Teaching In The Next Way

October 31, 2009 ·

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I love this interview that Shel Israel did with Howard Rheingold (a favorite author). Partway down the interview, Howard goes into some of what he does for teaching with modern tools. I ripped this part out. Check out what Howard does:

One strategy is to have only the student co-teaching team keep their laptops open while they are helping me lead the class; one member of the team makes notes on the wiki, sketching in top-level headings that the other students will fill in AFTER class, another member of the team identifies words for the lexicon and adds them to the wiki (and again the class, as a whole, fills in the definitions before the next class), and a third member of the team looks up sites online and projects them (I have three screens in my classroom at Stanford).

You can read the whole interview here. I’m grateful to Shel Israel for getting this out of Howard. Nicely done, sir.

5 Great Social Learning Resources

It's been talked about for years, but 'Social Learning' is more recently becoming the big buzz word in learning, and you should probably pay attention because it's being pegged as the next generation of eLearning (heavily debated of course, as is everything in learning).

I’d like to add in Peter Senge’s important clarifications on terms we often use:

Knowledge: the capacity for effective action. “Know how” is the  only aspect of knowledge that really matters in life.

Practitioner: someone who is accountable for producing results.

I had said that learning remains an individual activity, with all of the variables of the human experience and much less clearly defined or controlled than education or training. I also recommended that organizations should get out of the learning business and focus on performance. Organizations can direct performance but they should only support learning. Individuals should be directing their own learning.

Senge’s presentation last week gave me cause to reflect on this. He said that individual learning in organizations is irrelevant because work is almost never done by one person. All value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Therefore, social networks are the conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization (my conclusion).

To reduce these thoughts to their essence, I would say:

Organizations should focus on enabling practitioners to produce results by supporting learning through social networks. The rest is just window dressing

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is why we must focus on organizational Learnscapes instead of individual training programs.

Do not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize
If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done. The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates — or doing more — it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.

Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration

October 23rd, 2009 (1:00pm) Will Kelly 6 CommentsTweet This (84)

Recently, Simon reported on a couple of interesting studies looking at the use of collaboration technologies in the workplace, Forrester’s “The State Of Workforce Technology Adoption: US Benchmark 2009” and Frost & Sullivan’s “Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration.” Both reports have great stories to tell about the current state of collaboration technology acceptance within corporations. However, both reports skim over what is perhaps the key element in driving online collaboration within an organization: Corporate culture.

It is not enough to just deploy the latest collaboration tools, whether that is Microsoft SharePoint; Office Communications Server; Google Apps; a corporate VoIP telephony system; mobile devices like the BlackBerry or iPhone; or the latest online collaboration tool reviewed on WebWorkerDaily. The challenge is getting people using them — and for that you need a collaborative corporate culture.

Some integral elements of a collaborative corporate culture include:

• “Come-and-go-as-you-please” schedules. If your company is doing a seat check every morning in its cubicle farm, you don’t have a corporate culture conducive for much online collaboration. While “face time” is an old school management crutch, today’s workforce runs at a different pace with alternative work schedules, telecommuting, offsite contractors, and a myriad of employee personal commitments can foster what I like to call a “come-and-go-as-you-please” schedule. A collaborative culture helps do away with the age-old myths of the value employees get by spending time roosting in an office.
• No knowledge archipelagos. An old IT contractor colleague of mine once coined the term “knowledge archipelagos.” A knowledge archipelago is formed when employees hoard institutional knowledge, whether it is key documents on employee’s local hard drives or crucial  information in their heads, much like an archipelago of islands. Organizations that have a central repository of information  — off local hard drives and individual’s email inboxes — don’t have knowledge archipelagos, meaning that you don’t have to run down somebody to get access to their information. Sharing of project artifacts and corporate information online is integral to a collaborative corporate culture.
• Presence beyond the office (and regular office hours). I once had a client consider that if I was online via AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, or Windows Live Messenger, regardless of the hour or day that I was available to discuss work topics. While this attitude may seem invasive to some, it can make you more conscious your personal online time after hours. I’ve worked with other clients where IM wasn’t part of the mix during or after work hours. Again, it’s all about the culture.
• Technically savvy employees. Through my career as a consultant, the organizations I saw excel at online collaboration and remote working had a very technical savvy employee base, which shaped the corporate culture because a majority of them were early adopters, and lived a large part of their working day online. Their needs and work schedules fed into corporate culture and had an influence into the acceptance of online collaboration in the corporate culture.
• Supportive management. A true collaborative culture requires a supportive management team that wants their workers to be accessible to each other through multiple channels and realizes that traditional working modes won’t attract and retain the best talent. It also helps if these managers are early adopters and are champions for online collaboration and the benefits it gives to workers. The management team should also champion the environment, and be technically savvy (not just falling for the latest Web 2.0 tool fad). Another quality of supportive management is that they aren’t shy about recruiting employers or contractors outside of commuting distance from their nearest office.

