Off Course-On Target

Reflective Reduction Sauce

As many of you know, I am privileged to live in two parallel universes: one where I am the strategic futurist at Velocity Made Good Inc. (VMG), as well as speaker, provocateur, etc., traveling the world by planes, trains, and automobiles, and living at the speed of thought; and the other where I live and work on my sailboat, the good ship Learnativity, wandering and pondering the world one nautical mile at a time. Each time I move from one universe to the other, the shapeshifting process produces a tremendous amount of new learning for me.

Upon my most recent return to my fast universe, where I was immediately immersed in the Learning 2009 conference in Orlando last week, the learning was wonderfully severe. 

With a few days to reflect and do some cognitive “simmering and sauce reduction”, a few recurring themes and observations emerged for me: 

• Authenticity
• Curiosity
• Confidence
• Faith and Trust
• Unconscious Assumptions
• Redefining Experience
• Uncertainty
• Readiness for the Unexpected
• What If the Impossible Isn’t?
• Personal Capitalization

I’m sharing something about each of these with you in the hopes that they will be of some value and spark additional feedback and conversations. Each of these deserves and demands some explanation and discussion, so I’ll write about each one in a series of posts to follow. Today, I’m starting with Authenticity.

Authenticity

Authenticity has been a recurring topic for me for several years now, and it is one I am finding in both of my parallel universes. For me, authenticity is about the quality of being genuine, and it is one of the best examples of how the most profound and important things in life are the simplest. 

Authenticity can be and is applied to products and things such as content. In a previous post “The Land that Never Was”, I outlined some of my views on how the whole definition of what is real and genuine is either getting more difficult to determine or perhaps is just being redefined as the difference between real and synthetic becomes less and less and, in some cases, the distinction disappears completely. 

At the Learning 2009 conference, I heard both the topic and the word “authentic” in many of the sessions and in the hallways. There was a lot of conversation about authentic content for example. Authentic content is not to be confused with simply the poor quality of content, but rather it is about how accurate and relevant the content is, how true the “voice” of the content is, how relevant is it, and so on. 

A few months ago, while in my other nautical universe, I had a very personal experience with authentic content when I found myself on my sailboat in Pago Pago harbor in American Samoa on September 29th, a day which I have since referred to as “Tsunami Tuesday”. You can read more about this fascinating experience in on my Learnativity blog (Part I, Part II, Part III) and in my previous posting here on OCOT “Tsunami and Technology: Powers That Be at Sea” where I discuss how I found myself being the on-the-scene reporter (by virtue of being there in person), which I shared via the wonders of current technology, such as my satellite phone. This technology enabled me to send out test messages to Twitter and hence be picked up by many other bloggers and then by the world press.

In the weeks that followed, I was deluged by emails, texts, calls, and tweets from some of those who had been staying informed about the tsunami and about their friends and family who were also there at the time. What most struck me though were the common comments I heard about how extremely effective the reporting was, especially via those who were sending out tweets and writing blogs using firsthand accounts from those who were actually there. 

What I picked up from all this was that it was much more than the obvious fact that we were there. It was the authenticity that came from living this experience. We were being directly affected by this amazing natural phenomenon and were dealing with the reality of saving our ships, our possessions, and our friends and family, and were sharing it as it happened.

In the case of content for learning, training, and education, I am hearing about increasing awareness and demand for content that is similarly real, firsthand, relevant, and coming from those who have direct experience. Perhaps this simply goes back to emphasizing the age old advice for any writers or content creators to “write what you know”.

However, this conversation about authenticity and genuineness goes way beyond the narrow definition of content. Most notably, it is about us as people being genuine. Previously this quality of genuineness has been applied mostly to organizations such as businesses, governments, and non-profits, and has been about exposing when these are organizations are not representing and presenting themselves accurately and genuinely.  More recently, however, with the increased depth and breadth of the conversation that now takes place between consumers and producers, teachers and learners, and politicians and constituents, authentic and genuine conversation has become possibly the predictor and predicator of success.

