So Quora is blasting off right now. Some hyperbolic, breathless suggestions have it becoming bigger than Twitter. I don't know about that, I think that more people are interested in broadcasting than they are in participating in answering questions but I could be wrong. Regardless of where Quora ends up, either as the MySpace or the Facebook of the Q&A world, I think the rapid rise of this site and others, brings up a couple of powerful dynamics that largely go unnoticed...at least not so much noticed given their power (IMHO).  The first difference I see between the dynamic of Twitter and the way something like Quora works is in the Asymmetric Follow.   "Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social network user can have many people following them without a need for reciprocity. Assmmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other (newsletters are a clear exception here). If you see a social network where someone has 5000 followers and only follows 150 back - that’s Asymmetric Follow." (James Governor, 2008) That kind of dynamic is fine if it occurs within a network that accepts modes like broadcasting as well as lurking. I think though that the Q&A dynamic demands reciprocity and active engagement. I have been getting dozens of notices in my Inbox that more and more people are following me on Quora. First I have to wonder why - I assume that like me they are following me because they have seen the questions I follow and we're sort of organically building a community of interests. Secondly though, I began to wonder how many people I wanted to follow back. While I follow over 2,000 people on Twitter and would probably follow more if I just took the time to dig through the wealth of really smart people out there to follow, Quora feels different.  I'm already feeling a limit to the number of people I want to follow...I think because I feel like that could be a lot of questions headed my way and people asking you questions feels like a more significant energy commitment than simply reading tweets and re-tweeting or even replying. So I wonder if Quora does become incredibly large, as an overall community, will it have people who operate at the same scale as Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble or will it self-limit to smaller communities? ..but wait a sec, I'm just getting warmed up.  I also started wondering about the 'question' dynamic in itself. I mean from a historical/sociological/psychological/anthropological view...what's the Question all about? Turns out that down one avenue, this quickly gets you into discussions of intonation, if questions can exist outside of syntactic structures which leads to Chomsky and discussions of generative grammar and whether or not asking questions is an activity the one cognitive activity that distinguishes human cognition from the smartest of the animal world.  Great. One can of intellectual worms opened.  I'm not ready to put these particular worms back in the can yet though because I think this is important. So now I am looking for resources and I am asking questions: who is the leading writer/researcher/historian/anthropologist on questions? What are the cultural differences in how questions are regarded? What is the uptake of something like Quora in non-Western cultures? What drives humans to ask questions? Is there a Q&A-focused version of the Dunbar Number? Should we as people trying to architect moments of learning, be concerned about having a deeper understanding of this dynamic? How has asking questions as an activity changed over time? How do things like Mendeley and Zotero play in this space? What could we do with the data flowing into Quora et al if there was an open API like Twitter? Could design multiple apps for reaching into that data and displaying questions and answers in a huge variety of ways? So far I've got: Q & A Sites (I know there are more, feel free to add in comments)  Yahoo! Answers Aardvark LinkedIN Answers Formspring Articles on Quora, Questions, etc (I know there are more of these too :-)) Who asked the first question? Wikipedia entry on Question TechCrunch FAQ on Quora Quora Will Be Bigger Than Twitter Quora: A Social Network Built for Learning Generative Grammar Syntactic Structures My Quora Profile

Believe it or not, I find that image over there to the left to be offensive, on several levels. First, as a long-time (since like I was 9) comic book reader, I'm offended because it seems like the artist just gave up and didn't even draw Emma Frost but instead drew some kind of hooker/stripper avatar. Nothing to do with the story. Nothing to do with the character. Brilliant. Let me also tell you (entering second level of offended), I have an 11-year old son and I would love to get him reading comic books but I'm no about to hand him this issue of X-Men. So not only are they offending me, a current reader, they are losing out on a future potential reader. So what does a good cover look like? How about the one over here to the right? I like this one. Tension. Drama. Actually has something to do with the story. So please don't pander. It's not what got me reading comic books - its not what will bring the next generation to comic books.  And another thing, adopt tighter story arcs. You know when you never end a story, you don't prevent people from jumping off; you keep people from jumping on.  Oh and geez...enough with the one-shots - meaningless to the storyline.  And Holy Title Confusion...wanna know a real problem? These are the X-Men related titles shipping in MARCH: X-Men Origins, X-Men Legacy, X-Men, X-Factor, Wolverine, Uncanny X-Men, Uncanny X-Force....and I'm skipping around here. But you see what I mean? I mean which one do I get? Which ones are in the same continuity?  So yeah, Marvel & DC (w a little Dark Horse thrown in) you can continue to make Spider-Man 8 or Iron Man 5 - but don't forget where these characters came from  - they came from the pages of comic books and that audience that lines up to see those films? A lot of those people came from reading the books. So do something that shows you can actually remove your head from you collective publishing ass and do something to make this a vibrant publishing medium.  Thanks. Excelsior!    