Culture is key to successful online collaboration and that is an element that is often times hard to capture in reports and surveys. Web workers seeking new opportunities need to seek prospective clients and employers where the corporate culture is more than just four walls and a cubicle farm and there is a strong track  record of online collaboration and remote working already in place.

What elements of corporate culture do you see driving online collaboration and remote working in your employer and clients?

Culture trumps all. INATT

A thriving social network is the backbone of social learning in the enterprise. I hope Dion Hinchcliffe’s approach is successful, but it’s too early to tell.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Performance or Time To Market. What’s Your Choice?

Apr 12 2009 6:40PM | Permalink |Comments (9) |

The last presentation I listened to at the Electronic Design Processes Workshop last week was from Atrenta’s CTO Bernard Murphy. His was a very practical presentation in my opinion and he effectively asked the question: “How much theoretical performance are you willing to give up to tape out your design and get it into silicon?” It’s truly a practical question. Engineers intuitively know that the closer they try to get to perfection, the longer it takes. Push silicon technology hard to get clock speed or low power and you’ll spend a lot of time chasing the problems that crop up.

Are you willing to settle for good enough and not perfect? Are your competitors? If so, then who wins the market? The perfect chip that’s not yet available or the imperfect chip that’s in stock and gets the job done? Intuitively, I think you already know.

I've been thinking about this trade-off of precision vs. availability, and I'm concluding that 95% okay today trumps 100% okay a year from now. After all, it's the era of perpetual beta. Start selling today, and improve the product tomorrow. Remember the Innovator's Dilemma? Some buyers are ready for the next-generation product, even if it's still a bit buggy.

jay

Robert Parker

Via Felix Salmon comes this amusing anecdote about Robert Parker's blind tasting of 2005 Bordeaux, which he has declared the best vintage since 1982. Parker has previously rated all of these wines, and even given them exact point scores, so his public blind taste test was an interesting natural experiment: would Parker's new scores correlate with his 2007 scores? How many of these wines would he be able to identify?

The answers were humbling. (In Parker's defense, these wines are still very young and very tannic.) Parker confused merlot-based Bordeaux with cabernet-heavy blends; his favorite wine of the tasting turned out to be the lowest rated rate in his 2007 tasting of Bordeaux. Here's Dr. Vino:

A final issue is about points and the nature of blind tasting, a capricious undertaking if there ever were one. Although Parker did not rate the wines yesterday, his top wine of the evening (Le Gay) was the lowest rated in the lineup from his most recent published reviews... For all the precision that a point score implies, it is not dynamic, changing with the wines as they change in the bottle nor does it capture performance from one tasting to the next.

I certainly don't mean to diminish the impressive talent (and astonishing vinicultural knowledge) of Robert Parker. But I think his inability to reliably and consistently rate bottles of Bordeaux illustrates a larger problem with wine tastings, which is rooted in the sensory limitations of the human brain. I've blogged before about the mischievous experiments of Frederick Brochet - he's shown that wine experts can be tricked by red food coloring into confusing red and white wines - but the moral is simple: our sensations require interpretation.

Tell someone a wine is expensive. Nine out of ten times, they will say it tastes better.