One of the things I am is a historian. Done the time in the library. Read the original materials. Got the degree. So I tend to take a longer term view of things that people who haven't spent years studying events from hundreds or thousands of years ago do. I also have this tendency to ask annoying questions, like 'where did that come from?' 'when did we start doing that?' 'why did we start doing that?' It bothers me when people don't ask those questions. (Points to whoever tells me who said "A beginning is a very delicate time")One of the things that also really bothers me (cause I know you were wondering) is when people think they're historians too just because they have the history channel or because they had a history class in college. That's why this kind of crap from the Texas School Board seriously pisses me off no end.  All that is a disclaimer of sorts. I'm no teacher, although I have taught. So I'm kind of going to ignore my own warnings here and just present some ideas on the topic of education. There are two things that are spurring me on here (three really). The first is that I currently am a paying customer of the U.S. K-12 system (I have a kid in the 5th grade). Why this spurs me on should be obvious. My son is going into the 5th grade next year and I've already seen his curriculum grind to halt to make sure that everyone had time to study for the MSAs. He also sits in a classroom at a desk but more about that in the next paragraph. ;-) The second thing is a presentation that Gary Woodill (@gwoodill) from Brandon Hall Research did titled   "The History of Classrooms as Learning Technology" back in August of 2009. I know Gary was nice enough to share those slides with me from that webinar, I don't know if he has them available elsewhere online but they're excellent and I hope he can make them available. Now books like "Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920" are great at looking at the history of technology (radio, TV, etc) in the classroom but fail to appreciate the classroom itself as a piece of technology, as a tool, as a tool designed to accomplish a purpose. Remember that old joke about the little kid being shown around somewhere like Colonial Williamsburg? Her parents have to explain what everything is, the blacksmith, a loom, etc, until they come to the classroom. There the girl feels right at home...because nothing has changed. When we look at a hammer, we see pretty clearly what it's purpose is. The beauty of Gary's presentation is that it forces us to look at the classroom as a tool. As a tool designed to accomplish a purpose. Failing to look at the classroom itself as a tool and to consider for what purpose that tool was created is a failing of perspective we can't afford. Why? Because we're starting to do things like create virtual worlds with virtual classrooms in them. Why? Why are teaching adults in classrooms? Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye,Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 1We should ask what hand created technology like the classroom. What eye framed its "fearful symmetry" (see picture above for fearful symmetry)? Why? Because the classroom has become such a dominant metaphor not only in K-12 education but in Higher Ed and even in our adult training...even in our virtual worlds. In one sense (please see sign at the top of this post), the classroom represents the headwaters of our experience with education and training. The even deeper tragedy is that its not just the classroom we're blindly propagating...its other ideas which are being seriously challenged like No Child Left Behind and its offspring 'teaching to the test.'If our sons and daughters are struggling with "No Child Left Behind" then imagine their surprise when they get into the corporate world and find our main operating principle with regard to training could be "No Adult Left Behind." Boy, we have got teaching to the test down to a science don't we? So if classrooms are harbingers because they are where we start our experiences, then look at how some of these systems are doing. You have Bill Gates talking to the National Governors Association in 2005 and saying:"America’s high schools are obsolete.   By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded - though a case could be made for every one of those points.   By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they’re working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times."(1,2)Ironically enough, one of the most powerful recent voices to critique the current system and the associated reform attempts has been Diane Ravitch in "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education." The Gates Foundation itself isn't spared either. (1) Her message of the failing of testing and of sacred cows like charter schools has been resonant. Her book is in its 7th printing in 3 months. (1,2,3,4) This critique of the current system is that 3rd thing that has been bothering me. I think I also really like Ravitch because she is a historian of educational policy. So what do I want right? I want us and by us I mean the people who frequent ASTD, ISPI, and the  eLearning Guild events, the people who populate #lrnchat, and the people who are charged with using emerging technologies to teach and train..I want us to consider the tools we are propagating. The systems we are perpetuating. The theories and paradigms we use to bolster our plans. These tools, these ideas, these systems, become embedded in our world view since we are indoctrinated in them since childhood. What's the joke about 'who invented water?' 