Jane Hart’s been collecting reasons why organizations should not ban social media.  I wanted to contribute but didn’t think I could match contributors like Jack Vinson, Harold Jarche, or Jane herself. As it happens, that glover’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon anticipated the kinds of objections Jane had in mind.  What follows are some notions.  They’re not definitive or sure-fire.  In fact, "they are yet but ear-kissing arguments" (King Lear). There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.(Hamlet) Will, living in an age of social ferment, was pragmatic.  Yes, you’re accustomed to making your connections in an organization the way your boss (or your boss’s father) did. I have no doubt whatsoever that 1890s-era managers fretted and fulminated over the pointlessness of Mr. Bell’s contraption. We will draw the curtain and show you the picture.(Twelfth Night) Social media make it possible to provide…well, a fuller picture.  Not just in the sense of images more easily created, shared, and modified, but in the combination of images with other representations. By comparison, it’s really hard to fax a video. I’m not saying images will guarantee you’ll communicate better.  (Two words: clip art.)  But sometimes less (text) is more (meaning), and social media can help carry some of your intended meaning in ways more traditional vehicles can’t. An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.(Richard III) Here I see advice both for the organization and for the individual.  Speed’s vital: get what you have or what you need, as quickly as you can.  Informal consultation via messaging (Yammer, Twitter, instant messaging); knowledge collection and sharing through vehicles like wikis. "Plainly told" can also mean "write so you make sense."  I posted last year about the Washington DC Metro system’s stumbling efforts on Twitter.  The tweets seemed written by a committee, few of whom actually used Twitter.  They’ve gotten somewhat better (see here), though 6 of the 100 most recent tweets were truncated. (If you’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half and haven’t figured out the 140-character limit, you need to be a bit more reflective.  And maybe when there’s a delay, say "both ways" instead of "in both directions," trusting that train riders will get the message.) Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.(Twelfth Night) Speaking of both directions, Will has in mind the idea of fans, friends, and followers.  Rather than worrying about your own status (as an individual or as an organization), focus on participating in the communities around you.  Share stuff.  Offer value.  Give credit.  Link to others.  Spread the wealth. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.(As You Like It) One of the tendencies with social networking is that formal status, credentialization, and the like matter less than they used to.  Not that they’re irrelevant: if someone wants to know about nanoscience, then Andrew Maynard is a better starting point than I am. But you know from ordinary life that very little that’s useful derives from the status or the credential itself.  No matter how extensive someone’s expertise is, I find it’s good to see that he or she recognizes its limits.  As Matt Ridley said of science, I think useful knowledge is like "a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surrounds us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view." Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.(Measure for Measure) In my experience, it’s private organizations rather than government that trumpet the value of entrepreneurial thinking, agility, openness to new trends — but it wasn’t the government that kept building Chevy Cavaliers, that fought against home video recording, or that shoehorns all training into the lecture-hall, butts-in-seats model. Yes, there’s a fear that people will waste time on Facebook or Twitter.  That’s because some people will, just as some people use March Madness as an excuse to do nothing all all on the job but yak about brackets and bubbles. Another side of this: some organizations (public and private alike) are so deeply baptized in the Church of Best Practice that the notion of trying something for themselves is heresy.  I mean, if you’re a pharmaceutical company, might it not be better for you to experiment with social media in a pharma context than to wait till Business Week features a manufacturer’s experience which you’ll then try cramming down the throats of your people? The end crowns all, and that old common arbitrator, Time, will one day end it.(Troilus and Cressida) One real shortcoming of social media — as of software generally — is that you can’t rely on it for the long term.  Google Wave, announced at the end of May 2009, is essentially dead.  Facebook may bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, but so did AOL in its time, and CompuServ before that. So what Shakespeare’s saying here is, "get thou a grip."  If you’ve never used a word processor, then learning one is a real challenge.  But once you’ve learned one, you’ve able to conceptually handle another one as your company switches from WordStar to WordPerfect to Word to Google Docs. No, those aren’t the same.  There are significant differences, but there’s enough at the core to help you cope till you figure the rest out. As Will might have said if there’d been mayonnaise jars in his time, "Keep cool.  Don’t freeze." To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.(The Winter’s Tale) This idea flows from the previous ones.  The ease and informality of connections make it possible to go where you hadn’t imagined you’d like to go.  You get exposed to other viewpoints, to experiments in progress, to the cognitive coalface being worked in other parts of the organization. Those things are hard to do with the monthly newsletter and Human Resource’s weekly email blast.   (And, by the way, if you’re one of the people perpetrating that last item: whatever made you think "blast" was something that’d have a positive connotation for the recipients?) Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.(Much Ado About Nothing) In other words, early adopters, calm down.  Show, don’t tell.  Consider your audience.  Nobody (except maybe you) wants to be using the newest Bright Shiny Object.  Most people want to be getting stuff accomplished, and maybe there’s a way your BSO can help that. In a similar vein, O grizzled veteran with deep experience (including you, over there, who’ve been on Twitter for three months now):  don’t bite the newbies.  You weren’t born with XHTML coded into your DNA, either. This above all: to thine own self be true.And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.(Hamlet) Poor Polonius gets a bad rap.  Even if he was a windbag, at least here the bag’s wafting along some good advice. First: social media was created to serve the individual or organization, not the other way around.  Using these tools will make you…well, yourself, a person who happens to be using them. Which is why, if you’re prone to be a jerk, people tend to figure that out whether they encounter you in meetings,  in email, or on Twitter.  (The 140-character limit might help minimize that, but I have my doubts.) Similarly, if you’re open to new things, if you’re someone who reflects on and shares what you’ve been doing, if you’re participating in spheres wider than your hatband, then social media tools help you to be yourself, and become more like yourself.  

