer or P2P, where the users/customers become the network. These new forms of P2P actually work better as the demand goes up and more end user computers are added to this dynamic network. This is in stark contrast to the models that the likes of Google, YouTube and iTunes are using, where they have to store and stream the content, so demand typically slows down the overall system. Therefore, the major benefit of this new model that Joost is using is mass scalability. They’ll certainly need it if Joost takes off and billions of people start watching trillions of “channels” of on-demand “just right for you” TV content.

Joost is also another great example of the “mashup” or Lego-block-type approach I’ve long ranted and raved about. As Reiss got from his discussions with Janus and Friis, this is not so much a “skunk works” project as it is a mashup shop for “Lego-style architecture + open standards + existing public code”. Interestingly enough, Joost CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik doesn’t even like TV, but he has a big thing for Legos. So when he is in CTO mode, he calls it “a big exercise in systems integration” but when he tries to summarize, he simply says “We’re snapping together Legos.”

Currently, for each hour of broadcast TV programming, a viewer watches 12 to 20 minutes of advertising. Joost’s business model also depends primarily on advertising, but the distinct difference is that personalized TV enables highly targeted marketing and therefore MUCH less advertising…like, 90 percent less—as little as one minute per hour of viewing, if projections pan out. “The key in the past (to advertising) was volume and frequency,” says Clark. “Now it’s going to be quality.”

Joost has also made the conscious decision to NOT go after user-generated content. Given the current problems YouTube is having with the recent billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom, this decision is looking to be a very smart move—for now.

As per my previous posting on old media and new content, Joost is transforming the old medium of TV into the new content and is leveraging our current behaviors in terms of TV watching time. Reiss notes this in his Wired article:

“...it’s to migrate television’s mass audience to the Web. 'We want to be in the space where people are doing what they do now with TV, watching four to six hours a day,' says Henrik Werdelin, 30, another MTV defector who spearheads overall product development now at Joost.  He put it a bit more pointedly when he added, 'That’s a lot of YouTube clips.'"

Of course, there is no telling if Joost will itself turn out to be a winner. It may suffer the same fate as Napster, which was taken over by Kazaa. There is no end to formidable competitors and opponents in all of this, and it is just a question of who the big players will be and how soon it will happen. There is NO question in my mind that it WILL happen and will change and shape our behaviors just as the unleashing of other forms of content such as text, music and phone conversations has changed us.

If you’d like to learn more, you can keep up with Joost specifically via the Joost blog and even better, you can do some experiential learning by signing up to be a beta tester.

Even if you don’t see much value in having specific content on TV, don’t dismiss it outright. Instead, begin to imagine what you can do when you can have not just any content, but just the right content for YOU or for those you work with, your friends, or your family. As William Gibson so accurately put it “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”   Hope you will help to even out that distribution in the world.

w
a
yne
=====

Piracy going to the dogs?

While it might not seem probable that Malaysia, the UK, dogs, and piracy would end up in the same sentence, they did just the other day. As it turns out, I’m curious and involved with ALL of these things, because I:

• Just returned from a visit to Langkawi islands in Malaysia.
• Just landed in London today for some standards meetings and presenting at the Global Leadership & Governance of Standards for ICT in Learning, Education & Training.
• Have several dogs as family pets.
• Have a wonderful wife who works for the incredible national nonprofit organization of Canine Companions for Independence. She manages the programs and thousands of volunteers who help with their breeding, raising. and training of dogs that enhance the lives of children and adults with disabilities.
• Have a deep personal interest in piracy, since I earn my livelihood as part of a great software company, Autodesk, Inc.

But just how did Malaysia, the UK, dogs, and piracy all come together recently?  It turns out that Malaysia and the UK are the first to start using dogs to sniff out pirated CDs and DVDs in shipments! Music and movie piracy is a very significant problem in many parts of the world, and you can read some of the recent reporting about it from Ziff Davis or from ABC News.

Personally, these two articles left me a little confused, since one says the dogs are in Malaysia and the other says they are working in the FedEx warehouse at Heathrow in the UK.  But in any case, “Flow” and “Lucky” (pictured here) are apparently very fast and very adept at sniffing out these items amidst huge volumes of shipments. What would take human inspectors over a day to complete, Flow and Lucky were able to do in 10 minutes!!

