"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be." ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 22, spoken by the character Holden Caulfield, via quotegarden.com I watched Jon Meacham, Editor of Newsweek, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last week. Meacham had learned earlier that same day that Newsweek is being sold. He described the decision as a "rational economic decision" (based on journalism today). I applaud him for being there. I would have been curled up in the fetal position with a bag of Cheeto’s. "Who is going to be doing the reporting?" Jon Stewart asked. "If we’re all aggregators, if we’re all commenting, if we’re all analyzing, who exactly is going to be doing the reporting?" Hmmm. This might as well be a question asked at some "social learning" session within the "emerging" track at a national conference that is rich in sessions about traditional training ("dino" track ; ) It’s the same conference where there’s one person tweeting for each 100 attendees and there’s often no wireless. The one where you use a #hashtag so you can go back and link to the stream to illustrate how lame it was. Anyway, Meacham made this statement which has generated some critical commentary: "I do not believe that Newsweek is the only catcher in the rye between democracy and ignorance, but I think we’re one of them. And I don’t think there are that many on the edge of that cliff." From Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine: "We still need journalists reporting on oil wells that explode and leak, British elections being held, wars being fought, genocide unfolding, riots occurring in Greece, and all the rest. The good news is that we live in a world that features both "hard news" and informed commentary, to a degree we have never had before. In that respect, what we have today is a vast improvement over the past." Ethan Epstein at True/Slant in Journalists Try To Hold Democracy Hostage also wrote about the Meacham interview. "Meacham is, of course, wrong on the facts. There are now more catchers in the rye than ever before. Paradoxically, the same forces that are killing Newsweek are responsible for a blossoming of scores of specialized news outlets. Newsweek has to die so democracy and journalism can live. Simply put, it is the fact that web publishing is so cheap that has both killed Newsweek, and allowed all forms of niche publications to thrive. (The kind of publications, it should be noted, that never would have made it in an era when you needed deep pockets to produce news.)" Meacham, when responding to a question from Stewart, points to The Economist as being successful today. He doesn’t give his opinion why. Mine would be that The Economist is (and  has been) a meritocracy. And that’s the nature of the social web. The Economist is different from other publications not only because it offers a broad international perspective but also because it has no bylines. It is written anonymously, because it is a paper whose collective voice and personality matter more than the identities of individual journalists. This ensures a continuity of tradition and view which few other publications have matched. Or, is it Vanity Fair’s, Matt Pressman’s take? The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks—millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride. Reading The Economist or drinking cat-poop coffee shouldn’t be either, but as the quirky lead sentence of an Economist article might say, "Human beings are peculiar in many ways." At some point here, the Newsweek’s of the traditional training content world need to "get" the social web. It’s about human beings. Or is that too elitist? Too cat poop coffee? Is the clusterfuck around social learning a naïve view of learning or are the staunch protectors of traditional training taking a naïve view of learning? BTW…this is where The Economist was over three years ago. Tackling Social Media At The Economist And, a short piece about where they are today. BTW…You can watch the Meacham / Stewart interview here. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Exclusive - Jon Meacham Extended Interview Pt. 1 www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox calls it "gender asbestos:" "…a massive corporate mis-adaptation to today’s talent realities and the subsequent inability to retain and develop women as well as men." She would say any gender pay gap is not about salary inequities at all. I agree. It’s not just about salary inequities. I have a history of self-development. I don’t wait around. I purposefully took jobs throughout my career that were either just above what I thought I could handle or where I was the token "skirt." It has worked out for me. However, so long as my ATM card gives me what I ask of it, I don’t think of the gender pay gap except on Equal Pay Day or when I read a good article or something. I wonder what your reaction is to the phrase "gender pay gap?" Rolling of the eyes? Perhaps your reaction is to stop reading this right now. (Good. Thank goodness they’re gone.) You might think it’s non-existent or a non-issue. What a bunch