One of the most direct and best versions of this idea came from the conversation between Elliott and Betsy Myers at Learning 2009. Betsy impressed me both for what she said as well as how she said it. She is extremely engaging and effective. One of Betsy’s primary topics is “authentic leadership” and in her conversation with Elliott, she stressed key issues such as curiosity and courage. She spoke to me particularly when she recommended that each of us should “have the courage to be your authentic self”. 

For me, cultivating this quality is not something reserved for those who knowingly obfuscate their real selves, but also is something each of us needs to keep in mind when we fail to be who we really are—when we create too great a gap between who we are on the inside and who we present on the outside.

While it has always been a laudable goal to be true to yourself, I think that with the advent of modern communications technology, and most recently, the rise in the use of social media such as blogs, podcasts, Twitter and Facebook, authenticity and genuineness are being rigorously tested for and demanded far more than ever before. 

There is no question in my mind and experience that being your “authentic self” takes real and constant courage. However, there is also no question that the benefits of doing so are greater still. Does this match with what you are seeing and experiencing? What other ways are you seeing authenticity becoming an increasing priority?  I look forward to hearing from you.

Wayne

Loving Lexicographical Learning

Related to my theme of languages, but through pure serendipitous discovery via my addiction to watching TED Talks, check out this TED talk by Erin McKean on Redefining the Dictionary.

I LOVE this lady and her TED Talk for several reasons:

• As much as anyone, she’s in charge of the English language.
• She loves words and so do I.
• She gets to call herself a lexicographer, which as she explains also lets her say things like lexicographical which is a double dactyl like higgledy piggledy.
• Her desire to be a word fisherman rather than policeman, so she “… can go throw her net out and see what she can drag up from the bottom of the sea.”
• Her great sense of humor and ebullient presentation style.
• Her wonderful irreverence towards what makes a word “official” or “proper”, good or bad. Instead she focuses on what is useful for communicating.
• Her focus on inclusion rather than exclusion.
• Her appreciation and support for neologizing, which is the invention of new words and something I’m all too fond of doing!
• An entire presentation without ONE bullet point or text slide!  I’m inspired!

This is DEFINITELY worth 16 minutes and 02 seconds of your precious time!

Erin also maintains several blogs that are also worth checking out.  See her bio info below for links to a few of them and then go from there.

And if you liked this presentation, you probably will enjoy her great Slideshare presentation on “If Language Weren’t a Commons”.

If Language Weren't a Commons ...

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: isummit08)

From her bio on the TED site:

Why you should listen to her:

Much to Erin McKean's delight, her job as editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary involves living in a constant state of research. McKean searches high and low -- from books to blogs, newspapers to cocktail parties, The New Scientist to Entertainment Weekly -- for new words, new meanings for old words, or signs that once-favored terms have fallen out of use. ("Information Superhighway," anyone?) And it's clear that she relishes the hunt.

McKean is also the editor of the language quarterly Verbatim ("language and linguistics for the layperson since 1974") as well as the author of multiple books, including That's Amore and the entire Weird and Wonderful Words series. All that, and she maintains multiple blogs, too: Erin is the keen observationalist behind A Dress a Day and Dictionary Evangelist.

"Ms. McKean is part of the next wave of top lexicographers who have already or may soon take over guardianship of the nation's language, and who disprove Samuel Johnson's definition of a lexicographer as 'a harmless drudge.'"

The New York Times

View Erin McKean's Profile

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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Frontiers in Service

Recently I was honored with an invitation from Jim Spohrer to attend and present at the Frontiers in Service Conference on Friday, Oct. 5th, 2007 in San Francisco. Jim is the Director of Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, and he has been a longtime colleague and inspiration. Our connection dates back to his days at Apple Computer in the late 80's when he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Many thanks to Jim for this opportunity.

