So I was looking at XMind - mind mapping app - and it looks good and all but especially considering the air-tight lockdown on desktops across the federal government, I really can't even look twice at something that requires an install. I mean AIR is probably years away from approval. I did want to pass along WorldMapper. This site has some incredible visualizations. The one on the left is the proportionate world based on the presence of personal computers. The thing that gets me about visualizations like this is that I wonder what they might reveal about our organizations if we could view them through lens like this. What would your departments look like if they were sized by satisfaction with your training?Now as soon as I say that about not being able to install products, I find Balsamiq Mockups. Their products allow you to create software mockups easily and quickly. Now why would I like to have a closer look given what I said earlier about not being able to install products? Because they offer integration with products that may already be behind the firewall - Confluence and XWiki. Nice move - building integration w/ existing enterprise products - especially KM ones. Learning/training departments looking to sneak in 2.0 capabilities under the radar should hook up with their KM teams and see what already may be inside the 'wall.So a couple more tools...EtherPad. This one is dead simple. REAL real-time editing of text on the same web page. That's it.Its clean and simple and that is what works about it. Lets hope they don't fall prey to 'feature creep' and start loading down the site w/ more & more features. The last two tools are a bit more complex but offer some interesting options for building content.Flowgram - If you've tried to use MSFT's Producer to marry up PPT with audio, notes, etc....then stop. Just stop. You can create 'flows' of web pages, photos, etc (great review here). One problem already noted is that learners can easily jump out of your 'flow' since all the HTML resources (links, etc) are live. This is maybe a less intimidating version of some of the functionality embedded in VoiceThread (below).Voice Thread - Imagine you want to show a short video to your online class and gather their reactions. You set up an account at VoiceThread and upload your video, or your pictures, and then either share the link or embed the video in your site. Now your students can add voice comments via a phone, upload an audio file, capture a video response using a Web cam or simply add a text comment. Did I mention the "doodle" feature that lets you draw on top of the media? Oh wait, what about the ability to export your VoiceThread to something like say an iPod? Nifty huh? Better idea....ask your your content authoring vendor when they'll have this functionality available!

From the book's site: "The Self-Organizing Revolution explores the transition from the modern institution of mass schooling to a postmodern network of diverse learning options available to all young people. Miller wrestles with the philosophical, moral, and political questions that arise with the radical proposition that public schooling as we know it has become obsolete. He cautions against simplistic models of privatization and lays out an egalitarian, democratic, socially responsible program of decentralized education."Has anyone read this? Care to offer comments? Couldn't find anything on Amazon

So here we have the 2nd Annual Open Web Awards winners. If you don't know about the Open Web Awards, here is the skinny from their site: "Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories."Question #1: Geez. How did so many of these slip past my radar? I need to do some serious research.Question #2: Is is shocking to you or not that a competition that deals with "major innovations in web technology" has really only one site that I could construe as a "learning" site (eHow)? What about Udutu? Anybody else's app I'm missing? Are we as a community of so little commercial or creative worth that we need to just accept that the learning/training community will forever be locked out of contests like this? This is not a rhetorical question. I am looking for an answer here. Seriously. How do we view ourselves as a community in relation to some of these other communities represented by these winners?

If I don't say it enough - thanks for reading and I hope you and yours have a great and positive 2009!...and I hope you like this little video I found via twitter....

So, I started picking this up on Twitter -apologies for not remembering the original Tweeter - but certainly Global Nerdy is where I first landed. I posted before about how the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has made steps toward bringing 2.0 capabilities behind its firewall, but now it looks like it the USAF has a full-scale social media press going on. We'll get to the other stuff but what impresses me most is that they have a Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency in the Pentagon by the name of Capt. David Faggard. That's impressive to me since I know a little bit about what it takes to billet someone into a new position - it represents a certain committment to the medium. The breadth of USAF's involvement also indicates a certain level of committment and awareness. There is the USAF blog, the USAF Twitter feed (does it bother me that one of the uniformed services has more followers than me? no.... ;-)), the USAF YouTube Channel, the USAF Widget, of course, the USAF Podcasts. Check out this great article from David Meerman Scott on all of USAF's activities and some addtl. military+social media acitivities. I also find it telling that Capt. Faggard pops up quite soon after these posts are made...one interesting note that a commenter made on David Scott's post regarded the ability of individual Airmen to access the world of social media - there is a definite asymetry in the evel of involvement coming from the PA (public affairs side) and the ability of rand-and-file to engage. I face this on a daily basis w/in my own organization. What really interests me is Capt. Faggard's response, not only acknowledging the situtation but insisting that the USAF is "completely dedicated to creating a truthful and transparent discussion on-line." Great answer.So fair warning to Capt. Faggard...I may be reaching out to you to help me with my ongoing social media efforts w/in my own small neighborhood of the DOD.   