Tom Fox, in the Washington Post’s Federal Coach column, provides some advice for managers in the federal government who oversee younger workers.  Fox holds that "the best leaders recognize that potential talent is nurtured by developing expertise, executive skills and solid judgment, along with providing constant feedback and opportunities for personal growth." The advice may be obvious, but it’s also pertinent: Connect the dots between now and the future. Or, help the less-experienced worker see how current responsibilities fit into a larger picture that makes sense for that worker. Encourage an apprenticeship mindset. A real leader will know that the root of "apprentice" means "to learn," not "to do all the scutwork." Reinforce lessons learned through constant feedback. It’s true that learning can happen anytime.  You can increase the likelihood of its happening by helping your staff to reflect, reprocess, question, and re-express what they’ve been doing and the results that have followed. All of which reminded me of the skillful approach to coaching that’s wrapped in the sometimes flashy, sometimes sly trappings of What Not to Wear. If you haven’t seen this TLC program: in each episode, fashion consultants Stacy London and Clinton Kelly critique the clothing choices of someone whose family or friends nominated them for this, um, performance review. As with many "reality" shows, WNTW has a certain OMG appeal.  Worldly folks like you and me would never dress as poorly or as blindly as the folks on the program, right? I’ve watched many episodes (sometimes as an antidote after watching an especially grim movie).  Beneath the apparently lightweight notion of focusing so intensely on fashion, Stacy and Clinton pay a lot of attention to helping the individual focus productively on goals. Stacy: We don’t want you to label yourself just as a mom. Lori: But my daughter is my priority. * * * Lori: If you’re trying to change my distorted version of what I look like with form-fitted clothes, you’re not helping with these styles. Period. Clinton:  You do not have a crazy distorted body, a weird body shape. You have your own body shape. WNTW follows a set pattern.  I was thinking about this pattern as a model for helping inexperienced people start figuring out an area of complexity.  Sort of a well-dressed version of complex learning. You can think of the nominated-by-friends aspect as just part of the randomness of the workplace.  We don’t always get to choose our learning opportunities.  Sometimes they show up dressed as crummy assignments, annoying coworkers, or the departure of a favorite boss. Some of the standard elements in a What Not to Wear episode: The individual models 3 of her own outfits and explains why she likes them-while surrounded by mirrors. Clinton and Stacy create 3 new outfits that demonstrate fashion  rules suited to the individual. The hosts ritually toss out most (or all) of the person’s old wardrobe. The person goes shopping solo, armed with the new rules (and a $5,000 credit card from the program). Invariably, Clinton and Stacy intervene to deal with poor choices from Day 1′s shopping, and to help with Day 2′s. A hair stylist and makeup consultant try"reframing in their areas of expertise. The individual returns home for a reveal with family and friends. Whatever you think of fashion, you have to admire the way the gurus guide the individual into the (typically strange) word of style with mindfulness. They’ll make outrageous comments about the old wardrobe, but they’re also respectful of the individual, her life, and her career.  I’ve seen them dealing with a professional witch (from Salem, Massachusetts, no less), an Episcopal priest, a dreadlocked "alternative model," and a cancer survivor who’d had a double mastectomy. Looking past the show’s structure, you find: Rules of thumb (with the why). If you’re small-statured, coats and blazers that fall just above the hip are an ideal length; otherwise, you run the risk of a longer coat length distorting your proportions. New approaches gives as experience shared. Don’t despair if the first four or five pairs of pants you try on don’t fit the way you want them to - sometimes you have to kiss a lot of jeans frogs before you find your denim prince. Simplified cognitive maps (the mannequin outfits and the rules they exemplify). Opportunity to apply basic rules Feedback on that application in a collaborative setting From time to time, WNTW does a "where are they now?" show, reconnecting with people who’ve been on the show.  I suspect these are less interesting to the show’s audience (or there’d be more 6-months-later episode). I’m sure it’s tough for the individuals to maintain or even heighten their new style awareness when in their old settings.  The answer, though, isn’t requiring Stacy and Clinton Refresher Training.  Instead of a single answer, I’d say there are many possible ways for the person to adapt to real life, continue strengthening newfound skills, and to avoid falling back into stretchy sweats and rock-concert T shirts. In terms of your professional development, is that your standard outfit?  I don’t mean on your body, necessarily.  How are you dressing your mindset?