I met Jim back in the late 80's when he was leading the effort to create Apple's first online learning community and vision for anytime, anywhere e-learning and the Educational Object Exchange. Jim is also responsible for coming up with the whole idea behind WorldBoard.

The WorldBoard idea came to Jim one day in 1996 when he was out hiking and saw an interesting plant that he wanted to know more about. He started to imagine the benefits of combining a new viewing system built into his eye glasses with digital photography, GPS, and location information, and a way to leave information at that location for the next hiker who asked the same question he had asked (remember this was 1996!).  Eventually, he came to call this notion WorldBoard and there is now a whole group called the WorldBoard Forum working on this and related challenges. The site is very "click worthy"!

Back in 2000 when I was creating  "Into the Future: A vision paper" for the American Society of Technical Development ASTD and the US National Governor's Association (NGA), I used Jim's idea of the WorldBoard as an example of "augmented reality", whereas all that talk at the time was about virtual reality. Check out my paper for more details if you're interested. I can't believe it was "only" seven years ago!  

The Frontiers in Service Conference, which I mentioned at the start of this post, was founded in 1992 and is considered by many to be:

"'...the world's leading annual conference on service research. The conference has a very global nature, and generally draws attendees from 25 countries or more from around the world. It is sponsored annually by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland.'

The Center for Excellence in Service (CES) is a nonprofit organization composed of individuals dedicated to service strategy and research. CES combines its unique perspective of customer point-of-view and an exploration of a variety of services (with a focus on information technology) in order to provide business leaders and academics with the latest knowledge in service research.  CES also implements practical business objectives into its academic research, and this dynamic creates a partnership between the business world and academia."

I was particularly attracted to the dual attributes of this event and organization: they represent an international R&D community and one focused on the future of services. Services is a big focus area of interest for me. I see a future where our current distinction between services and products will be blurred to the point of requiring a whole new vocabulary to describe the emerging new world where products are becoming more service-like and services are becoming more product-like. 

This same view is also discussed in some of my prior postings, such as New Perspectives: Third Wave, where I point out author Alvin Toffler's predictions from 40 years ago where he envisioned that we would see a  blurring of the distinction between a consumer or a producer and his coining of the word "pro-sumer" to describe this.

Similarly, I believe we are seeing more evidence of a parallel pattern of convergence between products and services. Furthermore, I expect we will see this materialize on a mass scale in MUCH less than the almost 40 years it took for the "pro-sumer" society to emerge. 

At the Frontiers in Service conference, I had the honor of being on stage with Dr. Michel Wedel (University of Maryland) and Dr. Sajeev Varki (University of South Florida, USA), two eminent experts in the areas of recommender systems.

In our session “Rating Recommendations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, examples from the world of music predominated much of the discussion, since they provide so many tangible examples of what is already possible for mass personalization through feedback loops, metadata, and recommender systems, which address the tricky challenge of personalizing our listening experiences. Consider for a moment just how difficult and "fuzzy" this problem is to get some assistance with choosing "just the right" song at just the right time for just you and just your context at any given moment.

Given my affinity for mass personalization and what my co-conspirator Erik Duval and I refer to as the Snowflake Effect, you can imagine why I was delighted to be there.

The name Snowflake Effect refers to the fact that you are like a snowflake; there is no one else quite like you, and of course that also makes you just like every other snowflake!  But moreover so too is every situation, every project unique, so we're aiming for enabling each of us to have "just the right" people, content and "stuff" at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium, etc,

In my presentation to this group (see slides below), I posed the question that if this observation of uniqueness has arguably always been the case and is SO obvious, then why do we live in a world that assumes the opposite?  If we look around us, almost very product and service has been designed for some relatively large number of people, a "target audience, customer or demographic" and a whole set of assumptions about how everyone in this group is the same! But the times they are a changing!

| View | Upload your own

I went on to suggest that it is now possible to have such mass personalization, that there are more and more examples showing up every day, and therefore there are more and more people who know this is possible and are demanding it. Such "market demand" is usually met. 