of whiners right? You may think gender pay gaps only matter to the person who makes up the lower bar on a gender salary graph. Too bad so sad and all that. But it’s really a societal issue. You may react, as Cammy Bean did, with "…that really ticks me off." Cammy’s reaction came after summarizing Temple Smolen’s eLearning Guild’s 2010 Salary and Compensation Report (US). There continues to be a consistent gender gap in pay between men and women. On average, men are paid 14.5% more than women. This gap is most notable in part-time employee pay, where women receive an average hourly rate that is 49.4% lower than the rate men receive, while working a comparable number of hours. (p. 25) Why I thought? I remembered Clay Shirky, writing earlier this year about a once-removed issue… "…not enough women have what it take to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks." [ ...that many men, because they have this "skill," tend to get disproportionately rewarded.] After my first read (when this was posted back in January), the Shirky rant suggested to me that I should learn to lie a bit better. However, as is often the case, the thoughts of others got me thinking about this issue a bit more beyond my initial reaction…like this comment from Danny O’Brien which I picked up via Sarah Milstein. Sarah Milstein also linked to a great comment by Gisela that I think gets at some of the other below-the-surface reasons for gender pay gaps (and I do not have her research source)… So what is behind the gender pay gap? Is there a massive corporate mis-adaptation to today’s talent realities and the subsequent inability to retain and develop women as well as men? Do too few women have what it takes (call it what you will) to self-promote; to show assertiveness? Is there a societal behavior bias? Are women just devalued in the workplace? All of the above? Perhaps. It’s certainly alive and well in the e-learning industry (at least in the U.S.). Why does this matter? The U.S. can’t afford it. Those in charge of salary should step up and address it. For women…one idea: back up your negotiations with data from the report. This post is part of a blog carnival on the subject of the gender salary gap. Read more from Kelly Garber: Shark Attacks and Salary Reports, Julie Dirksen: Ranting on the Gender Pay Gap in E-Learning, and Cammy Bean: The eLearning Salary Gender Gap. Have something to say on the subject? Join the ride and contribute. Then share a link to your post in the comments on one of our blogs.

There are those who write cautiously on the web and those who don’t. What’s your style? I try to write what I’m thinking and write it like I’d say it if I was sitting around having coffee with you. Sometimes wine : ) Saying "what I’m thinking" can often be confused with bluntness. (Let’s just say my 360s always said "can be blunt." ) Blunt is not cautious. (I guess it could be if you were super diplomatic.) And blunt, when presented as a negative attribute,  always made me mutter to myself (1) don’t ask me your god damn opinion if you don’t want to know or (2) grow a pair, a spine or, at the very least, some elephant skin. Now when I say cautious writing, I’m referring to the dictionary meaning: a reluctance to speak freely in anticipation of some future event. My favorite writers are those that approach a subject without fear of the future. Liz Strauss, in an older article said, "To write with an authentic voice I had to learn to let go of what people might think of my truth or of my saying it. Authenticity is risk-taking with a marvelous reward." For the past several weeks I’ve found it difficult NOT to write cautiously. Difficult NOT to fear the future. Difficult  to write what I feel without wondering what others will think. That mindset for writing sucks. Big time. The cautiousness I’m feeling I let build up over time. I realized after spending much of 2009 having the control tweezers pluck the strands of creativeness out of me one fucking check box at a time, I had become reluctant, resentful, and downtrodden. Not a good state for creativeness and innovation. I started to think "if I write this then this might happen."  Yup, it was time to give myself a good slap up side the head. The results… I’m: reading cage-shaking books to get back on the edge making room for some more "focus" time in my schedule by shutting off my presence indicators more often partnering only with cool people, companies, and other creatives bitch slapping my anger into a box and making shipping labels with ATTN: ASSHOLE on them (which I’ll never send of course) spending more time in nature…(BTW…my garden looks awesome) getting more sleep contemplating doing "no way" stuff like learning how to (1) bowl or (2) raise chickens (because my son wants to do those things). These are some of the things that are getting me into a beautiful flow state on a current writing project. Hopefully I’ll rediscover my non-cautious, creative writing mojo soon. I may have just done that and am glad because frankly, writing here is actually a pretty cheap form of therapy that results in the need for less shipping labels.