As an undergraduate, I had a terrific time swimming way over my head in a course on modern sociological thought.  Among other things, we read Talcott Parsons, which is like getting mugged by a noun gang.  I thought I understood what he meant by specific relationships versus diffuse ones, so when Dr. Bauder asked for an example of the latter, I said, "Student and teacher."  (I mean, it should be a free exchange, right?) Her reply: "Okay.  What are you doing Saturday night?" Being specific takes more work To make the point clear: in a specific relationship, it’s the roles that are specific, and you more or less have to justify including things that don’t fit those roles.  You might shoot the breeze with the grocery store cashier about the weather, or the freshness of the strawberries, but ordinarily you don’t ask about his personal life. In a diffuse relationship, on the other hand, you have to justify leaving things out.  "You walked right past me and didn’t say a word.  What’s up?" Many of my professional connections (and some personal ones) are now virtual.  I don’t work in an office; I tend not to have long-term projects.  I don’t have everyday, flesh-and-blood colleagues.  So I need to cultivate my virtual connections: strengthen the existing ones, get the new ones get well rooted. In the physical workplace, most of your relationships are specific and often defined by various sorts of proximity.  You’re physically close.  You’re organizationally close (same team, same boss, same project, same department).  Or you what I think of as explicit proximity (relative position based on rank) and tacit proximity (based on relative depth of expertise). As the distance increased (other floors, other departments, other cities), you have to work harder to establish and maintain good working relationships.  People don’t know you. Reducing friction in your connections When you cultivate relationships in the virtual workplace, you’re using different tools to increase proximity.  For a long time, we’ve had workplace tools to reduce physical distance and collapse time-zone distance.  Now we’ve got greater (and more frequent) distance, but also more powerful tools. One concept that’s important to me, as someone who typically works on his own, is the virtual cube-mate.  I like being able to stick my hear around a metaphorical partition to say, "Listen to this."  Or "Do you know…?"  Or "Here we go again." But reducing virtual distance doesn’t mean that distance isn’t there.  And it doesn’t mean your in-person, interpersonal skill transfers to the virtual world.   As the Russian proverb says, your elbow is close, but it’s hard to bite. I have a pet phrase for asides and parenthetical remarks I’ll make, especially in a one-to-one exchange like an instant-message conversation or a series of direct messages on Twitter: "conversation insurance."  Things I do or say because: I want to make myself clear (or clearer). I want to avoid misunderstanding. I’m trying to be more like myself. Some of that’s just common sense (though common sense tells lots of people the earth is flat).  For instance, "I’m not disputing what you’re saying. I just think X applies as well…"  You go a little further because your message is going further. Some of it, though, is simply engaging long enough (in some complex combination of individual units and elapsed time) that both parties are better able to form a pattern for the other that’s not a bad approximation of face-to-face.  Which, as I think about exchanges over the past two or three days, isn’t so much conversation insurance as connection oil. I don’t know that there are Ten Quick Tips for this, which is too bad; I could have a workshop.  I do have a couple of notions: Walk, don’t run. Trying to connect closely with everyone you know (and everything they know) just makes you one of those LinkedIn Lotharios, the kind of person in whom networking seems like an infectious disease. Assume good faith. This guideline for Wikipedia editors encourages people to assume that others are trying to help, not hurt. Don’t drive crossways in the parking lot. That was advice from a colleague to his new-driver sons: when you’re at the mall, always drive along the "roads" up and down the parking lot.  Don’t go cutting across the lanes because there’s an opening.  Other drivers may not expect you. That last point is why I now use emoticons — at least on Twitter. They’re conventions, not moral failings I’ve been online a long time.  I’ve never cared for abbreviations like IMHO, YMMV, and so on.  I have a theory that each time someone types LOL, they lose a neuron.  So emoticons ( or, even worse, "smilies" ) made me shudder. But… as I did online text-chat in Second Life, in French, I worried that my humor (or attempts at it) would be misunderstood.  So I’d add emoticons I saw my francophone friends using.  It hardly hurt at all, and people got to know me. Likewise on Twitter — especially if I’m making a public comment to someone I don’t know well.  It’s easy to forget, if you’re only thinking of your chosen network, that not everyone knows you as well as you might think (or wish).  I can joke around with some people, but virtual passersby might not understand.  So an emoticon, or a few drops of some other form of connection oil, helps reduce the potential friction. Online presence is a kind of invitation, but you have to work at figuring out what the invitation means for you.  Sometimes, as with what I call book blogs — HotNewBook.com, set up mainly to promote Hot New Book.  Those are invitations to come in, browse, and buy.  The author probably doesn’t have a lot of time to interact with everyone who’d like to interact with him. Otherwise, if people are active on social sites, you have to work out how to interact with them.  In other words, it’s just like real life, except the conversation stops if your power goes out. (I’d like to thank Chris, Dick, Heather, Jane, Kevin, Sahana, and Simon, whose conversations with me this week reinforced for me the value of virtual connections.) My relationship images are based on this CC-licensed image by Doha Sam / Sam Agnew.CC-licensed cube-mate photo by el frijole.

