(photo by Virpi Oinonen)  Check out the post just below this one...pretty cool...embedded the Conference Wish List stickie board on this blog...and it works...you can add notes to the board right from this blog AND guess what!? ...You can grab the embed code too (see that semi-transparent box in the upper right-hand corner w the blank notes? Click on the lower case "i" and you should get a drop down box with them embed code available)!!   That means that this Conference Wish List really isn't mine...kinda is, I started it but we can all use it... I have certain interests...learning, mobile, training, anthropology, history, technology, government, enterprise 2.0, game design and development, serious games, social business, etc...but we don't need to limit the Wish List to those topics - in fact, I'd rather we didn't - I think while each of these areas have tremendous conferences focused on those domains - I also think its incredibly valuable to spread our conference wings a bit and travel outside our domains (I even think that the things we see at other conferences can come back to and benefit our 'home' conferences, e.g. new ideas for speakers, sessions, activities).  So this isn't a plea for self-promotion on my part - I want to know where the best face-2-face experiences are to be had in the respective domains and I happen to think this is pretty cool format to do that in or through...so jump in and add your favs. Thanks! (from everyone)

We have been at war for over a decade. Afghanistan. Iraq. Multiple deployments. PTSD. IEDs. mTBI. Our men and women of the armed forces have been stressed to greater degrees than any other generation of American fighting forces. Greater OPTEMPO..battles with no front lines...enemies with no uniforms...all of these things have combined to stress not only our warriors but our ability to serve them when they come home.  The Wounded Warrior Project is one of the many efforts that has stepped into that gap: "To foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation's history." The WWP can always use your help and now you have an easy way to do it.  I'm running in an event in September called the "Tough Mudder." You can go here to see the course description of the one I'm running in. Its about 12 miles long and features everything from balance beam crossings to ice-cold pits of water to a flame-lined, smoke-filled path and even the potential of electro shock! Yeah, its a bit crazy - it should be - it was designed by British Special Forces. Hopefully I make it through! Now Tough Mudder has already raised almost $3 million for WWP and I want to help add to that. If you go to this link, you'll be able to make a donation to the Wounded Warrior Project...you'll be helping a great program that serves people who have fought for our freedom and safety. Thanks everybody...even if you don't make a donation...please spread the word. That helps too....and if you feel so inclined, there are still slots available for the event! 

   FAIR WARNING: The video embedded here is safe for work but does contain a good bit of me talking. Please proceed with caution!  My view of technology is greatly informed by a concern for the humans at the user end of it. What does it do for you? How does it make your day better? So I tend to look at what existing human dynamics new technologies either support, extend or both. That view got a big kick in the pants (in a good way) about six years ago (Gasp! Yes, right after I got out of high school ;-))  - I had the enviable task of getting the smartest people I knew and/or could find together in a room to talk about blog/wikis (we didn't even have 2.0 back then) and how they impact the enterprise. My first call was to @jaycross who in short order, helped me to hook up with folks like @jerrymichalski , @marciamarcia , @eekim , @Ross , @cshirky , @dweinberger , and @timoreilly (although he couldn't make it...stupid calendar). Anyway, I was star-struck then by assembled brainpower and am even moreso today. What a huge gift that was. Well much like VH1, I'm trying to get the old band back together...I think the big lesson for me that came out of those sessions was that conversations are incredibly powerful (especially for learning) and the technologies of social media grant them unheard of scale and speed. I also think that those same dynamics are still at play today and that bringing back the human might be a good way to get people to understand what I see as so powerful about social media.  So this video is the first attempt at that. @jerrymichalski has access to a cool new G+ feature that allows us to record our Hangout and broadcast it via YouTube. We plan on producing a book out of all this and maybe some other items but what better way to start off looking at conversations than with a conversation. PLEASE feel free to comment with suggested resources, people we should talk to (already have a pretty good list working) and any comments or suggestions you have. We plan to do this a few times and I'll let you know when we do. Thanks and I look forward to talking to you all. 