My genuine interest, and why I thought it would be worth your consideration too, is because I and many of you are very much dependent upon the honoring and sharing of  ideas and other creative cognitive output sometimes referred to as “intellectual property”.  As we all evolve towards a community of “knowledge workers” living in the “knowledge economy”, we l become ever more dependent upon a deep understanding and valuing of the knowledge we create individually and collectively.

Now if we could just get them to sniff out online piracy, phishing, and spam!  Maybe we can start raising and training “virtual dogs” in Second Life that can look after this!

w
a
yne
=====

UNLearning one memory at a time? Mice can!

Since you may have caught my recent podcast UNLearning: the New Skill of the Future, I thought you’d get a kick out of this recent article in [email protected] reporting that scientists have successfully used a drug on mice that "...can clear away one fearful memory while leaving another intact. A single, specific memory has been wiped from the brains of rats, leaving other recollections intact." 

One possible (and positive) use for humans would be to eliminate particularly disruptive and fearful memories, such as those that cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This research is also helping us to understand how various parts of the brain work, along with their association to specific memory, thinking, actions, and capabilities. This research can also help in our quest to improve our overall learning capabilities.

And for a more irreverent approach to this news item, you might want check out Episode 55 of “Cranky Geeks” with John Dvorak. If you can make it through the first minute or so, you’ll see that they make some good points and references to movies and stories about the dangerous side of memory erasing.

As is often the case with science fiction and other fictional stories, the recent movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may not be too far off from reality. As is usually the case, new capabilities can be used for wonderfully positive purposes as well as equally frightening and scary ends. However, let’s remind ourselves that WE make the decisions, not the technology or the ideas. We can be both the problem and the solution.  Not sure I’d want it any other way.

For now though, I prefer to stick to more unaided means of obtaining the critical skill of UNLearning now and  in the future. On the other hand, I am also convinced that some, perhaps the majority, of the most significant improvements we are going to see in our abilities to learn, unlearn, and relearn over the next 25+ years, will be from neuroscience and other scientific approaches to cognition, learning, and performance.

Can we really be that far from instantly acquiring skills such as those shown in the movie The Matrix where capabilities, such as martial arts or flying a helicopter, can be downloaded into your brain and body? (speaking of which, if anyone has a link or file of the scene where Trinity learns to fly the helicopter on the roof, can you send it to me? It would be handy to have for such topics).

I’m fond of the line, “Careful what you wish for; you just might get it”, because I think we are getting what we wished for more and more every day! So the key question for us to answer remains, “What will we do with these enablers (be they technical, chemical or cognitive) when they arrive?” and how will we apply them in ways that produce very positive effects and outcomes for our learning and performance?  Life is for learning. Let’s live and learn to the max!

w
a
yne
=====

Snowflakes Galore at TechFest 2007 (Part 2)

Recently I reported how encouraged I was by some of the R&D results featured at the Microsoft Research TechFest 2007, a showcase of over 750 global researchers put on by Microsoft Research in Redmond WA.
Some R&D efforts (not specifically those from Microsoft) are addressing the need to index distinguishing features and otherwise enable the recognition from photos that contain a specific building or landmark. As I mentioned in my prior posting, this type of technology could be applied to devices such as a cell phone camera to trigger a map display and other relevant information about your current location based on the photo you take.

Fantastic progress is also being made in this area of automated recognition of photos and video. Some of these developments focus on the ability to do facial and body recognition to identify who is in the picture, while others are enabling the recognition of “objects” such as vehicles and buildings. At TechFest, I saw a demonstration called “Lincoln” (see the video), which works on a mobile phone with a camera (just try to buy a phone without it these days!). It lets you take a photo of a music CD or movie DVD cover and then it automatically links up to reviews and recommendations from others about this album or movie such as those found on Amazon.com. Microsoft has already made this service open to the public, so musicians, for example, can upload their album cover images or posters for upcoming concerts and let users receive links to songs to hear right on their cell phones, purchase concert tickets, or buy the music.