Are you in a corporate training environment? Dick Carlson in his mild-manner way muses on how learners feel about training (Learner Feedback? You Can’t STAND Learner Feedback!). Dick and I have some differences — I think dogs ought to have noses that they themselves can see — but not in this area.  The core of Dick’s post is the ultimate assessment: can you now accomplish whatever this training was supposed to equip you to accomplish? (Yes, that does mean "that you couldn’t accomplish before due to a lack of skill or knowledge."  Don’t be cute.) Because — if we start with a true skill deficit that prevented you from producing worthwhile results — that’s vastly more important than whether the training fit your purported learning style, whether the ratio of graphics to text was in a given range, and whether the person helping you called herself a trainer, a teacher, a facilitator, a coach, or the Bluemantle Pursuivant. If you need to learn how to recover from an airplane stall or how to control paragraph borders through a class in CSS, learning assessment comes down to two words: show me. With all that, I do think that how the learner feels about what’s going on does  influence the learning situation.  I just want to make clear: that’s very different from saying that those feelings matter in terms of assessing the learning. High profile?  You bet your assessment. I was once in charge of instructor training and evaluation for an enormous, multi-year training project.  In the final phase, we trained over 2,000 sales reps to use a laptop-based, custom application.  90% of the them had never used a personal computer. Which was a drawback: the client decided that as long as the sales reps were coming for training on the custom application, we should "take advantage of the opportunity" to teach them email. And word processing.  And spreadsheets.  And a presentation package.  And connection to two different mainframe applications using simple, friendly 3270 emulation software. In a total of five days (one 3-day session, a 2-day follow-on one month later). Our client training group was half a dozen people, so we hired some 30 contractors and trained them as instructors.  I mention the contractors because we needed a high degree of consistency in the training.  When a group of sales reps returned for Session 2, we needed to be confident that they’d mastered the skills in Session 1. (If the informal learning zealots knew how we electrified the fences within which the instructors could improvise, they’d have more conniptions than a social media guru who discovered her iPhone is really a Palm Pre in drag.) We used a relentlessly hands-on approach with lots of coaching, as well as "keep quiet and make them think" guidance for the instructor.  The skills focused on important real-world tasks, not power-user trivia: open an account.  Cancel an order.  Add a new contract. We conducted nearly 600 classroom-days of training, and we had the participants completed end-of-day feedback after 80% of them.  I never pretended this was a learning assessment.  I’m not sure it was an assessment at all, though we might have called the summary an assessment, because our client liked that kind of thing.  We had 10 or so questions with a 1-to-4 scale and a few Goldilocks questions ( "too slow / too fast / just right" ), as well as space for freeform comments. Why bother? I made the analogy with checking vital signs at the doctor’s or in the hospital.  Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate aren’t conclusive, but they help point the way to possible problems, so you can work on identifying causes and solutions. So if we asked how well someone felt she could transmit her sales calls, we knew about the drawbacks of self-reported date.  And we had an instructor who observed the transmit exercise.  We were looking for an indication that on the whole, class by class, participants felt they could do thist. (Over time, we found that when this self-reporting fell below about 3 on the four-point scale, it was nearly always due to… let’s say, opportunity for the instructor to improve.) When we asked the Goldilocks question about pace, it wasn’t because we believed they knew more about pacing than we did.  We wanted to hear how they felt about the pace.  And if the reported score drifted significantly toward "too fast" or "too slow," we’d decide to check further.   (2,204 Session 1 evaluations, by the way, put pace at 3.2, where 1 was "too slow" and 5 was "too fast." ) Naturally, to keep in good standing with the National Association for Smile-Sheet Usage, we had free-form comments as well.  We asked "what did you like best?" and "What did you like least?"  (In earlier phases of this project, we asked them to list three things they liked and three they didn’t.  Almost no one listed three.  When we let them decide for themselves what they wanted to list, the total number per 100 replies went up. ) Early in the project, our client services team sat around one evening, pulling out some of the comment sheets and reading them aloud.  It was my boss at the time who found this gem, under "what did you like best?" My instructor made me feel safe to be dumb. Everybody laughed.  Then everybody smiled.  And then everybody realized we had a new vision of what success in our project would mean. We wanted the learners to feel safe to be dumb.  Safe to ask questions about things they didn’t understand.  Safe to be puzzled.  Because if they felt safe, they felt comfortable in asking for help.  And if they felt comfortable asking, that meant they felt pretty sure that we could help them to learn what they needed to learn. What about weaving their feedback into the instructional design?  In general, newcomers to a field don’t know much about that field, which means they’re not especially well equipped to figure out optimal ways to learn. Please note: I am not at all saying newcomers can’t make decisions about their own learning.  In fact, I think they should make ‘em.  In a situation like this, though, my client wasn’t the individual learner.  It was (fictionally named) Caesar International, and it had thousands of people who needed to learn to apply a new sales-force system as efficiently as possible. Mainly procedural skills.  Low familiarity with computers, let alone these particular applications.  High degree of apprehension. (By the way, Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb online eight months after our project ended, so don’t go all social-media Monday-morning-quarterback on me.) I felt, and still feel, that our design was good.  So did the Caesar brass: within six months of the end of the project, a nearly 25% increase in market share for Caesar’s #1 product, and the honchos said that resulted from successfully training the reps to use the new sales software on the job. When you feel safe to be dumb, you don’t stay dumb long. CC-licensed images:Yes / no assessment by nidhug (Morten Wulff)."Cover-the-content" adapted from this photo by antwerpenR (Roger Price).  