I just finished reading the hashtag flows from the likes of #TED, #GDC, #SXSW, #LSCON, and #IAS12 - sheesh - talk about wishing to be able to have a superpower to transport from one awesome conference to the next and then instantly synthesize all the data coming out of those sessions into some insanely powerful new discipline that could sweep across multiple communities and problem sets like some benign Eye of Sauron leaving nothing but solved problems, renewed relationships and powerful new connections in its wake.  I feel like though we all go to these conferences and lament how we hate silos and then fail to tear down those silos in terms of the scope of the domain that we operate in. Think different yes! but also think more broadly! Take a look at this ridiculously small sample of tweets from these events.  The best plenary #GDC keynotes have been the ones from outside the industry. Ron Moore, and even Ray Kurzweil despite the latter's insanity. (link) RT @tedxbraam: "Doodling is considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning." — Sunni Brown http://t.co/t5yvlOq0 #TED (link) Social learning is not what you make people do (as in training) but something that happens naturally and spontaneously #lscon (link) Whoa! RT @theRab #sxsw tagged photos on instagram are growing at a rate of about 10-12k per day, casual observation (link)  "@ejaeson: Flashy polish means nothing if a user wanders in and breaks your design doing something unexpected but totally natural. #ias12" (link) Maybe conference organizers (hey @guildmeister and @hfisktwit et al, looking at you, w much <3 of course :-)) - need to think differently about their events. Maybe instead of professional development moments we need to think of them as professional exposure opportunities (no, not like that! ;-)) ...in the sense of new ideas and new domains. Its not like the speakers aren't good (they are) or that they're not saying smart things (they are) but they're saying them to same people. Maybe what we need is to swap the job of designing the schedule for the next conference with a different conference organizer.  Yes! What do you think it would look like if #GDC were designed by folks from #IAS12? What if #LSCON had its next program built by the folks who run #TED? And what if #SXSW organizers built the next #LSCON and #DEVLEARN programs? I swear if we just did that once - think of the absolutely SICK cross-polination that would go on and that would reverberate for years in our respective domains. 

Working through this book again and I thought I'd use this as a space to capture what I think are some of the most salient points from this really important book. Please feel free to chime in with you thoughts, comments, suggestions.  Chapter 1: The Ionian Enchantment  Einstein writing to Marcel Grossman "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct obeservation appear to be quite separate things" p5  "The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names."p4 Chapter 2: The Great Branches of Learning  Science is.."driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the Universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense." p12  "We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges" p12 Sherrington...the brain as "enchanted loom" ..."weaving a picture of the extrernal world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe"P13 "while the average number of undergraduate courses per institution doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education dropped by more than half.." p.13 "Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities and how is it important for human welfare?" p.13 Chapter 3: The Enlightenment p. 16 - Rousseau and the idea of "general will" used by Robespierre as justification for the Reign of Terror "savage coercion" p.17 the story of  Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet the "dark-angelic flaw" of the Enlightenment describes the Enlightenment as "a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels"p.23 "but what counts most in the long haul of history is seminality not sentiment" p.24 Francis Bacon as the Enlightenment thinker who's spirit "most endures" p.24 Bacon observed that "the mind, hastily and without choice, imbibes and treasures up the first notices of things, from whence all the rest proceed, errors must forever prevail, and remain uncorrected" ....thus knowledge is not well constructed but "resembles a magnificient structure that has no foundation" p.25 the "buccinator novi temporis" ...Trumpeter of New Times p.25 "The repeated testing of knowledge by experiment, he [Bacon] insisted, is the cutting edge of learning" p.28 Bacon as "Father of Induction" p28 "...Bacon advised us to use aphorisms, illustrations, stories, fables, analogies-anything that conveys truth from the discoverer to the readers as clearly as a picture." p29 Bacon's "Idols of the Mind" (tribe, marketplace, theater) p29 "Descartes' overarching vision was one of knowledge as a system of intercoonected truths that can be ultimately abstracted into mathematics" p31 "Descartes insisted upon systemiatic doubt as the first principle of learning"p31 "He allowed himself only one undeniable premise, captured in his celebrated phrase 'Cogito Ergo Sum'...." p31 "The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind......Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution." p34 dual sword of Enlightenment thought could free mankind or enslave it Romantic backlash "If the constraining universe of matter and energy cannot be denied, at least it can be ignored with splendid contempt." p38 "Rousseau, while often listed as an Enlightenment philosophe, was really the founder and most extreme visionary of the Romantic philosophical movement....For him, learning and social order are the enemies of humanity." p38 "His [Rousseau] utopia is a minimalist state in which people abandon books and other accoutrements of intellect in order to cultivate enjoyment of the senses and good health." p38 "In America, German philosophical Romanticism was mirrored in New England transcendentalism...." p39      