Sometimes I forget that people don’t know about potential learning/work tools that may have been around for several years. Such is the case with Google Custom Search (which has been around now for more than four years). Anyway…my catalyst for this post was a wonderful online workshop I did last week for AITD. They’ve got a nice line up of professional development opportunities and I was happy to be asked to present on one of my favorite topics - GOOGLE. (Note: Even if you’re not a member of AITD, I think you can could send an inquiry to see if you can sign up for an online event. What’s nice is I did it at US 8:00 pm ET / 5 pm PT (10 am +1 Sydney) so it’s a nice evening option for those in the US.) One featured tool I had kind of forgotten about was Custom Search Engine. The name is pretty self-explanatory. You can create your own search engine using one or more websites or specific web pages, host a search box on your own website, and create a custom look and feel. You can add other people’s custom search engine  when shared by the creator. One nice example I found was in Adobe’s Community site. They use it to selectively index Adobe learning and support content as well as the best content from the Adobe community. Uses for learning…. directed learning acts as a scaffold discovery learning guided exploration embed it in an LMS like Moodle to search for content co-creation by employees (collaborative web search engine) electronic performance support efficiency and productivity improvements community search lots of others There seems to be a business edition (fee) that will search your intranet. You can set a basic one up in about 5 minutes. You’ll need  a Google account. Here’s the Custom Search Blog (there’s also a Twitter account)..recent updates (from the blog) include auto completion of queries (think misspelling or suggestions), an AIR-based companion for Adobe Creative Suite 5 (E-learning Flash developers can search for relevant code samples to write better,  code, faster), support for synonyms, mobile search results, and on and on and on. Enjoy! Let me know if you’re doing something special with Custom Search.

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy So there you go. I mispronounced epistemology several times during a class last year. This is probably why: from Greek ἐπιστήμη. It’s like the symbol formerly known as Prince. My professor pronounced it so it sounded nearly sensual: \i-ˌpis-tə-ˈmä-lə-jē\. I’d probably get it right if I remembered the second syllable is pissed. Why would you take a class where you have to pronounce epistemology anyway? Yawn. Anyway, my nemesis. Epistemology. Perhaps I’ll fake sneeze when I say it next time so half the class says gesundheit! (American translation: gazoontite) and only the other half is thinking DOH! I’ve had trouble with mispronunciations ever since I can remember leaving me wondering if I’m phonetically challenged or just dumb. Isn’t this just the best digressive start EVER? Can you even digress if you’ve not yet focused at all? Apparently. Tony Bates. Author of Books. Ph.D. in educational administration. Global consultant. Brilliant. Probably can pronounce that word with ease….answers three questions that end up being words to work by. Design deliberately. He says the design of an e-learning course reflect the (often unconscious) epistemological position of the instructor/course designers SO if you want to exploit the learner-centered social constructivist approach to today’s social learning supportive technologies, you need to deliberately design. He notes that LMSs (the ones without collaborative tools) tend to be used in a objectivist way which implies that we’re behind the eight ball to start with. You may not agree but I think a lot of people just go with the gut. View e-learning as a curricular and instructional decision. Dr. Bates thinks we tend to see e-learning mainly as a ‘delivery’ decision. He suggests that it become a curriculum decision too especially if technology tools are deliberately chosen and used to support a particular epistemology (noting that slow uptake of web 2.0 tools is that they don’t support the predominant objectivist approach in North America). Use. Understand. Share. Be helpful. "Instructors should certainly know how to use the Internet and computers, but much more important is that have a good understanding of epistemologies, learning theory and instructional design; alternatively they need to be prepared to work collaboratively and respectfully with those that do have this knowledge." I think this gets at the core of what needs to be done to solve problems around poor e-learning courses and, as Dr. Bates notes, slow uptake of social learning. Of course he speaks of higher ed, where it’s more acceptable to talk about epistemologies and pedagogies and social constructivism (because they are in the business of learning). Talk like that is mostly poo-pooed in corporations. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Theory application to design - especially when unconscious decisions are at play - seems to be one way to break out of a rut. I haven’t supported all of this in the past. I’ve gone with the gut. Banned the blah blah blah stuff from my work vocabulary. This is probably why I sway toward starting e-learning with "course" in mind. Or content. You?

