The Learnstream of Jay Cross

Apparently people just don't notice how little is said while so much is conveyed. Why else would so many call the slew of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 social messaging tools revolutionary?

Consumer-facing Twitter and corporate-ready Socialtext Signals, Socialcast, Present.ly, Yammer (to name a few) are noteworthy, evolutionary, and crazy cool. They amplify voices and net people-picked answers fast. They can even update our collaboration capacity; improving our mindfulness by encouraging us to ask ourselves consistently, “Is this something I should share?”

Marcia Connor explains how Twitter enables the 30,000 year-old speech fragments we call conversation.

The New Media Literacy center at MIT lists the following eleven skills necessary in this new world, and I circle back to those as the über set of skills for all of us, no matter our age.

The new skills include:

1. Play: the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving.

2. Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery.

3. Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes.

4. Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content.

5. Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

6. Distributed cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities.

7. Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal.

8. Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources.

9. Transmedia navigation: The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities.

10. Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information.

11. Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Denise Tayloe of online privacy advocacy group, Privo, reminds us that online we're creating a permanent public record of ourselves, and who amongst us wants to re-read (let alone share with others) the notes we passed or diaries we kept when we were young. She suggests there ought to be one more new media skill.

12. Awareness: the capacity to mindfully see one's self in the context of the larger world where people's interests are not always compatible with one's physical and emotional safety.

Marcia Connor's posts on Fast Company nail what's required to learn and prosper in the network era.

Benefiting from Relationships

Most companies have gravitated toward the positive view of social networking -- recognizing that they can benefit from the relationships their employees have outside the organization. And, ironically, an effective model for such networking may be an ancient business form.

By Peter Cappelli

Our Center for Human Resources was having a meeting of sponsoring corporations this week, and the topic of social networks at the workplace came up for discussion.

The Internet raised an interesting challenge for the workplace as it represented both an important source of information that could be used at work and a considerable opportunity to goof off. Unfortunately, some of the use of the Internet on company time went beyond goofing off in e-mail conversations and Web-site visits. Embarrassed employers had to set up policies to restrict access.

Online social networks raise a similar challenge.

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and similar sites have big pluses and minuses. While it is certainly possible for employees to waste time on them and post potentially embarrassing information, there are different and perhaps bigger upsides than we saw simply with Internet use. This is especially so for the human resource function because these sites have become important sources of information for recruiting candidates and for shaping company image.

There is also something radical about these social networks for companies, and that is a recognition that they can benefit from the relationships their employees have outside the organization.

"Tapping social networks is the hottest idea in business as it provides a new way to get access to customers, credibility for products and contacts for hiring. It's a bit ironic that the most effective model for executing this hot idea is through an old organizational form."

Historically, recessions have been a time when new companies, like Microsoft, get born, and good companies separate themselves from their competition. It makes sense. When times are tight, people look for new, less expensive ways to do old things. Necessity breeds invention.

Therefore, the country that uses this crisis to make its population smarter and more innovative — and endows its people with more tools and basic research to invent new goods and services — is the one that will not just survive but thrive down the road.

Tom Friedman is right on. We need to shoot beyond a return to the past by inventing new ways to prosper. Tis time to get smarter.

Spot on Jeremiah, I’ve already had to remove Steve Rubel from all my rss feeds due to him filling them entirely in the space of one morning! A shame, I enjoyed his insight, but I think its a bit self indulgant for him to expect us to want to hear from him every five minutes. He seems to have gone overnight from being a valued resource to being an annoying distraction! If my top 5 daily blogs follow his lead there would be no physical way to digest all the info, things would be published faster than can be assimilated.

I think we're looking for balance here. Blogs for the carefully-aimed rifle shots; lifestreams for continuous shotgun blasts.

The question for educational leaders is how well does our system match the activities of our learners and society as a whole - are the approaches to research, learning, and teaching within education synchronized to the dominant long term trends around information creation, sharing, and personal interactions?.

George Siemens nails what's so wrong in corporate learning: it's out of step with the times.

I sometimes use a slide depicting a BMW labeled "At home" and a Model T labeled "At work."

People who have hung out in corporations too long fail to see the disconnect. Consumer IT (the net) has surpassed corporate IT (behind the firewall) in terms of easily connecting people. The old timers are setting themselves up to be blindsided.