So I've had this story in my tabs for like a week now and I haven't known what to do with it. The story is about a student who went to Dartmouth and who subsequently reported on the hazing and alcohol abuse he saw there and that he participated in.  Fair warning - the story recounts some pretty horrific practices. There's lot of drinking. Vomiting. Physical violence. Sexual harassment. Sexual assault. And on it goes. Now like ti says in the title, I'm in a fraternity. Not the one mentioned in the story but still. I've been in it for decades and am one of those people who don't see it as something you leave although I have been fairly inactive for a number of years. Before that though, I held numerous chapter offices, national offices and worked for our national headquarters for 2 years then served on our national board of directors. I wish deeply that I could tell you that the stories that the subject of the story lays out sound totally foreign to me and that I could never imagine humans doing things like that other humans voluntarily and certainly not when those humans happen to be college students. Sadly, the stories are all too familiar.  I will say I haven't seen abuse to the extreme and at the scale that is described in the story but then I haven't been a college undergrad for a couple of years. I will say this - that if those kind of problems exist at one chapter on a campus, they probably exist to some degree in all the chapters on that campus and probably with the band and football team as well. I'm not trying to widen the blame circle, I'm just stating that in my travels, I've observed that the attitdudes that allow this type of abuse to flourish are rooted in local traditions and mores. I should also say that hazing isn't restricted to fraternities and/or sororities. If its on campus, its kinda like an STD, you never know who has it and some of the folks who do will shock you.  I'll also say that I went through a transformative moment on this topic while in school. You go through this process and yoru first thought after it is - if I went through, so will the next people. Thank God that something my parents did, or divine intervention or something snapped inside me and that feeling lasted only about one term. I then spent the rest of my time as an undergrad, grad student house father, travelling consultant, national board member - fighting against this awful blight. I also want to say that I have seen amazing things on the positive side. I had two fraternity brothers stabbed while I was in school. One died. I've never seen a group of young men come together and support each other like we did then. I lost my mom to an anuerism while I was in school. I had no car and was in Georgia and she was in North Carolina. It was finals week but I turned to a brother while still on the phone with the doctor and asked him to drive me the 5 hours to NC - he only asked when I wanted to leave. I'm also a historian. At one point, I was the National Historian for my fraternity and so I've seen stories both good and bad stretching back over the entire span of our existence.  I'll also say that our ritual which does feature things like robes and candles, is no more threatening when done right, than the Masonic rituals from which it (and about 90% of all fraternities rituals) are drawn (most of our founders were Masons after all). Actually there are some quite beautiful parts in there and I wish deeply that we did not keep our ritual secret for two reasons - 1. I'd like to share it with you and 2. I'd like everyone to know what the letters that I wear stand for and to hold me to that brave and enduring motto.  So let me close this rambling post by saying that I have a 12 year old son. When he goes off to college, I'll tell him that he should go through rush and see if there is a chapter of a fraternity at his school that he likes (if its not mine, that's ok - although that would be cool). I'll also urger him to take with him a strong sense of self and a strong conviction not to belong to any group that asks him to violate his own personal values (things I think all people should carry with them). I may also visit campus and talk to the Greek advisor. I'll also go to bed every night as I do now after reading that story and having these thoughts all come flooding back - wishing and hoping that fraternities and the young men in them, will understand that they belong to organizations founded on the highest aspirations of man and not ones that should in any way be focused instead on the basest degradations of the human spirit. 