Reflect on that for a moment. The 123rd annual meeting. 123 years. Impressive. The program itself is also impressive. Thanks to Twitter pal @nwjerseyliz who is attending the conference and who reminded me that the whole program is online. I started digging through the program and I must say, having not been a grad student in a history program for a while or a practicing historian, the sessions make me miss it. I should also say that I think from a conference standpoint, its a remarkably well done and well organized schedule - conference organizers take note!I've included a list of the sessions I found interesting below but I did just want to say why just reading this program made me a bit wistful for my old discipline. I know, just by reading the synopsis, how much work went into the papers being presented at these sessions. I know how important it is professionally to the speakers that they had a paper accepted at the AHA Annual Meeting. I also know that no matter if it is Bernard Bailyn or Gordon Wood that is presenting, there will be people in the audience who will challenge their assertions - vigorously. As a discipline, history welcomes new ideas albeit with the caution to never bring a knife to a gun fight. By that I mean that as a historian, you know that if something you bring forward reaches that critical mass where someone else actually pays attention...then some of the toughest critical examination you have ever faced is sure to follow. Your conclusions will be dissected for bias. Your research methodology will be judged for its completeness. Your arguments will be tested for integrity and cohesion. Your very own original sources will also be judged to ascertain their worthiness as informers of the historical record. So kudos to the work and effort and intellectual courage of the authors presenting at this conference. We may disagree but my fondest wish for the learning/training field would be that as a discipline, it can focus some of its considerable intellectual firepower on testing the foundational, canonical assumptions of events and levels and scales that we rely on daily to serve our clients and learners. I don't suggest that we should tear into theories or models simply for the sake of it as an activity but as a way of making our industry as whole, sharper, stronger and more able to defend itself and its work. I think that could begin at the professional level, with the more popular conferences in our field but I think that the faculty in our Instructional Design programs have an additional responsibility, one that they are probably well aware of, to make their programs more inclusive and interdisciplinary. Here is a quick list of the sessions I really found interesting:Globalizing Historiography: Reciprocal Integration and Future Directions The Past of the Future or the Future of the Past? Perspectives on Digital Historical Monographs from Gutenberg-e Authors Teaching Historiography: Approaches, Resources, and Issues Culture, Military History, and Global Historiography The Future of Memory Studies Building the Future of History and Computing History Education and Technology in Our Middle and High Schools Teaching History in the Digital Age Sites of Encounter: Thinking Historically about Early Human History Putting Historical Skills to Work: Careers beyond Academe The Marriage of Theory and Praxis: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Medieval Grand Narrative Crossing Borders: Technology and Globalization in Historical Perspective

 

So I just got back from ASTD's Tech Knowledge 2009 in guess where? The usual suspects did their usual great jobs (Brent Schlenker, Tony Karrer, Michelle Lentz) - I'm not trying to slight any other speakers - just don't want to name the whole program. (FYI - I did upload my slides here.) (Double FYI - You can also look at the slides for the ILS Design Challenge that I mentioned here). I also think that Linda David at ASTD is probably one of the hardest workers in this industry and that Bob Mosher, et al served bravely on the conference committee. ASTD also stepped up and took a brave swing at extending the actual conference by having an ASTD Virtual Conference .That's actually further than a lot of conferences go. They also had Michelle Lentz (@writetechnology) pushing hard for a Twitter presence for the conference. You can go here and check out the associated Tweets.  I am also excited about the upcoming eLearning Guild's Annual Gathering and Game Developers Conference - both of which have been tremendously valuable experiences in the past and both of which I assume will be greatly valuable this year as well. I think I am just really beginning to want more out of my conferences. Here's a short list: Social media should be the default and should kick in as soon as I register and continue past the conference I should have the option to NOT get a printed guide that weighs 10 LBs. I know why you do it, for the ads not for the attendees - figure out an alternative model and save some trees - get creative w/ an iPhone app or a Flash app or something. Whether or not I'm a speaker or an attendee, I want input into what will be session outcomes. Asking me to pay, go to a session and then fill out an eval so that NEXT YEAR will be better is a little backward isn't it? FIGURE OUT WIRELESS!!!! I don't give a rat's ass how you do it, just freaking do it. Do you understand the good will and PR you will reap? Do you? I know this diff between simple and easy - this one might not be easy but it sure is simple - get it done. Keep the Expos. I actually like them. Do the vendors feel like they are getting value though? I don't know. Consider NOT holding a 'cutting-edge conference' on how we'll all learn in the future with everyone seated theater style or at rounds for 45, 60 or 90 minutes. Try some difference configurations - not all will work - jettison the ones that don't and use the ones that do to re-shape the face-to-face experience.  I'm also going to risk some wrath here and say NO to Vegas as a location. I'd actually rather be in Chicago or New York or San Francisco or Atlanta - if you want to hold a conference somewhere that has tourist appeal, then hold it somewhere with broader tourist appeal. Let's see that's all for now...so kudos to ASTD and eLearning Guild and GDC for doing some really hard work to pull off these incredibly complicated logistical events...I just want it all.