'I don't know but I bet it wasn't fish.' Too true. We need to critically examine all of this. We need to understand that there is no such thing as a neutral tool. That the creation of every tool is embedded in a cultural context, a milieu of meaning that we must consider when we consider its use. We must learn to not think outside the box but think outside the system. Kill the next button. Kill the idea that no one can fail compliance training but we don't really give a damn if it actually changes behavior or performance by one iota. Kill the idea that taking a course all the way through once and passing produces some sort of meaningful pattern of memory. What would you do if you had a blank slate?  ....course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong. (apologies to Dennis Miller)

So I love this app from Birdbrain.  It provides me probably the most useful look at my Twitter network of any tool I've seen. One of the interesting things it does is look at my followers every time I start it and tells me, since the last time I checked, not just how many new followers have joined and who they are but who has also stopped following me since the last time I checked. That's not really a totally new feature I know but BirdBrain does it faster than any other tool I've seen and it has resulted in a new dynamic for me. I've become really interested in who stops following me. Some are really obvious, people who have different interests, bots, etc., but some are not so obvious and those are the ones that interest me. Like @socmedia12 - into social media marketing. Were my tweets just not on point enough? Let me be clear, I'm not hurt, I'm not taking any of this personally - I'm just trying to understand the dynamic of how people reach the point where they are sufficiently moved to take the action to unfollow someone. Maybe its just interesting to me since I really rarely unfollow people and I wonder how other people make that decision. I've also started following a larger % of people who unfollow me because as BirdBrain highlights them to me, I'll take a look and find someone with interests that I'd like to track. So I guess I'm increasing the asymetry in my network by following more and more people who aren't following me. So thanks Birdbrain for crafting a UX that has allowed me greater insight into my lil ole twitter network - you're helping me pull together a better, more interesting, richer network. Plus, I just love that lil twitter bird with the glasses and pencil! 

Yep. Still here. You people are just too smart for me to keep up sometimes. I've got hundreds of tabs open on three different browsers on at least 2 different computers. I'm synching bookmarks and open tabs, I'm sending myself text files with links in them that I haven't gotten to yet, I'm trying to get three different, very cool projects off the ground at work, I'm prepping for DevLearn 2010...phew...now I'm tired again.  So all that is just preface to say that yes, still here and I really do have to get disciplined again about blogging. It really is a different dynamic than twitter and there is something much more cathartic and helpful at aligning the big thoughts in the action of blogging than the 140 character medium (funny - remember when blogging was criticized because it wasn't 'long form'?)So enough whining - let's get back to some writing and deep diving.  

No, not the U2's Edge...the Edge is a group of free-range intellectuals - scientists, technologists, authors..and once a year - like American football Pro Bowl or maybe more like the Running of the Bulls, we get to watch these brain-powered jocks strut their stuff - returning mental kickoffs 102 yards and doing an end zone dance of Oppenheimer-like proportions. Its awesome stuff really - thought-provoking, challenging (sometimes just in terms of trying to master the vocabulary) but I like it because it forces us to push outside our normal bounds of how we think about things. The occasion for all this is  the annual Question that the Edge asks its members to answer. Some of the past questions include "What was the most important invention in the past 2,000 years and why?" also "What now?" ....one of my favorites was "what is your law?" The 2011 Questions is now out and its a good one: "WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?" Nice one right? I love this explanantion of a cognitive chunk: "James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate." Now look, there are a 164 responses to this question from some very impressive minds so don't rush over there thinking you're just going to gobble all this down. Take your time. Read one. Digest it. Roll it around in your head. Find your favorites. I like Don Tapscott's line about "Why don't schools and universities teach design thinking for thinking?" How about Roger Schank's admonition that "Some scientific concepts have been so ruined by our education system that it is necessary to explain about the ones that everyone thinks they know about when they really don't."  The point is that you could spend days here and maybe we should. I look at something like the Edge's Annual Question not so much as a compendium of finished thoughts but as a rich storehouse of seeds for future thought..brilliantly constructed seeds maybe even genetically modified ones but seeds nonetheless that maybe we can bring back to our particular professional pastures, plant, care for and see what grows. Enjoy. 