I read my browser tabs like tea leaves I think. I look across the top row there and I try to discern what the tabs are telling me. Is there something bubbling up? What's gaining heat or buzz? I'm not saying my tabs are richer than others or more aromatic, its just one way I try to make sense of some of this stuff (I would also read actual tea leaves but they're so hard to find these days).   commodify; specifically : to render (a good or service) widely available and interchangeable with one provided by another company The latest group of tabs to catch my eye include the following: Training Sites Lynda.com:  CodeAcademy:  Udacity:  Treehouse:  Udemy:  Stand-alone marketplace Open Sesame:  Web-based tools Bloomfire:  Udutu:  Higher Ed MITx: Academic Earth:  OCW:  Mobile App production Appmkr: BuildanApp: SWebApps: iBuildApp: iGenApps: build the app right on your own phone Now this list isn't mean to be exhaustive, there are other tech triggers that I have listed in my little Watch List. The list above is just what's open in my tabs right now and it has me thinking.  The first five sites commoditize training on a range of technical topics. Why in the world do I need to buy a library of training from SkillSoft (just an example) when I can just cherry pick the training I want to pay for (for me or my people) right from here? Open Sesame provides a commodity marketplace for training courses.  Now Bloomfire and Udutu are emblematic of a class of offerings that commoditize services that used to be huge enterprise purchases...I can literally turn on an LMS or a production platform like I turn on any other utility.  The higher ed stuff is also really interesting. I can take a Game Theory course from Yale (actually took it - really good), download the course materials and join a live study group on Visualizing Cultures from MIT (note to self: do this), and even get a certificate for completing Circuits and Electronics from MITx.  The last group of sites are all tools that are designed to allow users to easily create mobile apps, including one which lets you do that on a mobile device itself. So now even these tools, representing a class of functionality that even 2 years ago you'd have to go out and hire a firm to provide, are commodities - widely available, economically and functionally similar and eay to use.  So we can move from education to training to means of production for either free or something that is so low cost as compared to what the cost would've been 5 or 10 years ago that the price appears at least to be trending to the free.  So where does that leave us? Where does that leave you big training content company? Where does that leave you institution of higher education? Where does that leave you vendors with traditional (and by that I mean old) business models? Where does that leave the learning and training industry? Do you pray that you VP never finds out about the ability to buy compliance training like they buy coffee for the break room? Or do you do everything you can to make them understand why they should do that and use you and your talents for more meaningful work? I'd argue that DESIGN in this environment becomes critical differentiator. No, not just instructional design although that has its place. UX. Game design. Organizational design and change management. Designing for the social or the mobile. The content is here people. The tools are here. What will make the GRAND difference is our knowledge of how to use all these commodities. I'll just ASSUME that everyone has seen a 1st season episode of Star Trek (the original) known as "the Arena." What made the difference in that epsiode (even moreso than Kirk's rugged good looks) was the fact that he knew how to build something useful out of the elements that he found (they were actually placed there by the other aliens) laying around. Look around you....there are all these elements laying about...do have the relevenat design skills to make use of them? Are we teaching the generation behind us the right design skills to make use of them? Are our professional conferences focused on these issues? Do our publications and sites echo with design discussions?  Wanna become a commodity?

