We've located a video that we think is the first one to come out of the initial area affected by the zombie outbreak. There is important information here. Critical. You really MUST watch this video. Seriously. Watch it

We already know that Zombies will be attacking...I mean just look at what they are doing to the logo! If you aren't already clues into that part of it, you can learn all about it here. Aside from fending off the undead, I could use a little help personally - if you're already headed out that way (and if you're not, registration is still open!) The main thing that I could use some help on is a little crowdsourcing for my Social Learning Workshop and Social Learning Camp.  I'm embedding a widget below that links to the post-it board I've been using to help develop the material for both of these. Please feel free to visit the site and contribute anything you think that fits - resources, links, success stories, strategies, etc. You're also more than welcome to use whatever you find on that site in crafting your own presentations, talks, whatever - I mean, this is supposed to be social right? :-) I guess that's it for now - except a blatant call to get on out to San Jose. This year's DevLearn is going to be awesome - great speakers - an alternate reality game and debrief - a Tweetbook already being planned - c'mon - you don't want to read about this one on Twitter. ;-)

You know, I always feel like I should just take a few days and watch all the videos from Pop!Tech. I soooo wanna be able to go to this conference one day but until then, I'll just feel glad that they post all this amazing material to the Web.  PopTech | Nina Jablonski from PopTech on Vimeo.

Social Networking Trends. ABC News interviews rep from Pew Internet Project. 

So I totally forgot about this yesterday! I am doing this Social Learning Camp at DevLearn 2009. OK. So, developing the materials for it here, yadda yadda. Anyway, we are going to be running quick (40 min) sessions throughout the conference on a bunch of different topics (you can see the schedule at the link above). We also have some real superstars coming through like Jay Cross, Koreen Olbrish, Mark Sylvester, Robin Paoli and Aaron Silvers - to talk about a range of Social Learning topics. Here is the kicker though - I can talk believe me - those of you that know me, know I am not kidding. Now I am more than thrilled, proud and happy to talk through the rest of the sessions but what I REALLY WANT TO DO - is use at least some of that other time as a bit of a 'BarCamp'  - that is - ping me somehow and let's work out a time and topic - case study - plea for help - strategies for implementation - for YOU to share with US. C'mon now, this is supposed to be SOCIAL so if you got two AWESOME slides and ideas you want to share - let's do it! You got a question you want answered? Bring it. Wanna vent? Rant? Well, OK but just watch the language. ;-) Anyway - let's make sure we use this time to get YOU what YOU need to take these ideas home and use them!

Ted Leonsis, for those who don't know, is a guy who made big bucks at AOL and is now owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team (CAPS Let's Go CAPS!) Ted also writes his own blog -really he does - and recently he posted this piece. In this post, Ted (yes, I call him Ted) asks if it ever does any good to blame the media for your troubles. He concludes that it isn't. He talks a lot about what he thinks you should be doing if you're in a position to need to control your image in the media and while that's helpful - I really like the article for what its not explicitly talking about.The fact that it is Leonsis presents us with a nice comparison. Look at the beating that Dan Snyder (owner of the Washington Redskins football team - who aren't doing very well) is taking right now. Do as Ted suggests and go Google "Ted Leonsis" and see what comes up and then Google "Dan Snyder" and see what comes up. It's clear which owner is shaping the message - by PARTICIPATING in it.   This is a central lesson about social media - people are already talking about the stuff they don't like and the policies they don't like - by not fully embracing not just the technology of social media but its attendant CULTURE of openness and transparency (as Leonsis recommends) all that happens is you prevent the sharing of all the good stuff.   I think one of the big pieces here that might get missed is that Leonsis is not talking about a technology shift - he is talking about a mental shift, a cultural shift, a shift in how he thinks about his relationship with the media. I'd humbly suggest that organizations looking to implement social media or social learning (whatever the current term of art is) are confronted with a similar option-make this about more technology or make it about changing your culture and using technology to help. If you are putting together a Social Learning plan are you budgeting for organizational design and change management issues? Have you thought about doing any ethnographic research before moving forward? Have you thought about how using these technologies might re-shape your corporate culture? We need to be thinking these things. These things are at the heart of what we need to do to really move forward.

