Why are sites/services like Coursera, edX, Udacity, Academic Earth, TED-Ed and Khan Academy (feel free to comment and add all the ones that I've left out) really important? World-changing content? Maybe. Stunning new technology? Um, no. Then what is it? They are cracks in the dam. They are canaries in the mine. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, wrote in part, "...We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic." Spot on Clay. Higher education, take note, its your turn. Oh, to all the folks in corporate learning and training who just breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn't their turn...you need to keep reading. Ever hear of  Common Craft? Lynda.com or Stormwind? How about Bloomfire? Code Academy? Quora? Snapguide? Instructables? Open Sesame? No? Look 'em up. Why? Well, I talk a lot about how we can look to the consumer market for features that will be included in our enterprise systems in the future....well look to the consumer market for new business models and production models too. Do you remember Fletch? Of course you do. Everyone loves that movie. Remember the scene in the doctor's office? No, not that part, the part where the dialog goes like this: Dr. Joseph Dolan: You know, it's a shame about Ed.Fletch: Oh, it was. Yeah, it was really a shame. To go so suddenly like that.Dr. Joseph Dolan: Ahh, he was dying for years.Fletch: Sure, but... the end was really... very sudden.Dr. Joseph Dolan: He was in intensive care for eight weeks!Fletch: Yeah, but I mean the very end, when he actually died. That was extremely sudden. That's what where we are headed. Everyone keeps cranking out instructional content based on seat time and levels of interactivity EXCEPT anyone not already in the industry. Those folks are the ones finding alternative models. Why? I believe its because the logic that once held that system together is breaking down.  Waaaaay back in 2005, Bill Gates gave a speech to the National Governor's Association. Part of what he said was: America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded - though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they’re working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times. Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year. I believe he was spot on. Summers off? Built for an agricultural society. Desks in rows and columns? A factory model of control and surveilance not education. You can't fix it though because it's not broken. Its an outdated design.  Wonder why all the companies I mentioned above are popping up? Why institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and so on are even experimenting? They feel the problems in the model. Do we? We keep pushing ADDIE like its some kind of magic charm. What happens though when we deploy a social media system first - that would make the "I" first...and we do that before any analysis because you can't analyze something that you have no data for...and then we tweak the design...whoa...now we're all out of order. I don't know if ADDIE is right or wrong but I know its too rigid. We don't operate in linear fashion we operate in a realm of simultaneity. Now what's your design concept look like? 30, 60 90, days to develop an hour of instruction? Really?  I'm sure the folks at the Rocky Mountain News, which started in 1859, thought they would continue on forever too. I'm not here with all the answers, just trying to remind people that we need to be asking these questions now.   

OK kids...The Wounded Warrior Project...understand that we are living in a time during which the U.S. is home to the greatest number of combat veterans in our country's history. The WWP is doing some amazing work helping those veterans adjust both mentally and physically and they've got some amazing results. Now as it turns out, I'm running in this little race called the Tough Mudder that so far has donated about $3.5 million to the WWP. I'm trying to help them kick in a little more. If you go here you can easily (and anonymously if you want) donate to the WWP. I'd appreciate it and we all know these folks who have given so much, deserve it. If you can't give, that's cool too, please feel free to share this and pass it along. Thanks and now back to our regular programming.

Look, social media likes you a lot. Really. I know you have feelings for social media too. The harsh truth though is that social media is not just going to see you exclusively and you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking you'd  be able to handle SoMe on your own anyway, they're too much for you.  I mean think about it, you can't even handle your email. There's no way you can stand up to Twitter. So stop thinking its you against the world. Get some Zen. Go with the flow...feel the Force...be the ball....focus on building your network.  You don't have a 1:1 relationship with social media - what you should be building is a many to many relationship. Social media is a network and you need to respond to the output of that network with your own network. I've got a strong network that kinda looks like a patchwork quilt.  Part of it looks for #socbiz. Part of it watches #swchat and #lrnchat. (shhh part of it even looks for mentions of my name). Pat of it looks for UX and part looks for jokes that are, frankly, NSFW and so on. It's my responsibility to architect the right network. The cool thing? Me and my network are also part of other people's networks - at absolutely zero incremental cost to any of us.  This is what can move us past the Tragedy of the Commons. So stop thinking like a subject-matter expert and start thinking like a Subject-Matter Network. 

