So somebody recently asked me about a presentation on "Learning 2.0" Not the first time I'd heard this term, hell, I probably used it a couple of times myself. This time however, something really hit me. I need to read a lot more neuroscience and cog sci but I'm going out on a limb and saying that there is no such thing. I know, cause I heard him say it myself, that Tim O'Reilly, the guy who started the whole "2.0" craze (or who at least at the meeting where it was started) did not use the term to denote an iteration but a break with the prior ways things had been done. SO I really don't believe that humans are learning differently - meaning, I think we are constituting memories, adapting behavior, practicing new skills - those activities that typically make up learning from the human standpoint - in much the same way as we have for hundreds if not thousands of years. I'm talking about our internal processes. That doesn't mean that we haven't changed the mechanisms we use but the internal processes are very similar. So there is no "Learning 2.0" from the learners' view - there could well be "Instruction 2.0" or "Teaching 2.0" but think about what is really different there - those last two (and you could throw in Government 2.0, Education 2.0) address organizations and not learners and this gets to my second bothersome point about "Learning 2.0."The use of "Learning 2.0" in my mind, puts all the burden of change on the learner. If they are all 2.0 and changed then clearly we (The Organizations) don't need to do anything on our end. Think about it - Government 2.0 as a term - talks about how the organization of government needs to change. IMHO, the use of a term like "learning 2.0" seems to absolve us of addressing the hard questions of how we need to change as organizations. Forget for a moment, about using Twitter for whatever or blogs for something else - do you need to have HR at the design table? What is predominant characteristic of your organizational culture? Is your technology woefully out of date? Does your office furniture suck and imparts to people a concrete idea of how the org REALLY values it "most important asset"? How do you hire? What kind of people do you look for? Those are the dynamics that our learners are already operating in. Understand that environment. Figure out how to change that environment needs to change. Then maybe, we'll actually be getting to a "2.0" place. Let's put the burden on us and not on the learner.

OK..so as you watch the video, imagine this smoothed out with telepresence-like fidelity. 

So, last month, I was at the eLearning Guild's DevLearn conference in San Jose. Awesome conference. Really. There were zombies, they always make for a nice conference (congrats to Tandem Learning and Hybrid for pulling off a remarkable ARG). I did a lot of talking during this conference. A lot. Those of you that know me will not be surprised by this but even for me, almost three days of non-stop talking about social media and how it can impact learning is a lot. One of the cool things that happened when I was doing all this yammering was that it helped me solidify a few things in my head about this very topic. One of these lucid moments came during a talk about how social media can be used to loop in subject-matter experts more easily into the design process or really into whatever stage they're needed in. People had been voicing the same complaints about access to SMEs, about SME's time being booked in other ways, about the bottleneck that these problems represented and then it just hit me...(I say just after reading 1,2,3 and so on)...we needed to be thinking differently...if we just used social media to build more ways to get to SMEs, then we wouldn't fix what was broken...our ability to access the expertise that we need, when we need it  - either in order to answer a question, provide input into a course design or for some other purpose - we didn't need better access to Subject-Matter Experts...we needed access to Subject-Matter Networks. (SMNs) Geez. This is what we've been talking about from Wikinomics to Small Pieces Loosely Joined...etc....but I am 99.9% confident that I coined the term! I hadn't done that before. Kinda cool. Just kinda popped out. Koreen Olbrish wrote an outstanding review of DevLearn and included the term in there - I just googled it and Clarence Fisher had a nice little blog post about it... I actually kinda included it in a blog post I did on another little blog experiment I was trying but was to get some more thoughts down on it...it even made it into the #lrnchat transcript. So I think though, that one thing that I really like about the term is that it works for me as a way to discuss the value of implementing social media within the enterprise, especially from the learning standpoint. This is what we want isn't it? Networks of experts that can not only give you the answer but do so from multiple perspectives drawing on multiple backgrounds and diverse knowledge sets all at a speed and scale that we've previously been incapable of. But the term is also a challenge...how do we de-construct our current notions of how expertise is recognized and re-configure it to allow for trust, reputation and authenticity not on an individual level but at a network level? How to construct learning experiences to maximize the existence of SMN's?So great - a new term - thanks Mark - because if its one thing the learning and training field needed, it was a new term. Yeah, I know but hopefully this one will spur discussion and thought about how we can use social media and social networks to construct a new cognitive infrastructure. 