Disclosure: I grew up in Detroit (and I don’t mean Livonia, let alone Auburn Hills).  My dad was an auto worker (and so was I, for one summer).  People back there say things like "Chrysler’s is doing better," using the possessive even when the company is the subject of the sentence. Well, Ford’s is doing well, too.  Not just in car sales, though those are on the uptick.  I’m thinking of the Ford Motor Company digital participation guidelines just posted at Scribd.  Like any large corporate, Ford doubtless has lots and lots of text somewhere, but these guidelines are a great example of sensible policy to guide employees who are using social media. You really ought to read the whole thing for yourself, but I’m going to summarize and comment here. Be honest about who you are. The gist: when your online conversations relates to our business or industry, identify yourself as working for Ford Motor Company.  Say who you are without giving out detailed information. Not too much to ask in any conversation. Make it clear that your views are your own. Include the following somewhere in every social media profile: "I work at Ford, but this is my own opinion and is not the opinion of Ford Motor Company." "Somewhere in the profile" isn’t an onerous requirement. For nearly 10 years, in one online forum, my signature line concluded with "My opinions, not GE’s."  In case people weren’t sure. Mind your manners. Treat coworkers, other personnel, customer, competitions, the company, and yourself with respect.  Don’t post offensive, demeaning, or inappropriate comments.  Respectfully withdraw from discussions that go off-topic or become profane. I’ve seen lots of discussion about how the immediacy (and physical safety) of the Internet encourage people to be… more than assertive, let’s say.  Good for attention, not so good for reputation.  At least not positive reputation. Use your common sense. Keep certain business-related topics confidential.  If you’re talking about the company or the industry, focus on matters of public record.  Don’t divulge non-public company information, or personal information about others. Remember: what happens online, stays online. "Search engines and other technologies make it virtually impossible to take something back.  Be sure you mean what you say, and say what you mean." Also, consider everything you post online the same as posting to a physical bulletin board or submitting a letter to a newspaper.  Assume that reporters, competitors, and your boss will be able to read it. Anyone who’s been online for more than three months knows this.  It’s not bad to recall it, though. * * * If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, you know that’s not the whole of it.  The guidelines tell you want to do about company intellectual property, about vehicle or repair concerns, about dealer issues.  And if you’re unsure, ask the corporate communications or legal staff for advice. Notice: there’s nobody you have to check with and ask if you can participate in arenas like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.  The document says, "we have advised our personnel to observe these guidelines when participating in an online conversation regarding Ford or the automotive industry."

