Brainpark is still a small company. There are sixteen of us and we are focused on the enterprise market.  We help employees learn from one another to become more productive.

It helps people capture their work stream, so based on a task that you are working on you can gather all the information from all the sources you used to complete the task.  It captures the process of the fulfillment of a task and also captures the stream of information around that particular research.  It then cross-references that with everyone else’s work within your enterprise.  It then identifies people who could help you to complete the task, who can help you do your job.
In a similar way to how Google learns who you are and what you do in order to serve more relevant ads, we learn about your behavior within the company in order to serve you with effective resources and connections. Our job is to help you do your job more effectively and more collectively.

VV: Now I see why your slogan is "Where information comes alive"

MD: We are launching a new website and we are going to do a soft launch of the company on June 22nd at the Enterprise 2 Conference in Boston.  We expect our slogan to change by then.  I believe our slogan is going to be “knowledge at play.”

VV: What is unique about the brainpark product?

MD: What’s unique about the Brainpark product is its ability to filter and interpret the unstructured data in a manner that helps employees become smarter and more productive at work.

It is quite unique as the process takes what is currently known as social networking and turns it inside-out for the benefit of productivity.  I think the most significant aspect on how we have approached the problem.  There are people working on collaboration using the standard approaches and what we’ve done is a relatively innovative and novel approach to solve this problem.

VV: Does your product help companies be more democratic?

MD: Yes it does. Our product helps companies become more collaborative and more connected. It allows the average worker to become more aware of what other people do and also of other people who can help them to do their jobs. In another sense, it enhances the community and enhances the environment so people can help one another to do a better job.

Clark Quinn and I met with Brainpark's Mark Dowds yesterday. http://brainpark.com Social learning + serendipity, a powerful blend.

Announcing Corporate Learning Trends 2009

September 15th, 2009 | Business learning

LearnTrends 2009
November 17-19, 2009 | Online | Free

George Siemens, Tony Karrer, and Jay Cross today announced that the third annual conference on Corporate Learning Trends & Innovation will take place online November 17, 18, and 19, 2009. This year’s topic is Convergence in Corporate Learning. Mark your calendar to participate and to network with fellow corporate learning professionals.

LearnTrends tackles topics you won’t find at the conferences you have to travel to. The event is free. Events are live & online and will be recorded.

We are open to your suggestions: email us or leave a comment at LearnTrends.com.

McKinsey recently published the results of its third annual survey on “How Companies are Benefiting from Web 2.0.” It’s well worth a read. Instead of trying to summarize it or hit all its main points, I just want to concentrate on a couple elements I found particularly interesting.

Internal uses are more popular and powerful than external ones. www.mckinseyquarterly.com%2fBusiness_and_Web_20_An_interactive_feature_2431%3fpagenum%3d1%23interactive&pgn=buwe09_exhibit">Adoption rates were highest for internal uses than either customer or partner one. Across all industries and geographies, the percentage of adopters reporting measurable benefits from internal uses was again higher than for either of the other two.

There’s no single ‘killer app.’ 65% reported that they were using 2.0 technologies internally, but no single technology was in use at more than 35% of respondents.  Wikis, blogs, and social networking tools were the most popular 2.0 tools, with 35%, 34%, and 32% internal usage rates, respectively.

Respondents report concrete and large benefits. Among internal users, for example, 68% of respondents reported ‘increased speed of access to knowledge,’ and the median estimated improvement was 30%. For ‘increasing employee satisfaction’ the corresponding figures were 35% and 20%, and for ‘increasing number of successful innovations for new products or services’ they were 25% and 20%. For customer-related purposes, 43% reported ‘increasing customer satisfaction,’ with a median estimated improvement of 20%. It’s important to stress that these are subjective and unverified estimates given in at least some cases by 2.0 enthusiasts. It’s also fair to point out that they’re pretty big numbers.

Usage is increasing, and so is investment.  Internal, customer, and partner adoption rates all increased in both 2008 and 2009. And 79% of respondents said that their future investments in 2.0 tech-based efforts would be comparable to or greater than their recent ones, and only 6% said that they were planning to decrease.

RT Bschlenker

Information Literacy is defined as the lifelong ability to recognise the need for, to locate, evaluate and effectively use information (American Library Association, 2006). Digital information literacy is one aspect of this and very relevant for the 21st Century. Another term used in this context is fluency and this is where the following definition sits:

"Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment." 21st Century Digital Information Fluency (DIF) project and model

You gotta start somewhere.

Abstracts

Keynote:     Learning in a landscape of practice: communities and boundaries

Many institutions of learning proceed from a similar set of assumptions: that a body of knowledge is a curriculum, that learning depends on teaching, that the classroom is the locus of learning, and that the rest of life is application. But in practice, a body of knowledge is really a constellation of communities of practice that contribute in various ways to the constitution of a field of inquiry. The boundaries between these communities can be quite problematic, and at the same time rich learning opportunities. What are the implications of this assumption for institutions of learning? How do we conceptualize the questions to be addressed? One approach is to view learning, not primarily as the acquisition of a curriculum but as the negotiation of an identity with respect to a landscape of practice—with a complex interplay of communities and boundaries. From this perspective, learning is a transformation of our identity. And teaching is not merely the transmission of a curriculum, but an invitation to a journey of the self.

Workshop:   Communities of practice: a social discipline of learning

The complex challenges we face today urgently call for new models of how we can learn individually and collectively. We have quite rigorous models to consider the informational and cognitive aspects of learning, but we need to become more disciplined about considering its social dimensions. One model with the potential to do this is provided by communities of practice and the attendant learning theory. These communities are as ancient as human kind. Yet they represent a model of learning that is extraordinarily aligned with the new geographies of connectivity and identity emerging at the dawn of the 21^st century. This workshop explores some dimensions of this social discipline of learning, as well as new approaches to learning challenges in business, government, education, and world development.

#iped09

Avoid arguments in favor of change as an innate good, and focus on practical and obvious areas where Web 2.0 technologies and business practices can quickly offer real and tangible benefits without disturbing mission-critical business processes or rocking the political boat. --Stowe Boyd

Is Happiness Catching?

By CLIVE THOMPSON
New York Times magazine

SOCIAL NETWORKS AND HAPPINESS
By Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler

Edge, The Third Culture

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You’re going to be hearing a lot about social contagion in the coming months, for it’s a great topic for people who are interested in how social networks function. Researchers Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler say:

We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.

The blue-dot people above are the unhappy ones; the yellows are happy.

The New York Times reports that more than happiness is passed along through friendship networks: so is the likelihood of gaining weight or giving up smoking!

A public health program to reduce obesity would be more efficient if it began by targeting well-connected people (because they’ll influence more friends.)

The research found that it’s friends who are influential. Colleagues at work, not so much.

Models, like myths and metaphors, help us to make sense of our world. Whether derived from whim or from serious research, a model offers its user a means of comprehending an otherwise incomprehensible problem. An instructional design model gives structure and meaning to an I.D. problem, enabling the would-be designer to negotiate her design task with a semblance of conscious understanding. Models help us to visualize the problem, to break it down into discrete, manageable units.

The value of a specific model is determined within the context of use. Like any other instrument, a model assumes a specific intention of its user. A model should be judged by how it mediates the designer's intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the design activity.

Awesome list of design models RT from Ellen Wagner

It is a common-known fact that teaching is a labor of love for most educators. They are overworked and under-appreciated and many of them spend their own money, time and energy to improve their students’ education. With all of the new mobile tools on the market today, teachers can more easily work from satellite locations, share educational resources and access school-related data directly from their cell phones. Here are 100 mobile tools for teachers that make the grade.