I'm sensing something in the tabs. There is a shift in the flow of the infostream. Eddies of data are harboring tadpoles of nascent thoughts. I'm also listening to the Writer's Almanac every morning. Is it showing?  This isn't feeling like a calm highway merging...this feels like a confluence...the rumbling, jumbled, hydraulic coming together of two or more rivers...there are multiple flows...multiple possible, potential directions, but which flow will dominate...which water will run on top and get featured in all those awesome Instagram pictures of rivers with artsy film noir filters and which waters will run deep, silent, unnoticed except that they will be the currents actually carving into the landscape, changing the river bed, they will be the ones creating meander scars out of entire industries...was this last great burst powered by the underutilized remains of the infrastructure of the dotcom bubble? Too many servers then, too many Aeron chairs...what is the excess capacity waiting to be used as a platform for innovation now?  "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 am, surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning," Oyl Miller Is that what Sherry Turkle is warning us against in "The Flight from Conversation"? ..which ironically has spawned both connection and conversation...(Roth, Cormier,) ...and I must say, Dave C. , love your response. Is she warning us against these currents forming some sort of conversational fluvial delta with little or nor discernible direction except some vague 'that way'? What is Turkle's response to the great electronic saint McLuhan who said: "If a new technology extends one or more of our senses outside us into the social world, then new ratios among all of our senses will occur in that particular culture. It is comparable to what happens when a new note is added to a melody. And when the sense ratios alter in any culture then what had appeared lucid before may suddenly become opaque, and what had been vague or opaque will become translucent."  Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy Do electronic cyborgs dream  of electronic conversations?  In Alexis Madrigal's piece "The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future" ....he asks "now what?" are we just doing more of the same..more Facebooks..more FourSquares...more but not different....I sang the same lament when I was still in grad school studying history..the history of the last 5 years of the French literary underground..a movement built on writing but studied with at least a limited view toward context in Hatfield-McCoy level conflict with my anthropology where everything is connected, everything contextualized. Back to history.....now Commager-Steele, Tonybee, the Durants, Braudel...their works all had their faults but they were BIG. HUGE. Eleven, twleve volume histories of the World, or Civilization. Breathtakingly large. Remember the game manual for F-117a Stealth Fighter? 200 page monster that started with Bernoulli's Principle and ended with how to evade Russian-made SAM sites. We used to read The Stand...in paperback this beast was over 1300 pages. Now we're telling stories 140 characters at a time. There's nothing inherently wrong with that but does it lead us to the punchline of telling the story of an elephant one part at a time? I think this more when I see an article for  One sentence pitch winners.......the idea that we now have contests to reduce the essence of a new startup into one sentence...and celebrate those who have thought small enough to be able to reduce their idea to a phrase. Or are we enagaging that principle whereby constraints make for great creativity (see one of my fav stories, The Microcosmic God)? Paul Graham hands out "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" ...like replace email (ok)...replace universities (there we go)...couple that with the Atlantic's special report on "The Broken Promise of American Education" ....and a little ditty I just wrote and I start to think that maybe education really is in for it.   I remember that the kind of unspoken defintion of history is the record of change over time....are we possibly moving into a time, the singularity if you will, when things are moving too fast for huge leaps forward...we're into pattern recognition phase now...wonder if there isn't some corllary to when Man first made the shift from Hunter/Gatherer to Agriculure....are we waiting for our inherent human capabilities to catch up to this new environment? do we have to reconfigure our socio-economic systems to allow some in our tribe to stay home from the subsistence-level infohunts and work on flint-napping some knowledge out of all these stones? "We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition" ― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns." Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!by Douglas Coupland With Men spending less time together on the hunt because some were now back at this new thing called the village...did they lament the weakening of social ties or did they view it as simply the new status quo and invent new social forms, mores and rituals to shore it back up? "We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 294 (that's what is known as "citing" someone...not just "quoting" them...see the difference?)   Are synthesizers the new flint napping shaman....are they the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery's Global Multimedia Protocol Group? Do they get to stay at home while the tribe hunts across the plains of Google and Twitter and Facebook? Is that where we start building the cognitive and cultural infrastructure for the next big leap?  Wow...I didn't even get to the "New Aesthetic" ....next time people.....