Cooking analogies have been used to describe blended learning. Instructional designers looking at blended learning through a chef’s eyes might see  a "recipe" of sorts where you put ingredients together using a process. Or, you could look at blended learning from the learner’s point of view as buffet where you pick out what you want from a variety of food. My mentor/colleague Gary Woodill introduced me to the cooking analogy at a newbie elearning workshop we were doing. It is a good one. However, I can’t help but think that when you actually mix ingredients while cooking the result is usually something that can’t really be "unblended" (although you could pick raisins out of an oatmeal cookie for example). But blended learning and quilting…that to me might be a better analogy, especially when talking about where social networks fit in. I like this definition of blended learning: "Blended learning is a combination of learning objectives and learning modalities that are strategically combined to achieve a training program’s expected learning outcomes." -Miner and Hofman, 2009 I hadn’t thought about the analogy between quilting and design of instruction until recently when I found some old quilting projects in need of attention. I share my love of the hobby with the Amish: Amish quilts continue to be a source of inspiration to quilters. Modern quilt artists are using black with solid colors and discovering the beauty in such basic designs. Amish quilt designs are a result of a belief that art is not a separate thing but that beauty is a part of function, a concept that can be an inspiration to all quilters. - womenfolk.com. When I design a quilt, I think in terms of its 3-dimensions. A quilt, of course, is made up of three layers (top, batting, backing) assembled by tying, machine sewing, or hand-stitching the three layers together. The top most layer is normally decorative; using an infinite amount of colors, techniques, and patterns. It can be taken apart and rearranged (with some effort but not as much as, say, a pie). The top layer is content. The batting is what makes it a quilt. Perhaps that can be viewed as the human element of learning. The backing is the underside of the quilt. Perhaps that can be the overall learning objective. You have commercially-made quilts that you can buy somewhere like JC Penney. They are all the same. They are quilted with a machine, not by hand. This is the equivalent of off-the-shelf courseware. You have template-type quilts with standard patterns from over the years. The can be very detailed or not. You can sew them my hand, machine stitch them, or even tie them (rapid). These are courses you make with template-based authoring tools. Then you have custom quilts. One-of-a-kind art quilts. Custom content. Entered into award contests. The picture below is a crazy quilt. No two are alike. They look haphazard. Random pieces are joined by elaborate stitching. Historically the pieces were a frugal way to use old fabric. Your fabric, each with a memory. Schema. This is what blended learning today might look like with today’s social learning focus. I think what’s especially interesting is that crazy quilts normally don’t have batting. And, if the batting represents the human connection to content and objectives, perhaps our approach to social learning should be letting people take the random pieces of their lifetime and sew them together as they see fit …crazy talk I know.