(link) "According to Chris Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University, education is evolving "due in large part to emerging information and communications technologies." And that's got him excited. According to Dede, that challenge can be met by utilizing a range of tools and technologies that kids are already using and, in many cases, already very skilled at. He broke those tools down into three--albeit loose--categories representing "ways of empowering people individually and collectively to: Think Create Share and do." I think the part where my blog gets a very passing mention is especially good. ;-)

Get your twitter mosaic here.

(Article Link)"Gregorio Convertino, who recently joined ASC research area here at PARC, have been looking at how Web2.0 tools like Wikis support workflows within the enterprise. By workflow, we mean activities that are important enough to be documented in the enterprise (either because it is an important client, or that it is an activity that is often repeated.)For this purpose, we have been doing an overall review of structured Wikis available in the marketplace (either thru open-source, hosted solution, or supported-installation). By "Structured Wiki", we mean wiki engines that are enhanced with lightweight programming features and database functionalities. The focus of our review is primarily, but on only, on the user interface and interesting new functionalities to organize content such as templating and database functions. Important criteria for us are ease of use, power of end-user-programming/organizing functionalities, and licensing"

This is a BRILLIANT point and quite possibly the most important one in the realm of implementing Enterprise 2.0. McAfee talks about getting requests to evaluate specific products for their 2.0-newness...he rejects that as an empty exercise and instead checks the deployment environment for how it maps to measures of "freeform, frictionless and emergent."He is spot on target when he argues that not ALL enterprise systems have to be or should be freeform but there should be SOME system "in which employees and other constituencies could come together as equals to decide what topics were important for the company, and how to attack them." This also rings too true; "Too many corporate collaboration environments that I’ve observed, in contrast, come up short on the frictionless and freeform criteria. They make it far too difficult for prospective users to contribute, and they persist in slotting people into pre-assigned roles based largely on the formal org chart. In many cases they also impede emergence by having many small and mutually inaccessible environments, instead of one big one." Oh yeah. Why do we keep spending money on these systems, deploy them and the do absolutely NONE of the organizational design and change management  work necessary to have them work successfully in the enterprise. I tell people every time I talk about this that these systems are not culturally neutral - they attack hierarchies of information command and control and traditional ideas of 'expertise.' Its always amazing that even when we do bring IT to the table, we never think to bring HR but we'll prattle on about how this will change the way people work but we won't act like we might have to change the way they are rated and assessed. Sheesh.

So I found this piece of work from the North Carolina Office of State Personnel's Grapevine;  which ostensibly has the goal of providing "a vehicle to build community among personnel and to foster a professional environment of sharing and learning." It is a moderated forum and evidently a HEAVILY moderated forum  - I mean Judas H. Priest - put a foot on my neck and squeeze why don't you? Read these rules and then guess at the level of participation in this 'forum.'Don'tsDon’t use any speech that is inaccurate, unlawful, harmful, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane, hateful, racially or ethnically objectionable, personal attacks,antagonistic, threatening, abusive or harassing to other users or the general public.  **So, you're going to outlaw inaccuracies?Don’t post advertisements, solicitations, chain letters, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other unsolicited commercial communication.  **OK..that's fine...Don’t spam.  **Ooops. I think you guys just violated your own ruleDon’t use UPPERCASE - This is the same as shouting.  **REALLY?! WHO KNEW?!Don’t repeat information already provided.  **Glass houses.....Don’t dole out truism (You get what you pay for.). **That is a favorite. I would've gone with "Don't parse homilies" but this one is still good.Don’t overwhelm with information.  **Seriously? Really? You have the gall to publish a list of Do's and Don'ts with 32 rules on it and then include this? Really? The whole list is here.

