n their book, Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track, authors Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg point out that today's education system is seriously flawed -- it focuses on teaching rather than learning. "Why should children -- or adults -- be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?" the authors ask in the following excerpt from the book. "Why doesn't education focus on what humans can do better than the machines and instruments they create?"

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught."
   -- Oscar Wilde

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.

the Social Enterprise.

It’s a manifesto for radical change.

It begins with a holistic view of the customer; the entire process emanates from a 360-degree customer profile that is at the core of the Social Enterprise vision.

It then continues with a radical transformation of the business, end-to-end, connecting customers with the companies they deal with, their staff, their distribution network, supply chain and even their products.

And it focuses on making sure that technology is used to enhance the customer experience, not to degrade it.

For five days, I’ll be eating my way through Southern France’s Côte d’Azur. Today Philip and I lunched at an unassuming restaurant in Villeneuve-Loubet. The back of the place is a laundry for the owners of yachts moored in the marina across the street.

We began by splitting a baker’s dozen of sweet, briny oysters.

I opted for the Salade Corse, a great selection of ham, spicy sausage, cheese, and jam. Philip had salmon lasagne. We washed things down with the house white. The tab came to €25 apiece.

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Auguste Escoffier, “the chef of kings and the king of chefs,” was born in Villeneuve-Loubet in 1846 and his house is now the Musée de l’Art Culinaire. Escoffier invented the organization of the kitchen that remains in place today. His recipes highlighted unami, the so-called fifth taste, a hundred years before it was “discovered” in Japan.

Aren’t these dishes for serving bouillabaisse, precursor of San Francisco’s cioppino, beautiful? Come to think of it, I must have some bouillabaisse while here on the coast of the Med.

This Matisse is made of icing. The collection of Escoffier menus made me hungry. Ecrevisses figure in many of Escoffier’s starters, and I love crawdads.

We’ll return to Villeneuve-Loubet on Sunday for the Truffle Festival. Restaurants feature truffle dishes and in the afternoon truffle-hunters will show their dogs at work.

We stopped by the local artisan baker to pick up a baguette to accompany tonight’s dinner.

We’re back at the maison as I write this. Appetizers were duck liver paté and Grisons air-dried beef. The scent of garlic fills the air. Roasted tomatoes with garlic is the main course. I’ve got to go. It’s time to eat.

My weight’s down to 75. (Kilos.)

Online course start-ups offer virtually free college

By Jon Marcus, The Washington Post, Published: January 21

An emerging group of entrepreneurs with influential backing is seeking to lower the cost of higher education from as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year to nearly nothing.

These new arrivals are harnessing the Internet to offer online courses, which isn’t new. But their classes are free, or almost free. Most traditional universities have refused to award academic credit for such online studies.

Now the start-ups are discovering a way around that monopoly, by inventing credentials that “graduates” can take directly to employers instead of university degrees.

“If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous,” said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor.
org, a nonprofit organization based in the District. Established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor, it offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors.

Another nonprofit initiative is Peer-to-Peer University, based in California. Known as P2PU, it offers free online courses and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox Web browser.

A third is University of the People, also based in California, which offers more than 40 online courses. It charges students a one-time $10 to $50 application fee. Among its backers is the Clinton Global Initiative.

The content these providers supply comes from top universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University and the University of Michigan. Those are among about 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement.

Remember that corporate learning is “informal” and HR doesn’t own it.

If you ask any business leader “how people learn,” their most common answer is “on the job.” And this is correct – sales people learn by making sales calls, engineers learn by doing design, customer service people learn by solving problems. The key to success then is not to provide a lot of formal training, but rather create an environment that supports rapid on-the-job learning.

Our research shows that companies which adopt “formalized informal learning” programs (like coaching, on-demand training, and performance support tools) outperform those that focus on formal training by 3 to 1. In these companies the corporate training team doesn’t just train people, it puts in place content and programs to help employees quickly learn on the job. This means developing training in small, easy-to-use chunks of content and making it easy to find as needed.

Josh has this right (although I hate the misleading "formalized informal" terminiology).

2012 is the year of transformation as digital Darwinism threatens rigid and traditional practices everywhere. Regardless of industry, digital Darwinism is a phenomenon when technology and society evolve faster than the ability to adapt.

Indeed, this is a time when organizations will invest in change to better adapt to emerging market opportunities, to more successfully engage with customers, employees and stakeholders, rethink systems and processes, and ultimately, revive the company’s vision, mission and purpose. The result is an adaptive culture that signals an end to business as usual. Without doing so only expedites the inevitable journey towards irrelevance. For 2012 and beyond, the following trends serve as beacons for not only survival, but leadership.