I’ve always looked at math as a tool to be mastered and wielded rather than subject matter to be absorbed. - Steven Wittens That remark on Wittens’ blog is a worthwhile viewpoint for a discussion today on Twitter about what we mean by behavior change and learning.  But let me backtrack a bit: When my son was younger — when a computer weighed nearly as much as he did — he got interested in programming.  After a while he could create startling graphics via ray-tracing, though at the time our home computer was so slow he’d start the process before going to bed, and check in the morning to see if it was done. I remember this passion of his, and a related one, when Stephen Downes led me to a 1K demo by Steven Wittens.  A 1K demo is a program of no more than 1,024 bytes, done as a tour de force. You can find lots of demo contests, with lots of prizes, but the real rewards seem to be (1) "I did it!" and (2) bragging rights. Which aren’t bad reinforcers to learning. I don’t know anything about creating a demo, but I do know animated, focused discussion when I see it.  I can usually tell good explanation from bad, and Witten’s description of his own work is admirable. While [generating all data on the fly to save space] might seem like a black art, often it just comes down to clever use of (high school) math… Unlike the actual 1K demo, the code snippets here will feature legible spacing and descriptive variable names. He explains initialization (how the demo starts) in two sentences, and then uses bullets to introduce the four main parts: activating the wires, making them visible, coloring them, and animating the camera. You can read the explanation for yourself.  I enjoyed the addendum: After seeing the other demos in the contest, I wasn’t so sure about my entry, so I started working on a version 2. The main difference is the addition of glowy light beams around the object. As you might suspect, I’m cheating massively here: rather than do physically correct light scattering calculations, I’m just using a 2D effect. Thankfully it comes out looking great. Essentially, I take the rendered image, and process it in a second Canvas that is hidden. This new image is then layered on the original. So, whaddya think? From my son’s experience and from the comments on Wittens’s blog, I’d say there’s a lot of informal, choose-your-path, get-into-it learning in the demo world.  Note what some of the (currently) 32 comments say: I always wanted to start learning more about this, but haven’t found any source for explanation. I like the step-by-step explanation that you have since it goes into the "why" any just not here’s my code. By the way, do you have any recommends for books into this topic? I  just wanted to chime in with another big "Thank you!" for taking the time to write this up. Like the other commenters, I’ve long been fascinated and mystified by some of these techniques, and your explanations are brilliant and accessible. I liked this demo so much that I took some time off my working day to port it to Flash, hoping to learn the internals of it and how it’s done… I got something 90% similar to the JS version.Although I was able to port the code line-to-line, I couldn’t understand many parts of it. I tried to look for some commenting somewhere on the net without results. So you can imagine how cool this article is to me! If anyone’s interested in having this version (AS2) please let me know. (Wittens, responding to a commenter:) I know there are still opportunities for shortening it by shaving off a few bytes here and there. But I find the problem in these challenges is rarely one byte. It’s usually 200-300 bytes over the limit that you have to simply throw away and replace with something much smaller and equally good. I would LOVE to see this as an audio visualizer. I made the visualizer on indieed.com, check out a song to see it. It’s nowhere NEAR as awesome as this.Would you be willing to sell a tweaked version of this to indieed (its my company) as our default visualizer for our player?Please email me, I’m quite impressed. There’s a long and very technical comment with suggested improvements from Jason Knight, with a calm if sly reply from Wittens: "Be careful about optimizing blindly…you added 36 characters to save 15."  And near the end end, after someone’s created a Flash version, other people start offering ways to improve that. Learning and worth At first, I thought of that last comment as some serious summative evaluation: "I want to buy this thing you made."  In a way, thought, all the comments are.  And this is how learning really happens: you work away at something, you search for ways to achieve your goal (or maybe redefine it), and you work at the thing again until you produce a result. Nearly all my clients have been large organizations, and their traditional models don’t always take in this reality.  Lots of people have said for a long time that talking isn’t teaching and that listening isn’t learning.  A misplaced emphasis on efficiency, often unmoored from effectiveness, tempts managers (and, let’s face it, training departments) to a throughput model. CC-licensed ray-tracing image by Susam Pal.

Once upon a time — the time of the first-century poet Juvenal — the phrase black swan implied something that didn’t exist.  More recently, the black swan theory refers either to highly improbable things, or to outliers with an outsized influence on events. Of course, if you had lived in western Australia before the arrival of Europeans, black swans would have been the only ones you’d ever heard of. Which simply says most people go with what they know. I’ve seen something of this in online discussions about the world of work.  If all your virtual dealings are with consultants, academics, freelancers, and and the folks who contract with them, you can easily get the impression everyone’s working independently. Even though I’m a consultant myself, I’m skeptical about that broad a generalization.  So I’m revisiting something I wrote about more than three years ago: who works where (or, who’s an employee and who’s not)? I’m getting this information from various business and non-employer statistics published by the U.S. Small Business Administration. In 2008, there were 21.4 million non-employers in the U.S.  Their total receipts were $963 billion, or roughly $45,000 per firm. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a non-employer is an organization with no paid employees, with $1,000 in business receipts, and subject to federal income tax.  (For some reason, a non-employer in the construction industry needs only $1 in receipts to be counted.) In 2007, there were 120 million employees working at 6 million firms.  Total receipts were $29.8 trillion. Certainly with the economic downturn since 2007, those figures have changed, but I doubt they’ve changed that much.  Even if every single non-employer were a unique individual, and even if none of the non-employers also had a job working for someone else, 120 out of 141 million people in the U.S. were employees.  And, as the Census Bureau says, "Most non-employers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income." I wondered where all those non-employers worked.    Here’s a breakdown by number of non-employer firms — in other words, the fields where you’d find these folks: Professional, scientific, technical services: 3 million Construction: 2.5 million Real estate, rental, leasing: 2.1 million Retail trade: 1.9 million "Store and non-store" retail — the latter would include things like catalog and home-based sales Other services: 3 million A catchall taking in everything from equipment repair to dating services to pet care Four of these sectors (construction, real estate, retail, and "other services") account for almost half of all non-employers.  Though perhaps the numbers would look different if the Census Bureau had a category for "social media expert." Meanwhile, back where you find 120,000,000 people: 5.1% of employees work for firms having 0 - 5 employees. The zero apparently takes in seasonal work when the work’s out of season. 30.3% of employees work for firms having 5 - 99 employees. 14.2% work for firms with 100 - 499 employees. 5.2% work for first with 500 - 999 employees 12.4% work for firms having 1,000 - 4,999 employees. 32.7% work for firms with 5,000 or more employees All this to demonstrate that most Americans who work, work for someone else.  And of the 120 million who are employees, nearly half work for firms with at least 1,000 employees. I don’t have a big conclusion to finish this off with a flourish.  I just think this kind of information helps set in context some workplace learning and performance-improvement issues. CC-licensed image of a black swan by specksinsd.