"It is an extraordinary era in which we live. It is altogether new. The world has seen nothing like it before. I will not pretend, no one can pretend, to discern then end; but every body knows that the age is remarkable for scientific research into the heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth; and perhaps more remarkable still for the application of this scientific research to the pursuits of life. The ancients saw nothing like it. The moderns have seen nothing like it till the present generation… We see the ocean navigated and the solid land traversed by steam power, and intelligence communicated by electricity. Truly this is almost a miraculous era. What is before us, no one can say, what is upon us, no one can hardly realize. The progress of this age has almost outstripped human belief; the future is known only to Omniscisence." Daniel Webster, 1847

Do you work with humans? OK...then read this book. Clear? Awesome.  You want people to use your systems? Your courses? Your learning experiences? Then read this book. This book won't do it all for you but it goes a long way. I think it also addresses user interaction in a way that we don't usually think of when designing courses. I'm just sitting here looking at the cover of this book and seeing that humans are pretty apparent in the title (hint: social means human)...then I think about something like "Instructional Systems Design" and it's a little less easy to see where humans fit in.  When is the last time you thought about the flow that you create for students when they sign up for a course? Did you even think about it at all? These folks did. They worked for companies like Yahoo! where people would vote with their mouse button if the flow of an experience on a site wasn't compelling or welcoming.  The authors talk about social user experience patterns and describe a pattern here as: "A pattern describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context. A pattern is not a finished piece of code or design. Rather, it reflects the sum total of a community's knowledge and experience or expertise in a given domain." Now social media and or social learning is all the rage but unless we want to turn this powerful moment into something approaching our grand e-learning design concepts like which corner do we put the Next button in, then we need to get smarter on design. Design that's like Soylent Green - about people. So read the book. Visit the Wiki. Let's figure out how to design systems for humans, not just systems that include humans. 

So "FOUO"  = "For Official Use Only". Here is a link to detailed explanation of the term, turns out its a document classification, not a security level. That link in part defines it as: "This designation is used by Department of Defense and a number of other federal agencies to identify information or material which, although unclassified, may not be appropriate for public release." The interesting part is the one where I see a story come across Twitter about something that is not only in my professional area but a personal one as well. I click on the link (no, I'm not providing it here) and I go to a story on the Website of a widely-known tech magazine. There on the story page is an image that clearly has "FOUO" stamped on it.  I think that policy is pretty clear here. I don't think I can link to or use that image. We found out when Wikileaks hit, that just because something is now publically available, doesn't mean that its classification has changed - so this image is public but still FOUO. As a govt. employee, I think my options are clear - don't link to it or use it. I just find this really interesting - kinda doing some mental disection on what this feels like.  What would you do if you saw come across Twitter that was really juicy but contained proprietary information about or from your company? Would you RT it?  

So I wrote this little blog post last year about an email I got concerning an awards program. My problem was the cost associated with entering the contest and the utter lack of transparency and the fact that empty contests like this demean our industry and our efforts. Small problems right? I was actually alerted to this contest by someone in my network but I also just got the email announcing it myself.  Last year the cost to be in this fine "contest" (pls use airquotes when reading aloud), was over $800 - I guess the economic downturn has hit everyone  and the cost is now down to $575.  Let me say again - this is the "Brandon Hall Excellence Awards". Now I should say, like I did last year, that I admire not only the some of the work that BHR does but a lot of the people that are analysts there. Really do....BUT.... ...awards like these just cheapen and demean our industry. Any awards program that is administered and run by a for-profit company is suspect by nature. Why can't we forge some non-commercial group that will ajudicate an awards program - that would be cool and helpful. One that is not associated with any one conference, publication or company - what about an awards program that is associated with our industry? Here is one truth - that won't happen on one level because awards programs like this are money makers. Pure and simple. I think another truth is that our industry is just too fractured. We have designers, developers, consultants, academics, 'legends', edupunks and more - how do we bring that group together? So I'm sorry BHR, I won't be paying the $575 to "get the recognition I deserve"....I hope that will come from my peers, my clients and my stakeholders. 

I found some great images on Flickr in the "Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Social Theory" group and one of them referenced the book "Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory" by Alfred Gell.  Seems like an awesome book...the reviews all regard it well...so looking at Amazon...there it is for...WHOA! $70!? Are you kidding? Oh wait, its been used as a textbook - so that makes it ok. Now get this...this book was written in 1998 and was published posthumously...that's right...the author is dead so that means copyright will only apply to this work for like another 120 years. Reasonable right? Judas, I mean really. We are so messed up as a society. I did find the book on Questia...great..except its also locked behind a paywall. So I hope Alfred Gell never wrote anything useful to a lot of people because they will never see it. Ever. Seriously you dopes, brokers from banks that had to use government money to bail themselves out are getting bonuses. BP has only disperesed about $4 billion of the $20 billion its dedicated to help the people in the Gulf. On and on. And we're gonna lock this work up behind some paywalls and here is the thing...if you charged ONE DOLLAR for this book, the publisher would make more money than the current price. Its just so damn stupid all the way around. No one is making money and nothing is getting read. Beautiful. 