First place, please don't ever call anything a "learning object" in front of me. Not unless you're prepared to tell me what it is and how its different than any other digital object. So let's go with you just don't use it. Cool.  Second place, have you used Slide Rocket? Did you know that when you use it, when you upload a PPT presentation to Slide Rocket it strips all the images out and adds them to an Asset Library? Did I mention its automatic? Hunh. Weird. Sounds useful.  From the exfm page:  "Exfm turns the entire web into your personal music library. As you browse, exfm runs in the background indexing every MP3 file you come across, building a music library for you. exfm will continue to check the sites you've visited, adding new music for you to listen to every day. New in Version 2.0:You can now Note songs you love and they will be publicly shared on your profile page at ex.fm/YourName. You can also connect your account to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to both share songs on those sites as well as pull in shared songs from people you follow on those sites. "   So tell me campers, if somebody can do this for MP3s (WHOA! what if MP3s could be LEARNING OBJECTS? No way Mark, you're just talking crazy!) then why can't we create some mystical authoring tool (some would call it a Chrome extension), where you create a personalized authoring tool environment that grabs objects as you cruise around the Web and builds you a library on the fly? What if we could hook that tool to your Diigo RSS feed so we teach the Machine as we use it? Wow that would be cool and useful. But Mark, where would the Next Button go!?

OK so seriously. We've stopped using Learning Objects right? Cause they're about as real as mean unicorns. Good. Now, as an industry, let's get into some serious theft.  Saw this article in TechCrunch, about Google firing up chatbots again.  This time the Google bot is named Google Guru and is available to any chat service linking to Google Talk. So think about Paving the Cowpaths (srsly click this link). Look to where your people are already using tools, maybe as pedestrian as IM. Now think about deploying a chatbot as a PERFORMANCE SUPPORT TOOL or an EPSS or some other name that just means getting info that people need to them, when and where they need it. #DuhWinning A corporate chatbot, chiling as that may sound at first blush, could be a natural and non-threatening way for people to interact with a ton of information. Now tie that chatbot interaction back to the employee's profile in the LMS and...do I need to draw this out? OK....you've got a built-in, human-populated engine for the things they're looking to find out. Nice huh? I know.  So maybe Google (#irony) for "chatbots" and see what turns up...and maybe think about a tool that already is in someone's workflow/ecosystem/learnscape. ;-)

So let's just skip the part where I haven't blogged for months ok? I've been seeing innumerable and inevitable Top Ten Lists, Year-End reviews, Predictions, etc and I thought I wanted to do something different but I couldn't decide what. Yesterday though, I heard a prayer that put things in perspective for me. The line in the prayer that struck me was: "Ask much of us, expect much from us, enable much by us and encourage many through us..." I started thinking that I have seen some projects and some people this past year that have really done that and I wanted to talk about some of them here. I also want to make clear - these people are my heroes - they humble me - they put my problems in perspective - they remind me that we live in a larger world than the one we normally let ourselves see - they remind me that the problems we are dealing with (and by default, if you are reading this on a computer you own, in your own house or apartment where you enjoy reliable electricity and clean drinking water every time you turn on the tap, then you are living in the most privileged societies in the world) are largely of our making and that we have a ridiculous amount of power and agency in dealing with them. These folks are amazing (and they are in no particular order).   Kids Are Heroes: Don't think kids can make a difference? Don't think you can? Check out the actions these kids have taken to help everything from other kids, to NGOs to pets to the environment. Its just amazing what a little organization and giving people the tools they need can do to help them really reach out to others in need. When is the last time you or I raised $2300 in six weeks and sponsored 7 children in Uganda? No, really...when was it? For me, never. That's humbling. I also love this project because it makes me hopeful what the world will or could be like when the kids involved with this project grow up and take this experience with them.  