Last April, about six months after my dad died at the age of 96, I met someone whose own father had passed away at 97.  I said something about how, when a family member’s over 90, you always have an unspoken awareness of their mortality. She agreed, but added that for her, there was also a feeling that her father had always been there and would always be.  Not a logical feeling, but a true one.  When my grandmother died, two years after my grandfather, I remember my dad saying, "Now I’m an orphan."  He was 59. All my siblings, as well as my mother, live in metro Detroit.  All of us went to Nova Scotia last month. The main purpose: to have a memorial mass for those who couldn’t come to Michigan for his funeral, to celebrate Dad’s life, and to bury his ashes in his beloved Cape Breton. I find I don’t have a lot of patience with people who talk about reaching closure as if it’s a stop on the subway.  I suppose they mean well, but I can’t help hearing an implied timetable, a hint that you should define some point and then get off the emotional train. No, when I say "closure," I mean a kind of rethinking.  It’s figuring out how to continue your relationship with the person who’s died - and fitting that with your other relationships. I’m managing.  I couldn’t say when, but one day, a few months after Dad died, I had been feeling sad about his absence from some event taking place.  I stopped and asked myself what was going on. The feeling cleared itself up:  "He would have hated to miss this." And then he was there: I could picture him sitting the way he did in his last few years. Often quiet because of his growing deafness and fading vision; bubbling and beaming when someone sat close enough to engage with him. I don’t idealize him.  He wasn’t the best dad in the history of the world; he was simply the best one I had.  The memorial service down home helped me see him through the eyes of old family friends, of cousins and second cousins and their children.  Unlike other family names in that small place — the local paper once had five editors, all named Macdonald — for a long time there was only one family in town named Ferguson. And the people who gathered at Stella Maris church on a warm Saturday in July are working on the latest chapter in their relationship with the one Hughie Ferguson they’d known all their lives.  

Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning has a post about using games to assess learning, and she addresses both opportunities and problems. Games are a natural environment for assessment…in essence, they are assessing your performance just by nature of the game structure itself. Unless, of course, there aren’t clear success metrics and you "win" by collecting more and more meaningless stuff (like Farmville)…but that’s a whole other topic. So let’s assume there are success metrics built into the game and those metrics align with what your learning objectives are. Koreen’s main topic is game design, but I want to talk about that last idea:  the game’s success metrics need to align with your learning objectives. This sounds like Instructional Design 101, since it is Instructional Design 101.  Ever more fundamental — Instructional Design 100, maybe — are these questions: What do you want people to do?Why aren’t they doing that now?How will this make things better? No, the first question isn’t about instruction at all.  Nor is it about, "How do you want them to act?" It’s about what you want people to get done. When you can’t articulate what you want people to accomplish, it hardly matters what interventions you try.  You have no way to measure progress.  Might as well just run them all through whatever you feel like. Making your goals less fuzzy "Sheep dip" refers to a kind of chemical bath intended to prevent or combat infestations of parasites.  (Videos of older, plunge style and newer, spray style processing of sheep.) Farmers dip or spray sheep because… well, I’m no farmer, but here are some guesses: It’s more cost-effective than diagnosing the needs of each sheep. A dip-tank of prevention is better than a barnful of cure. Sheep on their own rarely propose new pest-management processes. Ultimately, sheep farming has a few key outputs: leather, wool, mutton.  While the sheep play an essential role, I don’t think you can successfully argue that these are accomplishments for the sheep.  So what matters is the on-the-job performance of farm workers. Speaking of on-the-job, many industries and organizations impose mandatory, formal training.  Even there, the accomplishment shouldn’t be "training completed." One client delivered "equal-employment awareness" training annually to every employee.  The original charter was full of "increase awareness" and "understand importance."  Here’s what that looked like after a lot of "how can I tell they’re more aware?" You can recognize examples of discriminatory behavior on the job. You can state why the behavior is discriminatory. You can describe steps for resolving the discrimination. That’s not exhaustive (and the legal department would probably say you need to sprinkle "alleged" all over the place), but the three points are a first step toward a success metric that connects the individual and the organization. Sometimes, it is a training problem When people in an organization can articulate overall goals, it’s easier for them (as individuals and in groups) to think about how their activities and their results relate to those goals. They’re also likelier to be better problem-solvers, because they won’t corral every problem into a formal-training solution. Even when a major cause of a performance problem is the lack of skill or knowledge, you benefit from revisiting those Design 100 questions: What are the results you expect when people apply the skills they currently lack? What could interfere with their applying them? How will this approach help them learn and apply the skills? Slightly more diplomatic language led that EEO-awareness client to decide that knowing the date of the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t have much impact on deciding whether, in a job interview, you can ask an applicant, "Do you have a handicap?" I’m no expert on workplace games, but I’m pretty sure I get what Koreen Olbrish is talking about.  