So I heard this story on NPR this morning about how Joplin was dealing with the horrific toll from the tornado that destroyed 1/3 of the town and killed 162 people. I can't imagine what that must be like. The closest I get is 9/11. Horrible. Tragic. The story talked about all the increases in alcohol abuse, sexual trauma to children, increase in gambling, and so on. It also mentioned how kids will ask if the tornado is coming back when something innocent like the wind blowing storngly happens. The answer to the little girl's question is of course yes, the tornado is coming back. Every year. Count on it. Roll of the dice if it hits the town again. This is what gets me - if you live in the Southeast (where I grew up) or Tornado Alley - the tornados are coming. If you live on a beach, erosion will eventually take your land if a hurricane doesn't get to you first. Oh, also, if you live on a hill, you shold probabaly be aware of earthquakes, mud slides and for pete's sake, watch out for wildfires. I'm not an ad for anti-depressants - I'm just saying let's be realistic. I'm fascinated by the way we anthropomorphize storms and nature in general. The cruel truth is that nature doesn't care about us. There are no "viscious" storms, or "cruel" winds...those are human judgements that we put on a non-human entity. (another pet peeve: reporting that someone lost their battle against cancer - they didn't lose - the cancer wasn't playing, it was just doing what it does - I hate the way that saying makes it seem like some people just didn't fight hard enough) So what's my point? My point is that nature won't change...fires will burn, tornados will come, floods will happen...the key is that WE, the humans in the picture, CAN adapt...what's fascinating is when we don't. I rant about putting wires back on poles so they can be knocked down again instead of burying them...people rant back telling me about the cost but I ask (and never get an answer) how many times can you pay to put them back on poles before the cost levels out? ...but back to the tornados... Humans have this remarkable ability to adapt. We walk upright. Have opposable thumbs. Binocular vision. We adapt. We change. We also have an amazing capacity to face tragedy and come back and I think what's happened is maybe the wires got crossed...did we confuse adapting with a lack of courage? So here's what I think...if you live in tornado alley, have you thought about an underground home? They can be beautiful, energy efficient and they could give a crap about high winds. If you live at the beach, poles. Hills prone to mudslides, earthquakes and/or wildfires? Get used to no insurance.  I'm sorry but I'm just amazed that we who have descended from Australopithecus afarensis, have refused our heritage. have refused to adapt. So yes, to those folks in Joplin, to my families living in Kansas and Georgia, to dear friends living in California and Oregon and Washington, to more family lving in Florida - those tornados are coming back - they can't adapt - can we?

via itunes.apple.com So this is interesting..gotta say I'm impressed with the look and feel and game play so far..let's design one of these to teach people how to change their default password settings :-)

So that's my Asus tablet over there. Had it now a couple of months. First tablet I've had and first device I've had running any flavor of Android. Just a couple of thoughts:  -Its got freaking amazing battery life -I use it so much for note-taking that I've almost quit writing in my Moleskine (lil sad about that. Actually like the act of writing/drawing and tablets don't even get close to that yet) -Funny that I immediately strapped a keyboard to it. Makes text entry a breeze but also kills the ability to treat it like a tablet. Humans are weird.  -The Android market REALLY needs to step up the number of apps optimized for the tablet. Apple is killing them here.  -The price point is spot on. Judas that iPad is expensive. Might as well get a laptop. After my experience with this tablet I keep wondering if I could justify the cost of the iPad and an iPhone. -I love the form factor...thin...light...but I do miss the full-featured nature of a laptop running a full-on OS. -This is awesome for reading...better Kindle than the Kindle -I'm still figuring out my way around the OS -I do not have 3G on this model so at my office, w/ no WiFi, this feels really disconnected in a way that a laptop never really did. This really is a creature of the 'net. -I am feeling the pains of leaving Apple's Walled Garden...looking at apps that run on both and thinking "I already paid for this once.." ....my music is still 'over there'..... Anyway I think the idea is - have a firm idea in mind for what you want to use a tablet for...I think I've used a laptop for so long, I'm going through some kind of transition (first joker to start the "laptop natives" and "tablet immigrants" meme is gonna get it!) ....I think browsers and tablet/phone OSs still have a way to go before they replace a full OS of any flavor.