Another fun item at TechFest was a “bubble board” which can be used as a new form of answering machine (see the video). It displays all the messages you’ve received, and instead of a chronological text listing, it gives you a visual set of “bubbles” floating on the screen with the image of the person calling. When you touch a “bubble”, you see details of the message and caller, or it plays the message. The size of the image indicates the size of the message. You can also drag and drop the bubble to either delete it (fun visual of it going down a drain), save it, or add it to your contacts.

If you’d like to see, hear, and learn more about some of the over 100 other research findings that were featured at the Microsoft Research TechFest, check out the following:

• MAKE magazine's account of of what they saw there.  BTW, MAKE is a GREAT read for all you do-it-yourself-ers (DIY). They also have an excellent selection of blogs, podcasts and videos, WARNING:  it's very addictive and a huge time sink  if you have any DIY tendencies!! :-)

• Blog with videos of several projects from the Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Microsoft's more detailed explanation of  other featured research

Almost all of the research projects cited here today provide tangible examples of automated feedback loops, metadata generation, and the use of more visual and auditory formats.

I hope you too can see this trend towards something powerful. As all these individual advancements and capabilities continue to pile up, they produce a cumulative effect. This “mashup” of data and recognition makes it possible to snap a photo and receive all the related information that I mentioned above. Whether you travel to faraway places or just want to know more about the city you live and work in, this type of capability certainly shows why I have such optimism and belief in the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization and the dramatic improvements to learning and performance that this brings to all of us.

Be sure to let me know what YOU find interesting about this or other R&D efforts you may know about out there.

w
a
yne
=====

Snowflakes Galore at TechFest 2007 (Part 1)

Do you often find yourself standing or driving somewhere and not knowing either where you are exactly or where what you are looking for is located? Or do you find yourself curious and wanting to know more about the building or structure you are standing in front of?

I sure do and so I was buoyed recently by some of the R&D results featured at TechFest 2007, a showcase of over 750 global researchers put on by Microsoft Research in Redmond WA. One demonstration provided a good example of some themes I’ve mentioned previously here at Off Course – On Target, such as automated metadata generation, finding versus searching, contextual metadata, and personalization. To learn more about TechFest:

• Read about it in USA Today, and Schobleizer's blog
• See photos at Laughing Squid
• View video at Mix 07

Today I’m focusing on one item from TechFest that caught my attention, the ability to use a cell phone’s camera to trigger a map display and other relevant information about your current location based on the photo you take. This is also a good example of using audio or visual input and output rather than text to convey information. This type of photo feedback enables a more automated and immediate feedback loop to provide you with the information you need.

To do the initial research and demonstration, the developers acquired millions of street level** pictures of Seattle, which they indexed in a database of distinguishing features. These were then matched up with reference information about that location.

---

** Not interested in being street bound? Then check out Sky Server which lets you walk around the sky the same as you can with Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth used in their super handy Local Live Search!

---

It will be a challenge to scale this for a large number of cities and other locations. However, we are also seeing some other very scalable phenomena that may very well make this all quite possible, saleable and I'd say probable. Consider the huge and apparently sustainable amount of photos and videos being uploaded to marquee examples such as Flickr and YouTube. These could easily provide the volume of photos needed for this technology.

As more devices (including mobile phones) add GPS capabilities, precise location information will become available. See this recent review of some new smart phones with GPS. But we will still want a richer collection information triggered by the GPS data that would provide relevant to our situation and location. This might include photo images of what surrounds any given location, who else is in the proximity at that time, who we may want to meet there, and resources and services in the vicinity, such as restaurants, shops, Wi-Fi hotspots, parking spaces, and hotel rooms.  TechFest offered a number of possibilities.

There’s lots more to report about TechFest 2007 and I'll talk more about it next time.

w
a
yne
=====

e-Clippings (Learning as Art)

In my last posting, I mentioned Mark Oehlert's recent  “e-Clippings” blog entry about Netvibes Universal Widget API. Mark Oehlert is someone I’ve known for many years, from back in the days when he was working for the Advanced Distributed Learning initiative when we created such things as SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model). 