I read Julie Brink's recent article  on Game-based Learning for the Corporate World, and I just wanted to add to what I think Julie was trying to do - which is promote game0based learning as a viable and powerful option. This post is in no way intended to be snarky or derisive and I'm actually thankful to Julie for getting me off my butt and actually spitting out something on a topic I really believe in. I'm perfectly in line with what I think the goal of this article is..to convince people that games represent a powerful medium for learning in a range of environments, including the corporate sphere. You bet. Spot on. Couldn't agree more. The article however falls into some predictable traps that even supporters trigger and that actually end up weakening the very case they seek to make.  The very first listing of games, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Scrabble...immediately goes to a popular sort of game but what about Chess? Go? Games that have been around for centuries; or even making the point with games like poker and lacrosse and bowling - that games are games and that people need to get past this bias of the "gamer" name only referring to computer/console games.   The stats on the growth of the gaming market and the changing demographic of gamers is also interesting but I think of more interest to folks in the corporate space would be some admittedly dated stats now from Beck & Wade's 2004 book, Got Game? How the Gamer Generation is reshaping business forever: The gaming generation makes up 90 million individuals from the US alone. Approximately 56 million of these individuals are already saturating the workforce, from employees to upper management positions. About 12% are said to be managers already. In 2003, around 92% of kids age 2 through 17 in the United States access games on a daily basis.Of this 92%, only 80% are know to have home computers or some form of Internet access. Beck and Wade also make some really interesting points about this "gamer generation;" for example that gamers believe that winning matters (counter to the stereotypical slacker image), that they place a high value on competence-on the being the expert, that they are risk takers and believers in open communication and creative problem solving. These kind of points I think loom very large (or should) in the minds of corporate trainers who think they will just be able to provide the same old training to a generation raised on games - but I know we were talking about games as learning vehicles and not as bifurcators of generations. So let's get into comparing "gaming" to e-learning. First, comparing "gaming" to "traditional e-learning" is at best an apples to oranges comparison. Games require absolutely no technology. The dynamics that are inherent in games, including learning (see Raph Koster in Theory of Fun, Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, or Man, Play and Games by Roger Caillois for some background on the rich history of humankind and games), are in games played purely with human bodies and imagination as they are in games that require the absolute latest in computer hardware and broadband connections. e-Learning is by definition a technologically mediated delivery mechanism...its not even a stand-alone set of principles  On the theoretical front, we really need to get Skinner out of there. As one accessible example, if you read Donald Clark's recent post on Skinner (part of Donald's amazing learning theorists marathon) if really a weak frontman for the power of game-based learning and really makes it seem as nothing much deeper than stimulus-response is at work and that games are somehow graphically enhanced Skinner boxes. There are any number of better advocates for the power of game-based learning but two that leap to mind are James Paul Gee (eg What Video Games Can teach Us About Learning and Literacy) and David Williamson Shaffer (How Computer Games Help Children Learn and his work on pedagogical praxis) leap to mind...along with Eric Zimmerman, Katie Salen, and a host of others...the point being, there is an incredibly rich and growing body of work focused specifically on the power of games as mechanisms for creating incredibly rich opportunities...we should probably just leave Skinner to his mice.  The authors about can also make the point better than I as to the differences between designing games for learning or training purposes and designing e-learning. The short answer is however that the gulf is enormous. Game design is a whole other skill set that starts from a different place theoretically and is informed by a radically different view of the user/learner/player than is e-learning design. Read Theory of Fun by Koster - very accessible and probably the single best explanation of how game design enshrines learning in a way that traditional ISD does not.  The topic of when games are not the best tool is also a logical and valid point for discussion but hardly for the reasons mentioned in the article. Games are great at parsing out large amounts of information is contexts that actually allow people to remember it. Think back, how did you learn your alphabet? Numbers? Huge amounts of very basic data was transmitted either through games or play (which are related but are not the same)....games, I'd argue are actually much better vehicles than the NEXT BUTTON for transmitting data...it all comes down to design. As to the question of whether some content is to sensitive or personal to be played in game - depends on I think, if you really want to deal with the topic or just check the box. Let's look at some: Darfur is Dying: a game that teaches about the horror of genocide Foor Force: a game that teaches about famine relief Fat World: a game that teaches about nutrition and obesity There are examples after examples of incredibly personal topics being taught with sensitivity and care via games. I'd argue again that games can provide a richer, more nuanced context to these sensitive topics than traditional learning.  I think I've already touched on the demographics of the gaming population above and that's a great point - I'd argue again that we need to make that point relative to gaming in general and not act like all "gaming" is a video game.  The cost front is also a moving target. The basic truth is that you can spend as little or as much as you want to build a game but by no means will price ensure quality; only good design will do that. My recommednation and its one that people have heard me make before, is head over to Kongregate. All the games there (as of 5/15/2010 there were 57,000 free games) are all built on Flash and represent an incredible array of designs and game elements that will give you a broader perspective on the possibilities - of course that means you'll have to play a lot of games. Sorry. ;-) I also just want to ask, where is the point about the social aspect of gaming? That aspect is the one driving everything from Farmville to the new wave of 'gamification'...this is actually a key dynamic that has been granted new import due to the scale and reach afforded by technology - this aspect is one that could be particularly powerful in a globally dispersed yet integrated community like a corporation.   In closing (finally right?), thanks to Julie for writing her article or else I wouldn't have written this one and I like being reminded of the power of games to inspire and teach and I hope this post is taken in the spirit intended; one of amplification and pushing forward and not argumentative or snarky. 