Trends for Transformation

Leveraging Learning in Social Business
Installing social network software and encouraging people to exploit their connections is not enough. The fabric of a social business, its workscape, must incorporate structures and guidance to help people learn. After all, learning underpins continuous improvement and that’s what this is all about.

A sustainable workscape must provide the means and motivation for corporate citizens to learn what they need: the know-how, know-who, and know-what to get things done and get better at doing them. This takes more than access to social networking tools, blogs, and wikis. Self-organization helps but L&D professionals need to supplement social systems with scaffolding that focuses on learning. Without that, many organizations will descend into an aimless world of social noise and meaningless chit-chat.

I take Chief Learning Officers’ abysmal track record with informal learning to-date as a warning shot. In today’s fast-paced world, people who do not learn continuously, on the job, rapidly fall behind. Yet CLOs continue to focus on formal classes, as if they’re running schools instead of creating business value. Formal classes and workshops are necessary, but they constitute a tiny slice of the overall learning pie.

Several years ago, L&D professionals began to accept the fact that learning by experience and informally, with others, has many times the impact of traditional training.

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

CLOs who do not make it easier for social business people to learn are toast.

Making the transition from command-and-control training operations to vibrant social learning workscapes is where I think Internet Time Alliance is going to make a major contribution. I envision us providing hand-holding, models, and advice to help Chief Learning Officers and HR executives make the journey from pushing curriculum and instructor-led events to nurturing systems for co-creating knowledge and competence with workers. Time will tell.

Lots more on this at http://www.unmanagement.net/2012/01/18/the-agile-learning-train-is-leaving-th...

Today, the expectations of learners are much different than they were only a few years ago. Much of what is currently rolled up monolithic, one-size-fits-all courses must give way to small but relevant content updated and delivered continuously to learners based on their individual profiles or needs. In other words, learning needs to go Agile.

In a recent blog post by Bersin & Associates, Josh Bersin provides a great description of how Agile applies to training:

“Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks – so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance. […] Daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.”

What does this mean for us?

So how do Training Vendors help training organizations go agile: they adopt Agile Development. Agile Development is an approach where vendors deliver very fast, iterative product development through close collaboration with its user base (i.e. training organizations). According to McKinsey & Company:

“This agility can deliver new systems and capabilities in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. A frequent iteration cycle also keeps IT developers and business users in sync on requirements and priorities. […] Since this approach is most effective when business needs are shifting, it is gaining favor among many IT departments.”

Indeed, according to a survey of global executives by McKinsey, over 70% of respondents have deployed or piloted Agile Development within their organizations in order to be more responsive to changing business conditions.

In 2011, recognizing the rapid change in the training industry and our clients’ need to quickly adapt to the needs of their learners, Xyleme fully embraced and adopted enterprise-wide, the Agile Development Model. This post is the first in a series, written by Greg Schottland, Vice President of Operations for Xyleme, that presents the business value of using Agile, why it has proven a key competitive advantage to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others. Part one of this series provides a simple overview of what Agile is. You’ll begin to see the value just discussing the basics in this post.

Agile is simple:
• Build in small increments.
• Focus your team on one well defined goal.
• Keep the team small.
• Coordinate daily
• Get everything (and everyone) else out of the way.

And the result:
• A working product in weeks, not months.
• Customers that get what they are waiting for quickly.
• Developers that build what the customer wanted and nothing else.

Sounds simple, and it is. While there are volumes written about the details of effectively practicing Agile, this post will focuses on what Agile looks like “on the ground” in daily practice.

Taken from Josh Bersin’s blog

It all starts with an idea.

Somebody wants software to do something. Say we get this great idea to be able to create and store documents on the web (a la GoogleDocs). Rather than designing an entire web based document application, we start small. What is the most important problem to solve? This is simple to define. What do users have to be able to easily do at the most basic level? For our application, this would be the ability to create a simple document using a plain web browser over an average internet connection. You may be thinking, that is pretty basic, shouldn’t we at least include other basics like spell checking, text styles, maybe import/export? I mean who wants a document processor that doesn’t support bolding and italics…I mean really!

This little example is chock full of important lessons that Agile helps address. We might be inclined to design a more complete first version. The logic being it is easier to design everything in from the start. And, in some cases it is. But, more often than not, without getting key usability, architecture or market acceptance issues implemented and down cold, much of our “complete design” ends up being wasted, as key assumptions run into challenges. Years of effort and millions of dollars down the drain.