My additional point about what's new was the degree to which we are seeing what I call "MC3", the combined multiplier effect of:

Mass Customization x Mass Contribution x Mass Conversation = Mass Personalization

The R&D work , which Dr. Wedel and so many of the international researchers in the room are doing in this area, promises to accelerate this trend much further, much faster. 

I always relish any chance to get in front of people doing the really hard work of research and development, because it gives me the opportunity to suggest some new areas of research that some of them might pick up on. Such opportunities have just been too good to turn down and have proven extremely effective in the past. Perhaps being a bit overzealous, I couldn't resist providing this latest opportunity to be in front of such a prestigious and international group of R&D experts, so I put up the following list of key challenges I see facing both the service industry (the focus of this group) and mass personalization:

• Scalability:
  • Global personalization at a planetary scale
    • e.g. 6.6 billion people on the planet growing exponentially
  • Uniqueness is unique and infinitely so
    • n degrees of personalization per every person, place and thing
    • n radio “stations” per person
    • n-number play lists
• Sustainability:
  • Mass contribution models
• Transferability:
  • Portable Feedback and Attention data
  • Re-purposing from strange sources
  • Not “just” for content
    • Think about competencies; for example, “just the right” people
• Transparency:
  • Dynamic pattern recognition and speculative computing
  • Minimizing the direct explicit input required from individuals
• Metadata Matters:
  • Automated metadata generation
  • Attention metadata
  • Context acquisition
  • Inferred metadata and implicit metadata acquisition
    • e.g. the “missingness” that Dr. Wedel noted)
  • Mood metadata
  • Subjective vs. objective metadata
    • Genome projects (e.g. Pandora Music Genome Project

There's too much to cover in more detail in this posting (lucky you!), but I will use some of these items as fodder for future postings.

My thanks to Jim Spohrer, Ronald Rust, and the Center for Excellence in Service organization for this opportunity to learn about the many exciting R&D efforts underway and the chance to suggest some of the future work they might take on. Based on what I saw and heard at the conference, I'm more optimistic than ever that the dream of having the Snowflake Effect lead to mass personalization on a planetary scale is well on its way to becoming a reality!

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del.icio.us tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Technorati tags: Frontiers in Service, service, Jim Spohrer, Center of Excellence, Toffler, prosumer, pro-sumers, Future Shock, Third Wave, personalization, Snowflake Effect, Erik Duval, metadata

Brazil or Bust! (Part 2 of 2)

In my previous post, I told you about my adventure getting to this year's eLearning Brasil 2007 conference in São Paulo. The theme of this year’s event was The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

The conference itself was (and always is) very interesting for me and for all the attendees, based on past and present conversations and comments I have received. Obviously the majority of the attendees are from Brazil, but a growing and significant percentage of attendees are from other South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, as well as from Europe and North America. A full range of academia, especially universities and trade schools, commercial businesses, government personnel, and technology vendors are also well represented and are similarly diverse geographically.

Along with the eLearning conference, there is an awards ceremony for an annual competition t on technology that supports the visually impaired. The results are always amazing, and this year was no exception. So you can see why this is one of the only events that I regularly attend and why I get so much out of it.

As I mentioned earlier, Elliott Masie came to the conference via Internet-based video from his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, which worked extremely well. Elliott covered a range of key issues that he sees coming up over the next few years as well as some that are appearing now.

For example, he noted how people worldwide are feeling overwhelmed and distracted and the impact this is having on learning and performance. In this context, Elliott posed the question of whether good learning can take place at your desk and particularly, at work or on the job.