It’s the workplace first, then the learning goal, and then the application of good design in pursuit of worthwhile results. The same is true for any planned effort to support learning at work. You need to focus on what’s important, on how you know it’s important, on why you think training will help. Then you use that information to guide your decisions about how to help people acquire and apply those skills when it matters. Mindlessly grinding out courses (instructor-led, elearning, webinars, whatever) isn’t the answer, regardless of how many completion-hours people rack up. It’s just…well, you know.   CC-licensed images:Bigg’s Sheep Dip (Glenovis) adapted from this photo by  Riv / Martyn.Bigg’s Dips (yellow/black) by Maurice Michael.Quibell’s Sheep Dips by Peter Ashton aka peamasher.

I’ve signed up for PLENK2010, an online course on Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge.  The purpose of the course is to "clarify and substantiate" the concepts of personal learning environments (PLEs) and personal learning networks (PLNs). Main link for course information is connect.downes.ca, which provides more description as well as links for registration, the course forum, and so on. The instigators… I mean, facilitators, are Dave Cormier, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Rita Kop. This is my first experience with a large online course, let alone one with a connectivist approach.  What that last part means: In a connectivist course, course materials and course content are defined by participants as the course progresses, rather than prior to the course by instructors. Though the course outline defines a set of selected topics, these function as signposts for an iterative process of search, practice and reflection, as described here. The "here" is How This Course Works, which envisions four main types of activity for…well, me, and a few hundred fellow travelers. Aggregating means the facilitators collect and the participants receive a variety of items in "The Daily," an electronic document offering potential content.  Yes, somebody’s doing the initial aggregation, but I expect more knowledge critters in the herd than I can fit into my cerebral corral, so I’ll be… Re-aggregating. They call this "remixing," but it comes to the same thing.  You go through items in the initial aggregation, figure out which ones to follow, decided which of those were worth following, and eventually keep some.  (I’ve already created a PLENK2010 tag in my Delicious account, and I’ll probably have a separate notebook in Evernote as well. From a what-goes-on-in-your-brain point of view, those two activities are like taking in information.  Repurposing involves actively working with it-not simply repeating it, but transforming it somehow.  "This whole course will be about how to read or watch, understand, and work with the content other people create, and how to create your own new understanding and knowledge out of them." Feed forwarding as a term is a (slightly awkward) substitute for "share."  The facilitators encourage public sharing, thinking out loud, a willingness to make mistakes in front of people.  That rarely feels as easy as it sounds, but I think it’s good advice.   So I’m testing a WordPress tag (#PLENK2010), and I’ll see if this post shows up in the course feed.  If it doesn’t, I’ll come back and create a WP category instead.  (The different between a tag and a category only matters to WordPress.)  So-look, Mom, I’m feed-forwarding! So that’s where I am today.  I expect things to seem messy at first.  I know they’ll be confusing: I’m still wandering around the course Moodle like a transfer student trying to find PSYC 423, the parking permit office, and someplace with decent coffee. One thing I’ve learned: don’t subscribe to email updates for the "introduce yourself" thread.  Or, if you do, set up a mail rule to channel all that stuff. I don’t tend to think of the web of people and resources I learn from as a PLE or a PLN.  That’s mainly from a anti-jargon bias.  These are the people I learn things from, but I don’t think of them as having special status or membership cards. I realize that most folks who do use PLE and PLN as terms don’t think that way, either; this is just freelance grousing.  Notice, I am in the course. I wonder whether PLENK2010 will become a time sink: too many topics, too many potential activities, too many possible routes.  (I’m remembering Stephen Leacock’s line: "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.") But that’s kind of the way that learning works.  Clearly, people can and do learn in highly structured environments; indeed, sometimes the structure can help focus attention and keep distraction at bay.  I think it’s likely, though, that especially as you get deeper into a topic or field, a high degree of structure has less and less to do with your learning. And you always have control over what goes into your own time sink. The plan calls for ten weeks, beginning September 13 and continuing into mid-November.  As soon as I figure out what the first week’s activities are, I’ll start on them, keep some notes, and see how things go. CC-licensed image by ghemflor / Heather A.