Mark is a walking encyclopedia of historical references and is relentlessly curious about most anything to do with culture and technology in the context of learning. He probably should have been an anthropologist, but fortunately for us he has devoted his expertise to the world of learning and his e-Clippings blog is very much worth subscribing to and checking out if you are looking for a steady stream of what’s new at the intersection of culture and technology in the world of learning.

w
a
yne
=====

Mashed Up Snowflakes?

One of my main objectives here at Off Course – Off Target is to share and explain some of the key concepts and models that I have developed or adopted, and then provide examples that show how these concepts are becoming a reality.

The Snowflake Effect

Those who are familiar with me through my blog, my presentations, or just casual conversations know that I am driven by my passionate belief that personalization at the global level—what I call “the Snowflake Effect”—can now be achieved.  I’ve often described this effect as getting it “just right”, as in just the right content, to just the right person, at just the right time, in just the right context, on just the right medium or device, and any number of other “just rights” that you might imagine.

One of the fundamental enablers that make this Snowflake Effect possible is the universal application of a “Lego block” conceptual model—having a large collection of very small individual components (the Lego blocks), each of which has an equally small set of common standards (such as the common “pin” size of each block), so that it is possible for any block to be “snapped” together with any other block. 

You can choose any combination of blocks and assemble them together to form a unique result matched to a unique purpose and context. A finite set of blocks can be combined together in nearly infinite combinations, providing the potential for massive amounts of personalization. And talk about scalability!  As the number of blocks grows linearly, the number of combinations grows exponentially.

Mashups

This same idea is at the root of “mashups”, a term commonly used to refer to a unique combination of software code. But the notion of mashups is MUCH more universal, and can and will be applied to more purposes. I’ve made several presentations on this idea in the past few years. You can read more about it in my previous post The Future is a Marvelous and Monstrous Mashup. I believe that restricting mash ups to software code is completely arbitrary. When we treat it as a concept and apply it to many other things, it becomes truly powerful and profound. My personal definition of a mash up is simply:

A mash up is a unique assembly of bits and pieces from more than one source into a single integrated whole.

So “mashup” as a concept can and already does apply to almost everything. Some examples previously noted included:

• Music: Pandora.com, Last.FM
• Content: wikis, blogs, rich media
• Events: Mashup Camp, Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp
• People: Finding the right ones for a project team via their competencies, preferences, etc.

The Universal Widget API

So I was so intrigued to read the recent announcement from Netvibes.com called  the “Universal widget API”.  I see this as a very significant step towards this more universal application of mashups and an example of the Snowflake Effect.

What is a Universal Widget API? One of their bloggers said:

"It’s simple: Write once. Run everywhere.

• Open source JavaScript runtime
• Netvibes UI library to help make widget building quick and easy
• Connects communities together across all platforms and APIs"

If you are not familiar with this use of the term “widget” it has most recently been used to describe a bit of software code that can be embedded into any Web page and creates a little onscreen element that the user interacts with, such as a YouTube clip. For example, I’ve used the SlideShare viewer “widget” here on Off Course – On Target to embed my slides directly into a posting. You have probably seen and used examples of widgets that display a clock or maps on a page.

If you’d like to check out more examples and start using some of these widgets, you can look at:

• Yahoo widgets
• Konfabulator Widget Gallery
• Apple Dashboard widgets
• Wordpress Widgets
• Google Maps API

API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface, a set of tools that makes it easier for programmers to build a software application by providing all the building blocks (that Lego approach again!). The Webopedia definition of API is:

“Abbreviation of application program interface, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks. A programmer puts the blocks together.”

In his recent  “e-Clippings” blog entry about Netvibes Universal Widget API, Mark Oehlert said:

“I do have to wonder though, how one company will develop a universal API....good for Netvibes for taking the lead on this.” 

I certainly agree. Whether Netvibes pulls this off or some other group does so later on, any step toward a more universal and standard API for widgets would be welcomed. A standard would allow for:

• The universal development, sharing, and reuse of such marvelously useful widgets.
• Help make their use much more ubiquitous.
• Shift the focus onto the actual content and usefulness of these widgets.