I don't know why I'm apologizing but I feel like I should. I haven't been keeping up with the blogging and I blame you Twitter!! Actually I just blame myself, its not like I don't have things I want to write about but you know? So let's just let bygones be bygones and I'll do better from here. OK? Good. Need to some housekeeping here and we'll get to that but first I need to say how excited I am about heading over to London (the UK one) to talk at the Learning Technologies 2010 conference. HUGE thanks   going out to Donald H Taylor for asking me - I'm flattered and hope to bring an interesting and useful viewpoint on Making Social Learning Work in Your Organization to the audience. If you're gonna be there, gimme a shout and I think the Twitter hashtag is #LT10uk - so follow along or feel free to add in. Now onto the rest of our business.... Ambient Streams. I've had this tab open for a while. I kinda like the term.  A Game Built on Top of Comments: I like this idea for driving participation in new communities. I also want to look at Disqus.  Big Ideas Fest: Sounds like a good one to add to the conference calendar for 2010. I've also had this little piece on "absorptive capacity" open for a while: "refers to the ability to identify, assimilate and exploit knowledge from the environment or the ability to evaluate and utilize outside knowledge."You should also bookmark this poster on "10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling" ok..more to come...

 Found this at Ewan McIntosh's blog. Here is the company site. I LOVE the way the company talks about creating rich and engaging user interfaces. As a historian (yes, actually have the advanced degree and yes, have actually been paid to be one), I know it bothers me when everybody who wakes up thinks they can figure out the lessons of history - I also know instructional designers who get frustrated when everybody thinks they can design relevant instruction. Well look, I want THESE people - these people that are EXPERTS in crafting engaging user interfaces tom come in and look at our UI's for learning. Srsly - do we wonder that the UI might be important in creating a meaningful learning moment for people? Maybe? Maybe we should also consider how an environment like this could b used in our environments.

Thought #1: Why will Opera 10 STILL not display the Typepad editor correctly? Srsly.Thought #2: SUPER excited to be headed to Game Developers Conference. If you are in the learning/training field, head over to the GDC site and take a look at the schedule. In fact, I'd argue that as soon as you finish attending EVERY event that the eLearning Guild puts on, you should make it a point to attend at least once conference 'outside' the field on a regular basis. Thought #3: CONGRATS to the eLearning Guild for creating a very good iPhone app for the conference schedule. Srsly, conference organizers, we know that printed conference schedules are a source of advertising revenue but the waste of paper is getting a offensive. Offer a PDF that people can download and then make a freakin app like the Guild did for the rest of us. Thought #4: LOVE the free WiFi at the Virgin America gate. FTW!!Thought #5: More thoughts coming from the inflight WiFi on Virgin America. The coolest airline (not that I dodn't love me some Southwest)

Here are some numbers from the Facebook press room: More than 400 million active users 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day More than 35 million users update their status each day More than 60 million status updates posted each day More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week More than 3.5 million events created each month More than 3 million active Pages on Facebook More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans Every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users More than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users. Wow. That's a lot of people and data isn't it? How many users on your LMS? How many LMSs out there also support 3rd party applications?So please, someone, help a guy out...tell me why more companies aren't like Udutu? Fine, I'll accept for the time being that security is key, privacy...whatever...ok fine...but tell me, what is different about the data that Facebook handles and the kind of data that our LMSs handle? Start an app? Got it. Finish an app? Got it. Report a score? Done. So let me hear it - why is the architecture underlying Facebook, insufficient for our organizations' "learning management" system needs? I'm serious. Please. There must be a reason right? I am totally assuming I am just missing something.