"There’s something deeply human and therapeutic in getting all the crap out. We also feel a whole lot better. Manure, once it’s spread around, smells less offensive and actually helps things grow." The manure quote above is from a three-part post (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) on Losing your Job? Psychological, Spiritual, and Practical Advice by Kenny Moore. The quote comes from his advice for getting rid of anger, frustration, and resentment (after loss of a job). Some are givens… "…a safe place where you can get it all out without damaging your employment prospects. It’s better to vent these noxious fumes with supportive family and friends than to bring them along to your next job interview. Support groups, professional associations and life coaches all play a helpful role in this regard." His series offers some valuable advice. The one thing I’d change is the "next job interview" part. Might it be better (after you’ve vented your noxious fumes) NOT to look for a traditional  job? Deal with the psychological, spiritual, and practical issues and then realize it’s a new world of work. In the U.S., 20% of workers are either unemployed or underemployed. (Underemployed = employed part-time when needing full-time employment.) The reported (doctored) number is 9-10% unemployment  but it doesn’t include underemployment which brings the number to 18-20%. (And I suspect it’s actually higher because some people have just stopped looking.) Twenty freakin percent. I know right? And it doesn’t look like it’s getting better anytime soon. Economists are saying  it will take 5-6 years to return to "normal." Whatever that is. I don’t think anyone knows what normal will be five or six years out. To start to understand my own normal, I started to look to the "edges." The following is a definition of edges from The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. Edges are places that become fertile ground for innovation because they spawn significant new unmet needs and unexploited capabilities and attract people who are risk takes. Edges therefore become significant drivers of knowledge creation and economic growth, challenging and ultimately transforming traditional arrangement and approaches. It is exactly at the edge that the need to get better faster has the most urgency. Incumbents at the core - which is the place where most of the resources, especially people and money, are concentrated, and where old ways of thinking and acting still hold sway - have many fewer incentives to figure out the world, or to discover new ways of doing things, or to find new information. They’re on top, and they’re ready to keep doing what got them there. The traditional definition of full-time employment is antiquated. I started to think that a bunch of part-time jobs pieced together might be a better bet (especially for folks like me that deal primarily with digital information/knowledge work). Start to see your lack of full-time employment  as a way to get established in the new world of work (before the others get there.) Or wait 5 or 6 years. I’ve been a virtual hermit the past few months as I find my own way. So I’ll share my journey (still in progress) toward becoming an independent cloudworker in a series over the next several weeks. I think cloudworkers are on the edges. More about working with cloudworkers here… Other parts in the series: Coworking on the Social Web, From Cubicle to Cloudworker, Establishing Rates, Balancing Your Workload, Keeping Social Skills Sharp, Your Office, and something I’ve drafted called Doucheboat (but will probably never publish).

I’ve got two, five-picture frames hanging on the wall that leads into my kitchen. Each one has  a picture of our family at the same place on the same lake we go to every July. So I’ve got ten years of tradition which is a continual source of comments. "Look how much we looked alike at the same age." "Look at that hair." "That was the year it rained a lot", "Ha! you have the same shirt on two years in a row," etc. I’m sure every family has something like that. This year we broke tradition and didn’t go to the lake house. It was a hard decision. There were several reasons which I won’t bore you with. We decided to do something different this year so we’re off to the Cayman Islands next month, the place where my husband and I honeymooned twenty years ago. When we were there we did a lot of scuba diving. I remember becoming PADI certified before our honeymoon by doing confined dives in a pool, attending classroom training, and then doing open water dives. Not training at the resort but the cold lake water of New York State. Since then, I can’t recall the last certification course I took. It might have been that one. I thought after twenty years I’d need to be re-certified but that’s not the case. Since scuba diving is a dangerous sport if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’m going through refresher training. I don’t want the stories associated with my picture as, "remember when Mom jumped into the ocean from the back of the boat with lead weights and didn’t remember how to control buoyancy and sunk to the bottom of the ocean? That sucked." My kids are in the process of becoming certified so I’m tagging along. I thought it’d be cool to document our family training activities. Week 1: My 11 yr-old studied the first two chapters of his five-chapter text diligently and completed the review questions. He used a highlighter and wrote a lot in the margins. He was so excited to share what he was learning - hand signals, etc. My 14 year-old took the e-learning version and completed assessments. She kept a notepad and wrote down a lot of stuff about safety…exploding lungs and stuff. She’s very safety conscious. My 16-year old is away at