To learn more about the Netvibes Universal Widget API, check out Niall Kennedy’s detailed explanation “Universality of the web widget”.

What I would ask YOU to think about and comment on, is what widget would you most like to have? If we were to have a giant repository of widgets, what would you want to find there?

Let’s get creative and start building the demand for widgets, so as they become more ubiquitous, the supply will match our demand and real needs. To help you do so, be sure to try out some of the widget libraries I already noted and the many others you can easily find online. They will help you see their underlying power and value. Soon you’ll be saying, "This is great, but if I could only find one that would let me ………."

Happy finding and learning in widget world!

w
a
yne
=====

McLuhan meets Web 2.0?

In some of my recent postings (“The Old Medium has become the New Content” Part 1 and Part 2), I expressed my admiration and respect for the many prescient remarks that the late, great Marshall McLuhan made about the media, including “the medium is the message”. In keeping with this notion that “the old medium becomes the new content”, I thought many of you would enjoy a posting on YouTube which a good friend and colleage, Gerry Lang from Intrepid recently brought to my attention.  This led to some additional exploration and I turned up two others that seemed to have a story that I'd like to relate here.

First, Assistant Professor Michael Wesch at Kansas State University, USA has posted a video clip with the apt title of “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” (click on the image below to watch) Wesch not only provides a comprehensive explanation of the collection of recent Web-based technologies and the era of the Web popularly known as “Web 2.0”, he does this in less than 5 minutes!  In addition, he uses the medium itself to great advantage to make his points.

If you check out Wesch’s notes about this posting (click  “This …. (more)” to the right of the video), you can see that he matches his work to his message, because he says that this is his 2nd draft and requests that you send him suggestions for improvement.

In fact, his overall treatment of this piece provides a wonderful instance of  “leadership by example”. In addition to those things I’ve already noted, Wesch illustrates some of his points about Web 2.0 by matching the music (to my ears, at least) to the message. His chosen song, "There's Nothing Impossible" by Deus is available for download and distribution for free and as Wesch notes:

“Deus offers music under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license, yet one more example of the interlinking of people sharing and collaborating this video is attempting to illustrate."

This same license covers all the content you find here at Off Course-On Target. If you are interested in using Creative Commons license to distribute some of YOUR content so that everyone can readily use, reuse and repurpose it, check out the new v3.0 of Creative Commons license.

The second part is an example of user-generated content in the form of a follow-up response to Wesch’s clip by “Corey the Raven” that shos how such works can stimulate good responses from others. This is not only a good response but one that again uses the medium to provide part of the message.

And the third part is for those of you who are either new to Web 2.0 or find it all quite confusing.  It's a more "traditional" presentation style simple called “Web 2.0” created and posted on YouTube by Jeff Utecht from Singapore, China. Jeff offers a more factual overview of the history of Web 2.0 and does a good job of providing specific examples to illustrate the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0.

I enjoy these video formats and think they provide an excellent form of content and medium. They also underline the need to provide additional formats. For example, a text transcript of these videos or perhaps a set of “stills” (such as slides) would be extremely helpful so that you can discuss them later, pick out specific parts, and reference them. Wesch seems to agree and has added the transcript for “The Machine is Us/ing Us”.  Or if you prefer to try out your own version of using alternative mediums to get your message across, you can provide your comments via video and audio.

In my own attempt to “lead by example” and “walk the talk”, I provide a full text transcript with each of my audio podcasts here at Off Course-On Target. Of course, I probably need to provide an audio version of each text-based blog entry as well. I may be able to meet this requirement using some of the new automated text to speech converters. I’m working on that now.

In the interim, as we share and exchange our ideas, we can benefit from having multiple mediums and formats for the same messages in order to achieve maximum transfer and value. While not every message will require this, the availability of such formats as illustrations, video, audio, and text for the same message seems to provide a richer and more provocative experience. This, in turn, tends to stimulate responses in kind and goes a long way toward increasing the creation of new content and knowledge for and by us all.

w
a
yne
=====

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.

w
a
yne
======