Let’s look at our example in this respect. We have put a stake in the sand and said that the one thing that has to work is the ability to create basic text document on any browser over an average internet connection. If this doesn’t work, no one will care how slick our spell checker is, nor how easy it is to bold some text. If response is slow, same problem. But, if we have version 1 prove that we can connect 1,000 users to our system, and things are snappy responsive and basic documents can be created, isn’t that a relief? Now we can build on top of this base.

So, turns out our too small initial release may be just about right. What we do at this stage is write up our requirements for this initial release in a set of short, concise documents called User Stories. They include two major pieces of information: 1) a clear statement of some small functionality and 2) detailed description of how to test this functionality. That’s it. No massive requirements document. One of our User Stories might be that users can connect to create and save a blank document. The test would detail step by step instructions of the URL, the buttons pressed, dialogs that appear, etc.

Ease of Development.

As you can see, with well written User Stories, development is a whole lot easier. We code to the test; back our design into the tests. As a development manager, or customer, I can sleep at night. Developers aren’t done until our tests work. I don’t have to watch over it.

So, our initial planning will consist of creating a small set of User Stories which define our first release. We’ll call each such small release a “Sprint.” Each Sprint will be scheduled to last several weeks. No magic number here, can be 2, 3, 4 weeks, but probably should be less than 8 weeks. You’ll go back and forth trading off initial features against time and end up with a Sprint 1 of say 4 weeks (just an example we chose, no magic number).

You’re almost ready to start coding. The one remaining task is to take each User Story assign them to developers and have the responsible developer estimate what tasks they’ll have to do to implement the User Story, and estimate their best guess of how long it will take to complete that task. But…one twist. These tasks have to be small enough that they take between 4 -16 hours to complete. This level of detail is often unnatural. But, it has magic built into it. By forcing yourself to break down work to this level, invariably important overlooked details emerge, providing for much more accurate estimates. Now, admittedly, you are relying on the best guess skills of your developers, which will vary by developer, by task and sometimes by whether they have just had their morning coffee and are feeling optimistic or not. But, it provides a starting point, and over time you’ll find your developers get better at this, and you get better at coaching your under or over-estimators.

Ready. Set. Code!

You are ready to start coding armed with User Stories and a detailed task list for each developer. You may feel like you’re traveling light, and you are. That’s the whole point. You backpack has everything you’ll need and nothing else. You will have a daily meeting (called a Scrum) with all the developers with tasks on the project and you, the project leader and no one else. No managers, no other developers, no business analysts, just the “doers.” These meetings will be no longer than 15 minutes. You’ll ask each developer just three simple questions: which task did you work yesterday, which tasks will you be working on today, what is blocking your progress? That’s it. No lengthy design discussions or play by play of your development day. Just these three simple questions and 15 minutes later you are done. The purpose of this meeting is to ensure that any blocks from progress are removed immediately and that your developers stay on task. You, as leader of the Scrum, are there to listen for blockers and remove them as fast as possible. All the team members know exactly where the project is all the time.

One final task.

At the end of each day, developers update their task list with their best guess of the amount of time remaining to complete each task. Sometimes these numbers go down as work progresses, sometimes they increase (as you discover the task is more complex or taking longer than you guessed). Over time, you get a nice chart of all the hours remaining for the Sprint, called a “Burndown” chart. This chart, while simple, is amazingly powerful. Bersin reports,

“Companies which can adapt to agile management models will move faster and out-perform their competitors.”

So that’s it. Your team writes code each day to fulfill the tests in your User Stories, meets for 15 minutes each day, updates the time remaining for their development tasks — and after 4 weeks (in our example), you done. Delivered on time and to spec.

It sounds easy, and it is!

In our next in the series, we’ll look at how this simple process translates into faster time to market, lower costs and wildly happy customers.

For a day and a half in January 2012, twenty-one thought leaders from four continents gathered in a ski resort at Stoos in Switzerland to discuss what could be done to accelerate the transformation of organizations and their management. The idea was to figure out how organizations could become more profitable for the organizations and their shareholders, as well as being better for those doing the work and better for those for whom the work is being done. The tipping point isn’t about replacing capitalism with socialism: it’s about reinventing organizations so that they become more productive for shareholders, more inspiring for workers and more delightful for customers.

The idea that a group of people who had never met before as a group talking together for a day and a half could make progress on such an immense problem and begin a global movement that would facilitate a tipping point and change the way organizations are run is on the face of it absurd. But we were encouraged by Margaret Mead’s dictum: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Great summary of the Stoos Gathering thus far from Steve Denning.