Holy crap. Seriously people. So evidently I'm a bit behind the curve. My friend Ellen Wagner recently did a presentation at the Learning Solutions conference (along with Cammy Bean and Koreen Olbrish). Part of that presentation included a wonderful piece entitled the "Secret Handshakes of Instructional Designers"This is one of those presentations where you do 20 slides and only use 20 seconds talking about each one. Ellen has a whole post on using this Pecha Kucha format for talking about instructional design here. I was there for the presentation and it went over like gangbusters. Evidently though, in doing it, Ellen joined the ranks of lawbreakers, rebels and general neer-do-wells...Maybe Ellen will comment here on the email she got from the Pecha Kucha Foundation but I saw this post today that seems to run along similar lines. Quoting from that post by Lorenz Khazaleh: "This is Jean from PechaKucha HQ here in Tokyo. It has come to our attention that you recently organized a PechaKucha event without our consent.The PechaKucha name, logo, and format are all trademarked concepts, and as we clearly indicate on our site, we ask that anyone who is interested in running a PK event get in touch, as we have a review and agreement process that we go through."Yeah, I know. My head almost exploded too. I mean...this is a format people!! So then I decided to take a look at the Pecha Kucha web site. Sheesh. Rarely have I seen a site so full of whining pretensions. Like (from Aims of the Pecha Kucha Foundation):"To keep the global PechaKucha movement -- now in close to 300 cities with over 60 events a month -- growing in a sustainable manner, reviewing city applications and granting handshake agreements."How about getting out of your own way? How's that for managing growth? Why does a format either for a presentation or an event, have to be managed for sustainability?"With revenue from sponsorship, donations and advertising the Foundation will start and support global initiatives such as the PechaKucha website "Presentations" section -- a global city archive of presentations -- and the Marc Hoekstra PechaKucha Award."You're kidding right? You need to donations to host presentations? Have you heard of YouTube? SlideShare? And I love the idea of an award and Marc sounds like a tremendous human but if you believe in it so much, set up a PayPal account and let the world contribute. "Klein Dytham architecture has sponsored PechaKucha since its inception in 2003, paying for all website development and staffing costs. As the number of cities and events have grown so have costs and staffing. In 2008, Autodesk, the world's leading architectural and creative sofware company, came on board as a sponsor and helped cover some of the running costs. Klein Dytham architecture still sponsor the movement by covering the considerable shortfall."That's huge kudos for Klein Dytham but sheesh don't cover the costs of something like this out of the goodness of your heart and then come whining about it and about shortfalls. And while we're on the topic, "staffing costs"? I guess that not trying to make people apply for PK permits and having to review those applications would dramatically cut down on your staffing costs. So...since PK and 20x20 are both trademarked...I'm recommending we start a new movement...I'm torn between 19x19 and 21x21...can't decide right now. I do promise though to keep web site development costs low (if only there were some kind of free service for hosting a web site) and staffing costs down (my salary will be reasonable I promise).  So there you go people...what's next? A patent on starting your talk with a joke?

  So check this out. This is a game called Caesary and is found on Kongregate here. I re-tweeted an item from earlier today that talked about the interface being part of the game design. Then I see this.Just look at the amount of information available to you there. It's staggering on one level. Let's forget about the actual game play going on....I'm looking at synchronous chat, feedback (both to me and from me), available resources, profile, achievements and more. Oh, and its all done in Flash. See this kind of interface keeps me engaged. I'm getting a lot of information but its all useful and I'm using it to make lots of decisions. There is NO NEXT BUTTON. I don't feel like I'm getting spoon fed data at someone else's pace. I can even speed this up if I want. I'm getting corrective feedback at almost every step. Did I mention its multiplayer?