I LOVE this. Turns out DISA (at the most simplistic, understated level - this ISP for   DOD) is having a little conference this spring and they've asked Gina Bianchini, the CEO of ning.com to give the keynote. So I love that now as people ask me about accessing things like social networking sites like ning from within DOD, I can say things like "well we may not be 100% of the way there but DISA had so-and-so for a keynote speaker, that must indicate something." ...and yes, you can get to ning.com from within DISA - from what little birds tell me.Keep in mind too that DISA is the agency behind Forge.mil, the DOD's version of SourceForge. So thanks to Bob Brewin and nextgov for the catch...great news.

(link)Hal Varian, professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley, says it's imperative for managers to gain a keener understanding of the potential for technology to reconfigure their industries.   "We're in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of "combinatorial innovation." So if you look historically, you'll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. In the 1800s, it was interchangeable parts. In 1920, it was electronics. In the 1970s, it was integrated circuits.   Now what we see is a period where you have Internet components, where you have software, protocols, languages, and capabilities to combine these component parts in ways that create totally new innovations. The great thing about the current period is that component parts are all bits. That means you never run out of them. You can reproduce them, you can duplicate them, you can spread them around the world, and you can have thousands and tens of thousands of innovators combining or recombining the same component parts to create new innovation. So there's no shortage. There are no inventory delays. It's a situation where the components are available for everyone, and so we get this tremendous burst of innovation that we're seeing."

I feel like I have been seriously neglecting this blog but its all Twitter's fault! I mean I've been really active on Twitter and it is soooo easy to pop in and out of that channel. I won't go into all the tools, people to follow, etc right now, except to say that not only is it easy but there is a great deal of "heat" - e.g. great stuff flying back and forth. If you're not in it, you're missing a large and growing part of the discussion. You can jump on here.

  This post by Scott Henderson at Media Sauce, outlines an important new effort to try and fight the problem of hunger in the United States. Launching tomorrow, Thursday March 5, is the Pledge to End Hunger site.  According to Scott, "By simply signing an online pledge to share the website with others, volunteer, and/or give, you will trigger a 35 lb food donation from Tyson. That means every person who joins the movement will help feed 140 children."Now come on. Put in on your calendar. Do it. help end hunger.

This post from Marketing Vox is a great piece for continuing the thread of how we can change conferences. They cite a survey that found that: Conference organizers are now planning more time for Q&A (72% more vs. three years ago), more interactive sessions between speaker and audience (70%), and more panel sessions (64%). At the same time, they plan fewer keynote sessions (30%) than three years ago. Business leadership conferences feature more podcasts (62%), blogging and Twittering during events (58%), as well as live videocasting (56%). Less common, though still noted, are YouTube broadcasts (34%) and "unconferences" (18%). Organizers are expanding or considering expanding their business into emerging markets such as China (32%), the Middle East (24%) and India (24%). So, as you head out and plan your conference activities, look to see if you are providing the appropriate infrastructure to support these functions.

Abstract: "Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the "declared" set of friends and followers."

I am all in favor of products that fit into existing workflow and have potential to make that workflow easier and/or faster. At first blush, A.nnotate seems to fall into that category. So the functionality is one that allows you to add comments, notes, etc to online documents - nice but I also like the thought they put into handing the notes. It appears that when you add a note, it goes into a private, searchable note index.All that is nice right but as I am reading their site, I'm thinking to myself, this is good but it will never fly with my organization. Really? You want us to load docs to your server AND load notes to your server as well? Not going to happen. THEN I got a great surprise when I clicked over to A.nnotate's "pricing" page and saw that one of their solutions is a "standalone" option with the service on an appliance that can be installed behind my firewall. Now I haven't even tried the free version of A.nnotate but I just want to say that it is refreshing to see a company that offers this right up front and not only that, they publish PRICES! Holy Cow A.NNOTATE, are you looking to turn things upside down?Here si the only problem with the pricing. The most expensive option only comes to about $10K for the first year and then $2K per year in maintenance after that. How am I ever going to be able to convince people that its worthwhile when it costs so little? :-)

I just bought this book and have started working through it - and the purchase was largely based on this interview. "Boellstorff makes the case that the counterpoint to virtual worlds is not the real world, but the actual. And that this virtuality includes two important things: it is virtual (of course, but he explores this with incredible insight and finesse) meaning that you are never QUITE there, and that this is incredibly important; and two, it is grounded in craft, in techne, and that virtual worlds may be a harbinger of a shift from a knowledge or information culture, into a craft-based one….or perhaps a mash-up of the two, what’s now coming to be known as "crafty knowledge"."I'm also happy to note that I said I was "working through this book" and just reading it. I like reading carefully researched work with footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies...I love work that pushes me down other avenues and I look forward to getting thru this book. **I should also include the link to Dusan Writer's Top 5 Virtual World Books.