Next we discussed with the audience how there are similarities between cooking and eating, and learning and training, a comparison Elliott and I have found fascinating and valuable for several years. We reached a consensus that there are deep similarities between these two very human practices, so much can be learned from comparing them. The connection between learning and the world of food and eating appears to be so strong that Elliott is having master chef Bobby Flay join him at Learning 2007, where he will be cooking while Elliott is interviewing him about the design, innovation, and evolution of cooking, and how it relates to our world of learning. Best of all, we will get to sample some of what Bobby has cooked up. Now THAT is performance and learning at their best, don’t you think? ?

Next, we kept Elliott on line and on the screen and brought two other global leaders—Dr. Alistair Benson, Academic Director of Manchester Business School Worldwide, and Eric Shepherd, President, Question Mark Corporation—onto the stage for a Socratic Dialogue on “The Influence of Leadership and Technologies in Organizational Learning and Corporate Performance”. In a wide-ranging discussion, we covered observations such as:

• Contrary to the rhetoric that large numbers of workers are retiring and so we should be concerned about the “brain drain” that this would produce, we are seeing the opposite happening in several ways. First, just because people are eligible to retire based on age and years of employment, doesn’t mean they will, and indeed many are choosing not to. While in many cases, this change in the age of the population may involve a change in the kind of work and conditions, such as shorter work days or weeks, more flexibility, different roles, or more of a facilitative and consultative role, the real change is that people are living longer and working longer…A LOT longer.

Secondly we noted that this change would produce a broader range of chronological age among individuals on a team and in an organization. In many places, for example, we are seeing people enter the workforce earlier, sometimes because they are sought out by employers and are convinced to leave their education and training programs earlier because they already have sufficient skills and the knowledge that is so badly needed. Combined with the people from other end of the age spectrum, we can expect teams whose membership spans teenagers to centenarians. A good discussion ensued on what this means for learning and for working.

• An audience member from the São Paulo area talked about the challenge his company is facing from the lack of people with engineering talent and what should be done about this. The ensuing discussion found that this phenomenon is broad-based in most countries in the Americas and Europe and quite the opposite in developing regions, such as India and Asia.

The discussion included the trend of “mass contribution” by increasing numbers of people. Knowledge and expertise is now being captured through e-mail and instant messaging to blogs and wikis. There is, however, a missed opportunity to “mine” the growing repositories of such communications for the nuggets of knowledge, patterns, and other value within.

After a short break, I had the audience to myself—a wonderful opportunity. Beforehand, I had them choose one of several themes that they’d like me to talk about and to my delight, they chose “The Snowflake Effect”. We took a fun hour or so going through what is currently my favorite topic: uniqueness and the Snowflake Effect. Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things I value about the support I’m afforded from Autodesk is being able to spend time with bright. eclectic people in different locations on this planet every day.  This gives me the chance to test just how broad and applicable are the trends that I see. This diverse range of people from Brazil and South America confirmed once again just how powerful these notions of mass personalization, mass contribution, and the Snowflake Effect really are and how well these translate into their context. 

Given this tremendous validation and confirmation from so many locations and so many contexts, my close colleague and friend Erik Duval and I are hard at work developing the Snowflake Effect into a full conceptual model and articulating this in much greater detail. Please stay tuned for upcoming announcements when we will have a site dedicated to the Snowflake Effect where we will be asking for your input, reactions and critiques.

For now, I hope you find some good value from my most recent experience in the great metropolis of São Paulo. And my sincere thanks to Francisco and the super staff of MicroPower for the great job you do of making eLearning Brasil somehow better every year. It’s an honor and a privilege to be a part of the whole experience.

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Brazil or Bust! (Part 1 of 2)

Despite the travel gods’ best attempts to keep me from my goal, I finally made it to São Paulo, Brazil 52 hours after leaving San Francisco.

It all started with an emergency landing in Denver due to an electrical fire, which caused me to miss my connecting flight. I was rerouted through Newark, then shuttled to JFK, where the next leg of my journey was delayed because of fog in São Paulo.  Two flights later I finally arrived at my destination.