File this under Tip of the Iceberg Dept: I saw an email this morning about "measuring Learning 2.0." I've also seen a Learning 3.0 conference and is it me or does it seem that the semantic train is getting a bit far out of the station. Keep in mind, when Tim O'Reilly coined the term "web 2.0" he was describing not a technical leap so much but a break in way we had done business...that is, we were entering a new mode of doing things. So from that standpoint, I'm not really sure what all the 2.0/3.0 talk is about. I have more of a glimmer what all the web 2.0, 3.0 talk is about since those leaps are at least tangentially tied to technical leaps like social media, semantic web and so on. What is all the Learning iteration tied to? How is learning 2.0 different from 3.0? Are people learning differently? If not, then are we doing business differently? If not, then are the iterations tied to technical leaps? If not, then what the hell are we talking about? As they tell the kids in elementary school, words are important and are using ours badly....again I love Jay Cross dearly and love what he's done in terms of informal learning but I think he'd admit that the term "e-learning" has proved to be an inelegant beast at best. We categorically underestimate the "e" and don't change our design to incorporate or even acknolwedge it and its not actually "learning" - its training or education or content but learning is a personal construct. I'll stop saying that as soon as someone can sell me some learning.  So could we just stop the hype please. That's what it really is. Everyone wants to be appear edgy and cool and if we did 2.0 last year we MUST do 3.0 this year. Shut up about it for a year, how about that? How about realize that a term like "2.0" is a literary tesseract - it is capable of holding so much content and change and by racing by it on our way to 3 and 4 and 5...we are once again missing the power and potential as we chase after the shiny. 

So I've spoken openly before about my Tab Problem. Not the 70's-80's diet drink, the fact that I have 58 tabs that open up when I start Chrome...the number is a little troubling but more so is the age of some of these tabs...I need a Chrome extension that re-arranges my tabs every day like a 30/60/90 accounts payable system...I need to know how long I've had some of this tab inventory. Anybody wanna go ahead and code that, just lemme know when you're done. Until then, I'm going to put some of that tab info right here so I can maybe free up a couple of cycles on the CPU...  CryptoCat: instant, web-based, secure chat Pledge Music: kickstarter but for music Find this book: Marshall McLuhan: G.K. Chesterton: a practical mystic By Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Barrington Nevitt, Harold Adams Innis PlaySay: "An iPhone game that connects language learners so they can have real conversation with pronunciation feedback." WorkFlowy: need to try The Anatomy of an Experience Map: should be part of ISD training Videos from Adaptive Path's 2012 Managing Experience (MX): Watch all these AirCover: mobile security The Future of Apps and Web: Pew Report DIY USB Battery Charger: Build with son DIY Solar Charger: Build with son New lecture series by Ted Nelson (updated): Watch all these The Future of Gamification: read Pew Report Pearltrees: an organizer The 3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform: read