Greyt Expectations: Racing Greyhounds can be retired from racing from 18 months to 5 years old and they can live to be 15 years old. These are dogs born and bred to be athletes, to perform for our entertainment and this group of fine people work incredibly hard to find good homes for these amazing animals. The kicker is that these animals are bred to not only be fast and fit, without a lot of the hereditary health problems that other breeds have, but also to be well-behaved, quiet, calm and are used to being handled by a lot of different people. They make ideal pets. You should see the set-up at Greyt Expectations - they get dogs who have come off the track sometimes the night before - and they work tirelessly to find these amazing creatures good homes.  The USO: I really don't know what needs to be said here. Not trying to be US-centric here (but that's where I live so that usually happens) but if you do live in the US, then while you may not support all of the political policies that involve the use of military force, you should support the men and women who go in harm's way on a daily basis for us and for our country's sake. True, there are a number of wonderful organizations that support our troops but this one is the grand-daddy...I remember walking through airports when I was a kid and seeing the USO clubs there. Look through some of the programs on their site, they include care packages, language training and even MEGS (Mobile Entertainment Gaming System) - yep, they provide fully-contained systems of XBoxs, PS3, Wiis to our troops to give them a break. So while I like the yellow "Support Our Troops" ribbon - how about a donation to the USO to actually do that? Charity: Water: Thirsty? Turn on your tap. Grab your BPA-free water bottle. Take a sip. Good right? What if that took three hours for you to do, if you could? Imagine that in Africa, people spend about 40 BILLION HOURS A YEAR just walking for water. BILLION. About 30,000 people die EVERY WEEK from unsafe drinking water. EVERY WEEK. Not month. Not year. Guess what? 90% of those deaths each week are kids under 5. $20 can provide one person with clean drinking water. $5000 can provide a village with water. How much was my last laptop? Yours? How much did we spend on 'stocking stuffers' or coffee or magazines? How much would it mean to you if you had no clean water and someone did something that provided it to you? If you are human and live on this planet - this impacts you. Don't like kids? Hate dogs? Opposed to all things military (including the brave men and women protecting you?)? Fine. How about a little love for humans? Read the founder's story and keep a dry eye. I dare you.  free rice: OK....so times are tight. I hear that. You still want to help though? Awesome. How about improving your vocabulary while feeding people? What? Yep. Head to free rice and start playing. Every right answer donates 10 grains of rice. Every wrong answer does nothing but makes you smarter. No cost. You get smarter. You help feed people. Why are you NOT playing on this site? Organize a team. How much time have you spent doing fantasy football this season? How about let's carve 1/10 of that time off to play this game and help feed people. I think that every conference should set aside one keynote session during the conference where everyone will just play Free Rice for an hour. Imagine the food that could be donated! Nothing But Nets: Can I borrow $10? Of course, thanks. Can you take that $10 and donate it so that a kid can go to sleep tonight without worrying about getting malaria from an insect bite? Can you think of anything as scary as wondering every night that when you go to sleep, you make wake up with a disease that is one of the leading killers of children in Africa? $10. That's it. How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many $10s is that? How many nets? How many kids sleeping safely? I want to say also that I love the work that LINGOs is doing and I applaud them for it and urge you to support them as well...I think its awesome to leverage the training industry's expertise to help the world. I'm not trying to start a competition either - except maybe for us to compete with ourselves - let's gamify our lives and see how many "Good Human" points we can ring up or how many "I provided clean water/food/nets/homes/support" badges that we can ring up. I know we have made some strides but these efforts and these people humble me. People are living and drinking water and eating because of their efforts - that is amazing, awesome and humbling.   So today, I'll play Free Rice and I'll help my son set up a team there for his middle school. I'll show him the Kids Are Heroes site too. I'll pet our greyhound. I'll look at the USO programs and charity:water and Nothing But Nets and see how I can leverage my social network to support those and other efforts. Those are my New Year's Resolutions. What are yours? I hope that a year from now, I can look back on 2012 and see how many malaria-fighting nets I've helped to donate or how many grains of rice I've won or much water I've helped to provide to people who are dying of thirst or how many of our brave, fighting men and women I've helped pass the time with MEGS (love the acronym :-)) - that would be an awesome - and humbling - 2012. 