I've seen some other arguments about why video games are not "art" but this column from Jonathan Jones is just stupid. There have been lots of comments on the Guardian's own site and on Kotaku and I'm sure, in countless other places and I might not add anything ground-breaking to the discussion but I just had to get a few ideas down here.  I'll get to Jones' contention that video games aren't art but let's not let his first assertion slip by unnoticed - that there is some combination of age and intellectual development past which, people should not praise video games nor should they be playing them.  I don't really have a crtique of this argument past the fact that given that, one could quite reading Jones' article there since his bias is so clear we know which way this article is going to go. You know what? That's OK - it's his column and he is entitled to his opinion and he is certainly entitled to not play any games - it's just that I feel sad for him. I don't think everyone should play games all the time but I do agree with people like Jane McGonigal about the positive impact of games, and with other studies that detail both the positive cognitive and motor skill improvements that acrue from game-playing (not to mention the social benefits as well).  So I'll hope that perhaps someone will get Jones' a couple games for the holidays and that maybe he'll take some time and play a little - it's a brighter world on the other side.  An interesting note is that Jones' disagrees with MoMA's decision to display video games as art. The interesting part is that his column in no way talks about the process that MoMA went through to arrive at that decision. Nor does he address in any way, how whatever collection of what I can only assume are suprememly qualified judges of art at MoMA have arrived at a decision that someone like Jones' can so clearly see is wrong.  Finally we come to the heart of Jones' argument - I think it goes that because games are a collective product, they can not reflect a personal vision  - no one "owns the games" so there is no artist. "A work of art is one person's reaction to life." -Jonathan Jones This argument confuses me to such an extent that I have to shake my head a bit at first. I want to ask Jones what he considers art? Clearly paintings - he references those. Sculpture? Music? Film? Photography? (I won't EVEN bring up comic books - I can only imagine how Jones feels about those!) How many people can be involved in the production process before it becomes non-art?  Jones also argues that even the greatest chess player in the world wasn't an artist. Again, this argument much like his cognitive/age cutoff for playing games - just makes me sad. To be able to watch Bobby Fisher play chess without recognizing that as art, well it just makes me think that Jones' world is a dim place indeed.  Why only one person? Why can art not be a collective reaction to life? Why the solitary aspect? To be sure, there have been great artists who were so possessed by incredibly strong personal visions that they made some great art but I utterly reject the notion that art BY DEFINITION requires some hermetic-like solitary act of creation. I reject that because I reject the idea that there IS a solitary act of creation. Van Gogh's reaction to life was a deeply personal one to be sure but one intimately colored and affected by interactions with others. He did not cut an ear off because he was an island unto himself.  Every artist is part of a collective. A collective of experiences. I collective of the production process. Art is by my definition, a social product in that it is mediated through one's own experiences with others. To deny that is to deny that humans are social creatures. To call out video games as non-art because their collective nature is more transparent than some other art forms is just plain wrong. 

So went down to the awesome E Street Cinema with @sassysbgal and The Boy Who Is Not On Twitter to a showing of the classic cyber-film "Hackers" starring a young Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller (dude, that laptop is SCREAMING with a 28.8 BPS modem!!).  It was cool and nostalgic and I love it when Miller and Jolie were tossing out "PCI Bus" and "RISC" like they were deeply meaningful.  @FutureTenseNow was ther organizer and @zephoria was kinda like the special guest star - danah was also nice enough to take some questions afterward and one was from someone who asked if she thouht that the term "hacker" could ever be reclaimed and reconditioned to have some meaning, if not benign then at least a little more nuanced than what we have now. I didn't get a chance to answer that question but here is what I was thinking..... No. Not happening. Not anytime soon and here is why...the denigration of the term hacker has to be placed along a spectrum that I'd argue, started with Pearl Harbor, was amplified by the atomic bomb, was cooked into our national psyche by Vietnam and which was granted horrific status by 9/11. All these points have been hammer blows to the collective American ideal that no matter how hard you hit us, we'll get back up. (Read: Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture) Taken together, Pearl Harbor and the US's two atomic attacks, showed that America could be surprised and that if an opponent had atomic weapons...that surprise might not be something we could recover from. Vietnam showed we could be horribly wrong about how to prosecute a war and that we could actually "lose." 9/11 showed that our enemies didn't even need to have atomic weapons any more to do us serious damage.  These have been hammer blows to the American psyche and I think, have permanently done away with our capability to allow room to consider something like hacking to have any kind of innocent, rebellious youth quality. I don't think our considerations of national security have room for that anymore. Its sad. Its a loss. The consequences have just been shown to be too high to have room for much forgiveness. I think 'hacking' is now permanently equated to criminal or terrorist activity. The RIAA and MPAA also bear blame here for making real-life criminals out of 13-year-old girls who have downloaded some songs or a movie.  So I'll keep thinking well of Defcon and Black Hat and wearing my "Got DeCSS?" t-shirt (thx Jon Lech Johansen)...but I don't see a slew of future heroes emerging from the ranks of the l337 haxx0r. I'll hope though and remember, Hack The Planet! ;-)