I had been asked back to São Paulo for the third time to emcee and facilitate the eLearning Brasil 2007 conference at the beautiful São Paulo World Trade Center (see photo at right).

And in spite of the unique challenges I faced getting there this year, once again I found it well worth all that I went through to be part of this annual event. In fact, the whole experience fit right into the theme of this year’s event, The Influence of Leadership and Technology on Organizational Learning and Performance.

Here are some extracts of how my adventure played out and how it fit into this year’s theme on learning and performance:

• While I was stuck in the JFK airport in New York, I used phone and instant messaging to contact Francisco Soetl, MicroPower CEO and the wonderful mastermind behind the “eLearning Brasil” events, to update him on my changing itinerary.

• Over lunch at a JFK restaurant, I made an Internet connection on my laptop with my Verizon wireless data card and downloaded a very effective new collaboration environment called MicroPower Presence that Francisco and his talented team have developed. We used this to provide VOIP (voice) and share some slides for a quick meeting with his team in Sao Paulo to set up a series of different plans, depending on whether I got there on time, late, or not at all.


• I also connected with Elliott Masie, who was going to be doing a keynote at this conference via video from his home base in Saratoga Springs, New York, and did some planning with him. Elliott, via his shiny new iPhone no less, was on his way to the opera at the time, but we quickly set up plans for my interview with him, whether it would be from the stage in Sao Paulo or by driving from JFK up to the Masie Center in Saratoga Springs where both of us could be beamed into Sao Paulo via video and the net.


• Boarding the plane (finally!), I sent Francisco and Elliott a text message update that I was on my way and when I was scheduled to arrive in São Paulo. (6:50 am).


• Finally on the ground in São Paulo at 6:50am local, but since no phones were allowed during the 90 minutes in the immigration and customs lines, I had a tense bit of non-communication time. By the time I was in the taxi the conference had begun, so I switched to text messages and mobile blogging using my phone.


• If you’ve never been to São Paulo (and you really should go!) then just try to imagine traffic in the world’s second (or fifth) largest city (depends how you count). Picture a city with about the same population as New York City (19+ million), but with only one fifth the land area, and about ten times more cars and trucks, and a thousand times more bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles. Got the picture?!


•   If you are imagining a lot of smog (among the world’s worst) and lots of helicopters (the most per capita in the world) and lots of high rises (7th in the world), you’ve got it about right. Oh, and did I mention this was all during morning rush hour?!!


• Fortunately a good colleague, Eric Shepherd, was also attending this conference and was in the audience. Eric is the CEO of QuestionMark Corporation, one of the world’s leading developers and suppliers of assessment systems and services for education and training related assessments. He was going to be on the Socratic Panel I would be facilitating in a few hours. Eric and I were able to do some mobile blogging while I was in the taxi, which enabled him to send me continuous updates on what was being said on the stage, what were the audience reactions, etc., and provide me with the much needed context once I was on stage (let’s hope) and facilitating conversations with the other keynoters and panelists. In return, I was able to keep the organizers updated via Eric, on my whereabouts and ETA at the convention center.


• When it became doubtful that I was going to make it to the conference in time Eric kindly offered to take the stage on my behalf and start the interview with Elliott when he finished his keynote address. Finally, in what I think is the closest I’ve ever come in almost 20 years to being late for a speaking engagement, I dashed from the taxi as it pulled into the Sao Paulo World Trade Center, caught the elevator to the convention center, and ran onto the stage 3 minutes late and in time to thank Eric as he handed me the microphone and I started the interview with Elliott.

That counts for close right? But it also counts for just doing what it takes to make things work. I thought this was a good example of how the combination of great people with the right “can do” type of attitude, and the clever use of whatever tools and technology we have around us, can overcome unexpected situations and still get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction.

I'll talk more about the conference itself in my next posting.

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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.

| View | Upload your own

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:

| View | Upload your own

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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