YOU HEARD ABOUT FACEBOOK RIGHT???? $5BILLION IPO!!!!! You know what changed? Nothing. Darfur? Peace in Middle East? Clean drinking water to anybody else in Africa? Any fewer people in this country denied basic civil rights like being able to marry who they want to? Any fewer abused kids today? Nope. I absolutely mean to be a party pooper. Someone tell me what product got created here. How many sustainable jobs were created today? Did some already rich people get richer? Yep. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-FB although I will say, no other product on the web makes me feel as creeped out at times as FB. I also don't begrudge anyone at FB from the Zuckster on down for pulling down some big cash. I just want us to keep some perspective. We live in a world full of tremendous joys but also tremendous sadness. The Japanese tsunami. The earthquake in Haiti. The FB IPO impacted none of this. So as all the news feeds and tweets explode with the news of this momentous non-event, maybe we can spare some cycles to think about the Wounded Warrior program. The plight of those fighting for freedom in Syria. You know, the little things that never garner the same attention or interest as a 5 billion dollar IPO. ....and now, back to FarmVille <click click click>

Let me caveat this whole thing by saying this isn't a rant (well not entirely) but really a plea for conversation (more on Conversations coming soon)..... Like many, I've traveled an odd path to get where I am today. My undergraduate degree is in business/management. Case studies, accounting, finance, the works. Then something happened and instead of going on to get my MBA, I decided that I wanted to study history and anthropology so off to grad school. I'll never forget my first grad school seminar in history. All the other follks in the room had history undergrad degrees so I felt really out of my domain depth. That class was a M,W,F and on Monday the class would be assigned a topic along with a list of potential books on that topic. Come Friday, each student was to have prepared a 5x8 card (both sides) that contained a critique of whatever work they had selected. Not of the subject of that work but of the work itself. Historians refer to this as 'historiography.' "Furay and Salevouris (1988) define historiography as "the study of the way history has been and is written — the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."  So you read your book, you write your card and you show up on Friday and you have to defend your critique of the work to the rest of the class. I was nervous but when other people started going something became clear to me - these people might know more about history than me at the moment but no one had ever taught them how to argue a point, at least not in front of anyone. Clio however (the muse of history) is a demanding taskmaster. Soon enough my peers raised their game and we all came out of the class sharper than we had been.  That interaction, the discussion not just of subject matter but of how that subject matter was constructed, is I think critical to a field. It helps keep a field and its associated theorhetical base, sharp and current. What I am looking for now, is historiography's corollary in the instructional design field.  Where are the conferences or conference sessions that examine critically the canon upon which ISD as a field, rests? Where are the contrarians of Bloom, Gagne, Kirkpatrick who go after them not in an ad hominen way but in a way so that not only their conclusions and models are laid bare but also the methodology upon which those conclusions rely? I look at post like these (Vygotsky - the Lysenko of learning, Piaget - why teach this stuff?, Learning Styles Challenge -- Three-Year Update) from Donald Clark and Will Thalheimer and I want more. I want to know where this kind of critical inquiry is part of the ISD curriculum. I want to know where the great keynote speakers are speaking on this and what rooms their sessions are in. (another great one By Donald on "Don't Lecture Me") Give me some Socratic Method please! Why does this bother me so much? The same reason title like "The 7 Habits of so and so" bother me - are there really only 7? What was #8 and why did it get left out? When self-help speakers do that, its a problem on one level, when people do it in a field as incredibly important and potentially powerful as training, its orders of magnitude more important to be addressed. When someone puts forward a model expounding on the 9 Events then is your first reaction - why 9? That model precludes a discussion about #10 and it also precludes a discussion about why #6 is till in there when its clearly wrong (as example). 