We're almost up on St Patrick's day and so I'm getting visually flooded with four-leaf clovers...that jolly, green symbol for luck. So I started thinking about luck and I've concluded that I'm, 'wicked lucky.' (I can say that with a Boston accent in my head since I was born there).  I'm lucky for a bunch of reasons. I think I'm alive at a great time. I'm psyched about my job and my company (@socialetxt ;-)). I'm healthy. I have an amazing 13 year old son who deals with some tough cards he's been dealt with a grace and strength that I admire. He's a great kid.  What I'm really lucky about though is that I have someone in my life who I've known for so long that I can't remember what it was like before I met her. She is smart, tough, funny, beautiful, is a mom whose son adores her - and I don't want to forget creative and talented. Understand this, I am not an easy person to live with. I have a trunk full of flaws and if they could be fixed by surgery, I don't want to think how many operations it would take. She knows all these flaws - knows them in a way that no one else ever can - and here she is. I don't know what I'd do without her. I do know that she's my rock, my base, the part that lets me do creative stuff or thoughtful stuff or fun stuff - she is that necessary ingredient. We've been married 23 years and I still love when we're were walking down the street and takes my hand or kisses me goodbye in the morning.  So I'm a Protestant with a German heritage - not so very Irish (been there a couple of times and love it and the people) - but on St Patrick's Day with all the clovers and every other day - I'll wake up and count myself lucky that @sassysbgal is in it. 

I heard a general one time start a conference with the admonition to consider all the presentations as if you had a blank slate. I thought that was pretty powerful. It moved people out of their entrneched positions and got them to stop thinking about legacy systems and so on. More recently, I saw another note talking about drawing inspiration from a blank slate and I started thinking about setting up a training system rom scratch in a organization. So let's say you are in an org of a couple hundred people, the org is a couple years old, its grown to the point where you need to get a little bit more structured in terms of systems - not formal from a content perspective but maybe move away from the ad hoc nature of systems that people have been using until now. What's your first move? Buy an LMS? Hire someone to build curriculum? Start listing content to be produced and deciding on the media? I don't think so.  I think blank slates are cool...like white pages of paper, their emptiness is full of potential. You never really get one though do you? Not completly anyway so let's think about our blank slate in this case from the standpoint of systems. We have no legacy systems. No existing LMS. No authoring tool pumping out content in some weird format. What do we have though? We have employees - folks that are doing their jobs. Folks that are already learning. So let's start there.  If you wanted to build cars and you found a factory of people already doing half of what you wanted, would you just chuck all that to install your own deal? You might and if that is you then I hope you enjoy your time on the trash heap of industry because that's a stupid and wasteful thing to do.  So let's not start installing training systems without first finding out if we can just leverage what people are already doing to learn. Yes! That's right! Much like Christmas came for the Who's without box or bows, learning comes without storyboards and job aids. Now we're back to our original question - how do you start? I think if you start from a place that says "people are already learning  - I need to help that" - then that is a very different place than "we need to create content and build courses." The system that suggests to me as the foundational piece is one that allows discovery, exploration and sharing. You want people in your organization to be able to discover each other's talents and strengths - and you want them to be able to discover relevant content and material.  You want them, your employees that are already learning, to explore new ways of working together (anyone else hear strains of Star Trek whenever you use the phrase 'to explore'?), and new ways of forming teams and so on.  Finally, you want them to be able to share  - to share their knowledge, their experiences, their capabilities, their encyclopedic recall of the bast places to eat near the office. Oh, yeah and you want to make all that happen with very little friction, integrated with other systems and include it in the workflow. That sounds awfully social doesn't it? Now that we have that stood up, now we can start using that system to really identify holes in the knowledge base, communities that need management, and relationships and lines of communication that need to become visible (hello email!). Then we can add in as appropriate, some more formal content, some analytics, etc. Those things should be capabilities of the system but they are not the foundation of the system so don't favor them over other systems - expand on the pre-existing learning that is going on right now inside your organization, use a social layer to allow your own employees increase their performance.  Now, look at your slate. 