camp so has taken his text. He’s already been in a pool with  scuba gear as a boy scout so it was decided he can miss the first pool session and get up-to-speed the following week at the next pool session. I’m not allowed in the pool the first week because there’s all newbies in the class and the instructors don’t need any extra work. I’ll be allowed in the pool the second week. So, I was sitting watching the first part of the pool session (it’s 3-hours long) and they have to first swim eight laps of the pool and tread water for 15 minutes without any equipment. My husband looks at me and I know what he’s thinking. He’s wondering if I can do that today. Swimming for me today is jumping into the pool and then jumping into the floating chair with a beverage. I’ll have to try the swimming test on my own at my community pool before the next pool session. Some of the newbies are moving pretty slow, floating on their backs so I should be OK. As long as I don’t have to do a full out crawl next to Michael Phelps I should be OK. They go over equipment in detail at the first pool session. It comes as no surprise that the equipment has changed in the past twenty years. I will now use a dive computer  to manage things like decompression status, ascent rates, etc. instead of tracking it manually. My 11-year old is planning to be my equipment instructor next week when I get in the pool. He’s taking that very seriously drawing me diagrams and watching a video with me. I start my e-learning today…we’ll see how it goes. I’m really kind of nervous about the first pool session. My observation of what’s changed for me since 1989: Computers have replaced analog devices for scuba. There are now e-learning courses to replace classroom courses making the certification process more flexible. I lost my PADI certification card so ordered a new one online, uploading a new picture. It arrived in 5 days. I could’ve also printed a temporary care from the PADI site if I needed it immediately. Questions I had about the health form I researched online and even posted some questions in an online forum. An automated status update on Facebook via TripIt mentioning the trip to the Cayman Islands resulted in ten comments, three from friends who went there. My connections will know when I takeoff and land (if they want to) and if I enter my flight details.  And  that means… Burglars will know that I’m not home (but they won’t know that I hired Chuck Norris to house sit). I started following some dive shops on Twitter in the event there’s a Twitter deal. I’m monitoring, via RSS, hurricane updates. I booked the condo I’m staying at online after doing some comparative shopping including reviewing the comments from people who spent time there. I used my credit card rewards program to get two free plan tickets - all done online. I’m following a couple of dive blogs to find some of the better places to dive. Big changes and interesting to think about what will change in the next 20 years.

This is a just a test post for the fine people from the Mohawk Valley Chamber of Commerce.

In Leaving Social Media Still Planned [http://bit.ly/bmRTid], Robert Bacal is interviewed by an unidentified person (I suspect he’s interviewing himself - a reflective piece) about his previously announced plans to leave social media this year. Well, not leaving, he explains, but "continuing to feed blog posts into social media platforms automatically…and interacting when asked." So perhaps a title like Changing the Way We Use Social Media might better reflect the business decision he’s making. Not leaving but doing it differently. Why the change? To me it sounds like Bacal’s getting tired of swimming upstream. ("Why do something when the trend is going against you and you have zero power to influence it" he says.) I imagine it would be tough when your site’s name is SocialMediaBust [http://socialmediabust.com] and your business motto is "Giving the Business to Social Media." One of the reasons for the change, he says, is to "not drain our time doing things we hate to do." I hope that’s one of the reasons anyone changes something they’re doing. Life’s too short. Anyway, SocialMediaBust is in the business of critiquing social media,  he says he hates doing it, so he’s going to "pull back" on "giving it." That would make SocialMediaBust a useless site to me, as a business person. I want the dirt. I want the critique of research. The way Mark Bullen separates the wheat from the chaff on Net Gen research as it relates to learning. That’s a USEFUL site. We won’t be getting that. Instead, SocialMediaBust’s purpose will be to "broadcast [content] to funnel people to our blogs and websites." (Hat tip for transparency and thanks because unsubscribing to useless blogs and Twitter streams happens to be one of my business goals so this makes things quite easy.) Bacal goes on…he’ll decide month-to-month is he’ll maintain the very blogs he is trying to funnel people to (measured by traffic). Here are some of the statements that I hope Mr. Bacal can give some clarification/facts/data for all our benefit: "Real interaction is and has been dropping like a stone on the major platforms." "I’m seeing more data that suggest a contraction of users and use." He predicts a social media bubble burst (for business purposes) sometime in 2012. (That should give him enough time to sell several copies of his book Giving the Business to Social Media, soon to be released.) I can’t help but think that the post  misses the whole point. The social web won’t die off, it will continue to evolve. This could’ve been written about any number of technology tools we’ve used over the years in education. (I don’t have links in the post so as not to give any linky love. Just copy and paste the URLs on your web browser.