George Siemens,  Tony Karrer, and I are pleased to announce the LearnTrends 2009 Innovation Awards.

The awards are designed to recognize products, projects, processes, and companies that represent interesting innovations in applying technology for Corporate / Workplace Learning and Performance. Winners will make short presentations during the LearnTrends conference.

Deadline for submission is: October 30.

To apply for an award, fill out the:

Submission Form

Spread the word. There’s no admission charge. We want to recognize innovations, from individuals to teams to enterprises.

Here are the top sites from Informal Learning Flow for September 2009.

Featured Sources

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals.

1. The Awesomeness Manifesto- HarvardBusiness.org, September 16, 2009
2. An Operating System for the Mind- Half an Hour, September 19, 2009
3. RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized- OReilly Radar, September 14, 2009
4. Rapid Prototyping Tools Revisited- Adaptive Path, September 16, 2009
5. What do we mean by engagement online?- Full Circle, September 8, 2009
6. Scoring with Social Media: 6 Tips for Using Analytics- HarvardBusiness.org, September 21, 2009
7. The Singularity and the Fixed Point- Technology Review Feed – Tech Review Top Stories, September 3, 2009
8. Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)- OReilly Radar, September 22, 2009
9. Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late- Scientific American, September 10, 2009
10. From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.- TechCrunch, September 20, 2009

Paco Underhill is our Founder, and CEO. His first book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping is out in twenty-seven languages, and has sold more copies than any other retail book in history. His columns and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, Money Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal among others.  

Paco is the only foreigner ever to serve on the Board of Advisors at Hakuhodo – Japan's second largest Advertising Agency. With Hakuhodo he has collaborated on manga-based retail guides available in Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Paco is currently working on new book - the working title is The Female Factor - The Worship of Goddesses. In it he reviews how the changing status of women is affecting the physical world we live in.

Fall 2009 CLO Symposium

Peak Performance: Pushing Your Enterprise to the Top

September 28th — 30th, 2009

The Broadmoor — Colorado Springs, Colorado

Benchmark Your Meta-Learning

Learning can no longer mean “training.” Learning must mean problem solving, creativity, innovation and more. Organizations are finding huge benefits in getting concrete about informal learning, and you need to, as well. How does your organization stack up? In this session, we will review the results of the CLO/TogetherLearn survey of meta-learning practices and learning culture. We'll suggest the concepts you need, the examples you seek and the tools you need to assess your status, review and prioritize the opportunities, and develop your plan for action.

Take any aspect of secondary schooling as we understand it – lessons, classrooms, subjects, tests, year groups, the role of heads, the authority of teachers – and he challenges it. Hargreaves – who, at 70, recently finished his work on the curriculum for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) – has been involved in something far more wide-ranging, and more dangerous, than the government could have envisaged.

He calls it "system redesign" and says "it's more exciting than anything I've done in my career before". In his vision of 21st-century schooling, pupils help make the curriculum, tell the school how to use information technology, set standards and learning objectives, assess their own and one another's work, spend half or whole days on collaborative projects, sometimes work at home. Teachers are mentors or coaches who comment on students' work rather than grading it. Subjects become "essential learnings", such as communication, thinking or social responsibility; or "competencies", such as managing information or relating to people. Schools become part of networks, working with other schools or colleges, sometimes outsourcing even the work of whole departments.

Tip of the hat to Charles Jennings

A free innovation guide for NGOs and Social Enterprises

For years, organizations have used Human-Centered Design (HCD) to arrive at innovative business solutions. In collaboration with the Gates Foundation and non-profit groups IDE, ICRW, and Heifer International, IDEO has specially adapted this process for NGOs and social enterprises that work with impoverished communities around the world. The resulting HCD Toolkit helps organizations understand people’s needs in new ways, find innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

http://www.ideo.com/work/item/human-centered-design-toolkit/

My earlier post on KM governance attracted some outstandingly thoughtful comments and I will reply to them all shortly. One of the other tasks on that report was to define KM. Now I have resisted this in the past, but it had to be done. So here is my attempt.

Davenport and Prusak define knowledge as “a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, process, practices, and norms.”

While this definition has stood the test of time it is focused on, and would only be fully understood by, someone with experience of knowledge management. Given the overall levels of cyncism about knowledge management, together with issues of initiative fatigue and excessive communication, it is proposed that a simpler and more common place definition be adopted together with some clearly business orientated guiding principles. A first draft is set out below:

The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes.

The following guiding principles will be applied

• All projects will be clearly linked to operational and strategic goals
• As far as possible the approach adopted will be to stimulate local activity rather than impose central solutions
• Co-ordination and distribution of learning will focus on allowing adaptation of good practice to the local context
• Management of the KM function will be based on a small centralized core, with a wider distributed network

LearnTrends Innovation Awards

September 22nd, 2009 — Business learning, Innovation

George Siemens, Tony Karrer and I are pleased to announce the first ever LearnTrends 2009 Innovation Awards.

The awards will recognize products, projects, and companies that represent significant innovation in Corporate/Workplace Learning and Performance.

Winners will be announced and will be asked to do short presentations during LearnTrends 2009.

To apply for an award, complete the Submission Form.

There is no entry fee. (And no fancy plaque either.) We very much want to get nominations from all corners. (Innovation occurs at all levels.)

We will appreciate any help you can give us to spread the word about these awards. Pass the word. Tweet about it. Tell your network. Help us attract some ingenious projects.

Lifestreaming Lessons - a 90-Day Report

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As many of you are aware, three months ago I did something that some considered virtual heresy. After five years and 5300 posts I shuttered my blog, Micro Persuasion, in favor of this lifestream. I set out to find a middle ground between a blog and a tweet. I longed for a new approach where I could post shorter items, more often and in more visual and creative ways. I wanted to establish a place where we could probe technology - like Da Vinci once did on his own - but do so together and daily. Posterous has done a great job on the tech side, but I want to elevate my game.

So far, I am extremely pleased with my approach, but I am never one to be satisfied. The basic formula is working well. I use this site as a launching pad to initiate many of my social streams and then I go and engage in conversations around these out in the hubs where it syndicated. Still, I am also posting content often directly into Facebook and Twitter without starting it here. I may play with the formula so that everything at least begins here.

So what's missing? Well, the content is still too text heavy. Posterous lets you do so many things with audio, video, photos and text. I keep a list of formats I want to try. However, I still resort back to text too often and, what's more, I haven't been able to post daily as I had hoped. I am close, but I can do better.

Steve Rubel got me into this lifestreaming experiment. I haven't given up on blogs. Rather, I've been playing with Posterous as an alternative for posting links and keepers that don't warrant a blog post. Also, Posterous provides an easy way to broadcast via Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I find Steve's suggestion of choosing one's media for expression by the calendar rather than the content ill-founded. Methinks he needs to reconsider drawing mindmaps on his iPhone while on the Long Island Railroad. I do like the reminder of the diversity of forms of content one can throw at Posterous.

Working

• Emergent Practice
• Soft Skills
• Work 2.0
• Rarefication
• Creativity

Structures

• Wirearchy
• Perpetual Beta
• New Org DNA
• Cooperation

Living

• Age of Dissonance
• New Models
• Long View

Learning

• Informal
• Relevance
• Critical Thinking
• Personal Knowledge Management

Great taxonomy. Or is it a folksonomy? Either way, it clears a path to understanding.