 So I saw an exchange on Twitter between @hybridkris and mrch0mp3rs  concerning closed versus open formats for eBooks. They're a couple of smart guys and the discussion is important but it also got me thinking about the fact that maybe we to think a bit more about the "book" and its place in culture and history are and what the very real pros and cons of adding an "e" to that venerable medium may be. My interest in this dates back to at least 1999. I had recently left grad school and so things like the future of the academic monograph, libraries and academic journals were actually on my mind. Also on my mind was the struggle with what has to be left out when writing a book or paper and how what's left out so often forms a powerful context for not just the subject matter but for understanding the place and time that the author was occupying when they wrote the piece - critical information for being able to understand what their underlying viewpoint was. Robert Darnton (1,2)was always one of my favorite historians, so I read with interest his 1999 piece in the NY Times Review of Books, "The New Age of the Book." In that essay, Darnton makes a case for what I think is still one of the most compelling uses for e-books; academic publishing. He reports on the impact on library budgets of the ridiculous costs of academic journals and periodicals something that has corollary and deleterious on the amount of money that is available to spend on academic monographs - which, as anyone who has ever pursued tenure can tell you, are the lifeblood of that pursuit. Darnton also lays out how an e-book could be architected to provide the reader with a variety of layers of writing and knowledge that could be drilled down into at will. He sets the stage almost poetically:"In the case of history, a discipline where the crisis in scholarly publishing is particularly acute, the attraction of an e-book should be especially appealing. Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this box, you say to yourself, at all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letter I am quoting. If only Icould follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours leading away from my main subject. If only Icould show how themes crisscross outside my narrative and extend far beyond the boundaries of my book. Not that books should be exempt from the imperative of trimming a narrative down to a graceful shape. But instead of using an argument to close a case, they could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of making available the raw material embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past." (1) Darnton has now essentially created a new academic sub-discipline; the history of the book. Acting now as the Director of Harvard's libraries (srsly, how cool is that?), Darnton has published The Case for Books; a defense of the form that has endured for so long. In an article from Publisher's Weekly, it's clear that Darnton still holds to this idea of creating a multi-layer book - I still think this is a really compelling idea and one that needs more discussion (I also think its ironic that his book is available on the Kindle). Darnton now though has extended his interest to Google and its massive efforts to digitize millions of books. Two articles (1,2) layout both his concerns and the potential promises of such efforts. In a similar vein, he has also written on the future of the library in the digital age.  As an aside, a fav paper of mine by William Powers, Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal, goes into even greater detail about not just the book but the physicality of the material itself. So what's my point in all this? Just that we leaped into "E-learning" without fully understanding or even trying to understand in many cases, what would, could or should be different about that experience than just "learning". Now we stand here, 10+ years down the road and we the "next" button and we have rapid templates and we have online, web-based smiley sheets for assessments that tell us as little about the learning experience as do their paper-based brethren. In short, we haven't come very far. Now, we are doing the same with e-books (and I fear, with virtual worlds but that's a different post). The book as both physical artifact and medium of knowledge has a rich and long history - that history and the affordances granted to us by its current incarnation should not be disregarded as we go forward with e-books but studied even more closely so that we can make informed decisions not just about format and construction but also about notions of authorship, the dynamics of note-taking (I LOVE his observation concerning the linkage of reading and writing), of sharing, of who should be legally able to digitize and distribute electronic books. All of these dynamics will shape the future of the book and it's "e" cousin. We need to be literate in all of them. Let's do some reading.   

So I'm sitting here look at this nicely done list of instructional design models; and I'm thinking this is why I am so wary of people or models promoting the "7" this or "9" that...I saw this panel at ISPI several years ago. It was supposed to be one of those "Myths, Fads, and Fallacies" of learning that are so much fun (so much fun in fact, we did a session of #lrnchat on it). One of the "gurus" on stage was Thiagi. Brilliant and humorous as ever; Thiagi looked up and down the table and said, in that accent, "It's clear to me that I am the only Indian at a table full of chiefs." The crowd cracked up, but then Thiagi proceeded to tell the audience that the idea of "systems" thinking about something as inherently messy as learning was (and I'm paraphrasing) a bit arrogant. He did this with great style and humor and the whole room was chuckling the whole time. The whole time though, I was looking around thinking "do you people hear what he is saying?" I think some of them didn't but some of them probably did and were laughing nervously. So when I look at this list and I think of Thiagi's talk, I'm reminded that what we may want to pursue is something more like a school of thought - with rooms for many models and many ways of thinking - but with an emphasis on the discipline, critical thinking skills, willingness to challenge accepted wisdom and intellectual curiosity and rigor that would serve all of us well.