I’m in cold San Jose this week attending Devlearn 2009. The first day keynote was by Andrew McAfee. He is the author of a recently published book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges. I’m not going to describe the subject of his talk; there are many blogs that have done that already (here and here). It was a nice talk and he gave many pointers. But he made no attempt to bridge the gap between Enterprise 2.0 and Learning 2.0. Or answer questions like ‘how Enterprise 2.0 can be used to leverage Learning 2.0?’ Maybe the breakout sessions were meant to do just that - and there were many, many sessions that had social media and especially Twitter in their agenda. This surprised me a lot, in a negative way.  I found that there is a very big hype on using social media for learning. Many are talking about it and there seems to be a divide between those who have experimented with it or have a program for it and those who are just trying to grapple with their day-to-day learning challenges. The 2.0ers feel elevated, hip, trendy and scoff at the those who are still trying to make the best of taxpayer or shareholder money by being conservative and seeking out what works. But all of this talk on social media I heard had a lot to say about the media part but very little on the learning part. They are still advocating the creating and access to content with very little attention on why this is being done and how is it going to help learning and improve performance in the long run. The systems view I think is missing here. The mantra seems to be "get social and you’ll learn". This has a lot to say about the maturity of Learning 2.0. Talking about maturity, there were many talks that were just blasts from the past - "How to grab attention", "How to use video effectively", etc. All I can say is, WOW! Here is my frank opinion on the first day - the talks did not excite me but they did give me a good picture of the e-learning landscape in the US. It shows me what people are busy with and what they are experimenting with and what we can expect to see in the next few years. The total experience is more than the sum of the parts I guess. But I can tell you what excited me - meeting Jay Cross. Here we are, two individuals on opposite sides of the planet, engrossed in each other’s work for over 10 years but never having met face-to-face. Then I finally see him and what a joy it was.

I’ve written a new article at PebbleRoad, The culture of collaboration and what it means for your intranet. Here’s my punch line: the adoption or participation you’re going to get on your intranet is directly related to the culture of collaboration that exists in the organisation. Having the right collaboration technology does play a part, but only as a sidekick to the culture of collaboration.

Brilliant article by NPR on Atul Gawande’s new book, The Checklist Manifesto. Gawande has written an entire book on how checklist and other reminders help in complex situations. Here is a good quote: There was about 80 percent who thought that this was something they wanted to continue to use. But 20 percent remained strongly against it. They said, ‘This is a waste of my time, I don’t think it makes any difference.’ And then we asked them, ‘If you were to have an operation, would you want the checklist?’ Ninety-four percent wanted the checklist." I’m waiting to read Gawande’s new book but right now I’m in the middle of another book that talks about the same checklist culture from a very different angle. This book titled Streetlights and Shadows and is written by the brilliant Gary Klein. Both Klein and Gawande are my favourite authors. I’ve read all their previous books. So, this is interesting for me to see how their worlds collide. In his book, Klein spends an entire chapter debunking the use of checklists in complex scenarios. His idea is that checklists are wonderful in well-structured and predictive environments and do not work that well in ill-structured and unpredictable environments. Here’s the question I want answered when I start reading Gawande’s book: are the checklists just for mechanical tasks or are they for complex procedures? The surgical safety checklist mentioned in the article looks quite general. Maybe that is the point: even the ‘general’ stuff in surgery can lead to a life or death situation.

Kristina Halvorson has put up an interesting diagram that shows how the different roles in a we project team relate to one another.

A wonderful list of shortcuts and techniques to help out with common tasks.

When will this infection catch on worldwide? These are the small pockets of hope that we have left. Brilliant stuff Kiran!

From Noupe. Good starting points to get more on IA and infographics. (via Infodesign)

John Hagel and John Seely Brown talk about Creation Spaces - "places where individuals and teams interact and collaborate within a broader learning ecology so that performance accelerates." They go on to discuss how these spaces are different from the traditional KM systems: "Knowledge management traditionally has focused on capturing knowledge that already exists within the firm — its systems rarely extend beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. Creation spaces instead focus on mobilizing and focusing participants across all institutional boundaries."

Interesting post on Lawrence Lessig’s views on the Google book deal. "By breaking up books into different licensable parts, Lessig fears that we are going to encounter the same problem with books that we do today with film. He gives the example of documentary films which are sometimes nearly impossible to restore or preserve in digital form because the rights to every song and clip of archive footage need to be cleared again. This is an artifact of the types of licensing contracts that became the norm for film, where each constituent part of a work carries its own copyrights into perpetuity, making it more difficult down the road to update into digital form or pass along as a piece of shared culture. Up until now, books for the most part are treated as one single work."

A good read on how storytelling can unite the different aspects of the user experience such as brining different perspectives together, defining the goal or defining the user (personas). However, there is another benefit that the article briefly touches upon and that is defining the journey (scenarios). It’s one thing to define a user, but a whole different perspective when you chart out the journey of this user accomplishing goals and tasks.