I'm probably going to come off sounding sanctimonious or worse but what the heck...it's just the Internet and nobody reads blogs anymore... I saw this story about the first features available on Google Glass and yes, you'll be able to take pictures and respond to things with your voice and golly gee, you'll also be able to see your incoming email messages and read headlines from the NYT!! This reminded me of a talk that Raph Koster gave at GDC a few years back about how if games were such a powerful medium, then why weren't they addressing pressing social and humanitarian issues with that power? I actually think games are doing some of that - from Games For Change to Games for Health  - I think games are being deployed to positive effect. I don't think that Google Glass is headed along the same path.  I find my self wishing that the story above was about how the first apps to be built and groups to get the devices would be efforts focused on collecting data for humanitarian relief or for scientific purposes or for First Responders to have access to critical information at the point of need. Seems like we used to start tech off at the "big purpose" level and then it trickled down to the consumer level. Now we start with the most retail of applications and hope that someone with vision can find a way to re-purpose that tech for loftier goals. I understand the dynamic...Google is an ad delivery platform and the Glasses will greatly help target that delivery. Just like Facebook Home will greatly aid Facebook (although I really don't see how Home will help Facebook users).  Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of capitalism - think the free market is terrific (w/ some limits) but I do think our present First World society gives pretty short shrift to the idea of service. I'm also as guilty as anyone else in engaging in that behavior. As a small step...maybe today....take a minute and Think Big...let's see what happens. 

Dan Pontrefact, Marcia Conner and Kerry Brown have written a great piece, Revolutionize Corporate Learning. I think it's a brilliant piece written by some top notch folks...my only issue is that if the aim is really to revolutionize corporate learning, then the manifesto doesn't go far enough. And please, I am operating on the principle of "any idiot can write the second draft" here - meaning that without taking anything away from what Dan et al have crafted, I want to suggest some additions.  First, let's start with some semantics (insert collective groan here). Corporate Learning - there is no such thing. There is also no "mobile learning", no "e-learning" - there is game-based learning (that locates the opportunity for learning in a specific instructional medium. Did I mention there is also no "social learning" - if there is, please describe for me the opposite...anti-social learning. Why is this an issue? Names matter here - a rose by any other name will not smell as sweet... Why? Well for one because we can't do ROI on "learning" because we can't sell learning. We can sell training, performance support, even environments rich with opporunities for learning but we can't sell learning and we need to stop saying we can.  Second, we need to fully realize the scope of the ecosystem in which we operate. Remember those great sci-fi stories about some group or culture and then at the end, the big reveal is how that group or culture is just a small part of some much larger ecosystem? World in a grain of sand stuff. Thus it is with "corporate learning." We operate inside a system and part of that system is one that is supplied with a population of willing workers educated in instructional design curriculum that on average is outdated at a minimal level simply does not provide the kind of education required for people to think differently enough about "learning" to be able to revolutionize it - right now, we're dependent on mutants (and I count myself one). We come from different backgrounds and have a range of experiences and toolsets but we weren't produced by any conscious program to generate creative thinkers...we're random mutations.  Another part of that ecosystem that we operate in, is a large group of people who have never even tried to spell ISD and who will operate for a good number of years, utterly unsure of what it is and why you seem to think it's important to the organization. Here's a little experiment, find the library of HBR case studies - now search for all the case studies that focus on training or even better the role of instructional design and/or ADDIE in corporate success. Let me know what you find. To all the other people in our organizations (and I'm generalizing to save time/space) "learning" or "training" is a department that creates content when requested to or makes other people take that awful, time-wasting compliance training. We need to be cognizant of the perspectives of people in our little terrariums and know that working to change thier mindsets is critical and integral as well.   Let's recap - we've decided on a name change and we've agreed to keep in mind that we operate as part of a larger ecosystem.  Here's what that leaves us with having to address: The reality of having to reengineer the existing curricula of ISD programs at both the undergrad and grad level  The reality that we have to re-educate all of our corporate peers about the role of a training department  The idea that we need to develop a sensibility within the profession, that critically examing the canon on a regular basis, is something that we owe to ourselves and our clients (and leave the gentle at home, we're all grown-ups here - and I just need to say that I think that Donald Clark's 50 blog posts on 50 learning theorists, is a perfect example of this).  The need to bang away at the accepted canon of instructional design and understand that for most of it's life, ISD has had nothing to do with fostering learning.  The need to blend in (and by that I mean develop expertise in and start using) information and research that is coming out of neuroscience (w/out buying into the sometimes specious focus on the mystical ability of FMRI to tell us how brains work) and from work on things like cognition and memory.  (If we actually want to deal with "learning") So we change the tenets on which ISD is based. Then we change the curriculum which is taught in colleges and by our professional organizations. Then we change clients/employers' ideas of what we can and should be providing them. Then we have created a fertile field in which a new profession can catch and grow.