4 Levels of evaluation rules out both the 5th and 6th levels but also rules out the notion that maybe evaluation doesn''t break neatly into levels. I'm not saying oppose all models but I am saying that all models and their proponents should be called on regularly to defend themselves and not just queitly adopted  Therein lies I think a HUGE problem facing the training industry and the academic programs that support the education of ISD professionals. These models, rightly or wrongly, soundly designed or based on Flat Earth-level thinking, have not only been adopted but entire business models have been constructed around them. This makes change at the industry level incredibly hard. Add in the fact that entire text books and courses have been written incorporating these models and now change is made difficult at the academic level. This academic portion is even more insidious in a field where there is not an incredibly strong and vibrant sub-discipline of professional self-critique.  So now industry is locked in, academia is locked in, conferences are locked in and at best you have a small population of innovators and thinkers at the edge trying to affect change being resisted by an entire ecosystem. I mean really, look at this post by Will Thalheimer on the crap/fraud/intelelctual crime that is the marriage of Dale's Cone of Experience with percentages. This post came out in 2006 and yet I'd wager you'll find it in slide decks today being taught in conference sessions and classrooms as gospel. We must develop some sort of professional nervous system - some way to relay messages across our entire corporate body that these need to be expunged. One way to do that is to build a strong, independent model of self-inquiry and demand that the canon upon which our field rests, be sharp, current, defensible, based on sound methodloogy and research and we must not tolerate a creeping acquiescence of neatly numbered models into a field of such importance.  If I'm wrong or even if I am right - let's have a conversation about it. 

I think I have a Pinterest account. I may have pinned something at some time. Oh yeah, here it is....this is what I saw when I logged into Pinterest this morning....for some reason it thinks I'm VERY into aprons. Anyway, that's not the point (BTW I do have  HUGE apron collection ;-)). The point is I'm watching Pinterest explode and wondering what's up.  I'm also watching the birth and growth of visual resumes. I'm watching long-time visual people/expertise matchers like introNetworks provide in-depth integration with enterprise-grade social media platforms like Social Text. I'm looking at the 5 folders full of camera and photo apps on my iPhone. I follow hashtags like #INFOGRAPHIC and #INFOPORN. I already am a huge fan of Visual.ly and now thay are making infographic creation tools available. I've always thought that Dave Gray and his focus on the visual was spot on and I love his Marks and Meaning book.  Why am I watching? Just because I remain convinced that if you want to see what enterprise software /services are going to look like in 18-24 months (w/ some its already here, just not widely distributed ;-)) ...then you watch the consumer space. How will your automated keyword searching programs for resumes (easily one of the most de-humanizing uses of search ever) deal with visual resumes-which seem to be expressly made for consumption by PEOPLE? Will companies EVER EVER EVER EVER wise up and provide actual training for their people in how to produce quality visuals? Will we ever have such a demand that we'll just have to go ahead and clone Nancy Duarte? Remember when people thought that stuff like folksonomies and tagging and wikis and blogs and micro-blogging and activity streams and GAMES would NEVER get inside the corporate firewall? Well holy cow, even the venerable software frankenstein that is SharePoint is lurching in those directions. I dodn't want to get into it here about the bias of text over the image and how that has gone and is changing BUT, from where I sit (in the cheap seats).....All signs are pointing to the idea that the next generation of enterprise services/software will have large visual components-both on the production and consumption sides? Are you ready for your close-up?