So hi everyone. OK, not going to try and hide it - I'm totally jacked. Psyched. Pumped. Whatever. <Insert favorite "I'm very excited" superlative here.> Today is my first day at Socialtext. If you want, I'll tell you all about them but if you've known me for a while, you've probably already heard me talk about them. If you want the 'human speak' version, they we make an outstanding platform that allows you to find the people you need to work with and then get your work done faster and better so you can get out when you need to and get home in front of traffic. I could throw in a lot of words like collaboration, enterprise, customer-facing, intranet, and so on but really - they we help you work better. My job is going to be working with the customers of Socialtext to help make sure that their visions are realized and that they get the benefits they are looking for. I may even help point out some ways that our platform can help them that they may not have even thought of yet. I'm sneaky like that. I'll still blog occassionally, tweet prolifically, post photos to flickr and keep trying to figure out the best way to use G+. I still have an about.me page and am still loving my Scoop.it site called It's All Social. Honestly, I also feel like I'm doing what I should be doing, helping people and organizations figure out the best way to use an outstanding piece of software to perform better.As always, thanks for reading!    

I'm re-reading Starship Troopers. I just love this book. This book talked about an army of Iron Men years before Stan and Jack introduced us to Tony Stark. It covers everything from racism to gender equality to how society establishes the voting franchise for its citizens. Oh, and then there are the armored suits with shoulder-launched atomic weapons, drop capsules and bug hunts. Those are all analogies too but they're also wicked cool. Anyway, this got me thinking that re-reading something like Starship Troopers (having never watched more than 10 minutes of that disgraceful movie) might be some sort of cultural marker of being a geek. That got me wondering, what other markers might I have lurking in my background that might indicate a certain geekiness. Let's see what I found.  I am a second generation member of the Science Fiction Book Club. I cut my teeth on Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, Anderson, Sturgeon - HARD science fiction as it was called, FTL drives and event horizons (then those new guys Vinge, Gibson and Stephenson got into the act). None of this vampire love story crap. Hari Seldon is a hero. I know Asimov's pen name that he used to write the Lucky Starr series.  I started out usually as an Elf (got a thing for bows), Lawful Neutral. When PC games hit, the ones I bought came in ziplock bags with mimeographed instructions and 5.25 disks. My first programming experience was BASIC on an Apple IIe. Wrote a whole branching text game using that. That was after my dad had showed me how to use his  FORTRAN flow chart template.   I've built crystal radio sets on Christmas morning, put together desktop computers from the chassis out, while debating which power source was better than another. I remember when modem speeds jumped from 14.4 and dreamed heady dreams of 28.8 days to come. Remember when the first 1GB hard drive came out and we all thought - what the hell would you ever need that kind of storage for? I date most things in my childhood development as either happening before or after 1977 because that's when Star Wars came out. I subscribed to Star Wars monthly and use the posters as wallpaper. I watched every episode of Space 1999 and to me, Battlestar Galactica stars Lorne Green. I know what all the buttons on the steering wheel of the Mach 5 do and my favorite was always the robot bird. I knew what every round in Logan's gun did (there were 6 different ones). I dreamed of becoming a Ninja Hacker Overlord or maybe the Kwisatz Haderach or maybe just a Stranger in a Strange Land. I devoured every issue of OMNI magazine and wish I still had them - it'd be cool if WIRED featured sci-fi writing like OMNI did.  There is a first edition of Seduction of the Innocent sitting on my bookshelf and I can say things like Excelsior! and Wonder Twin Powers Activate! with complete confidence. There is a table in my office that is actually just boxes of comic books with a table cloth on top of them. I used to mark major changes in the economy by increases in the cover price of my comics. When I went on a tour of the FBI building (when they still used to do that), I'm pretty sure I was the only one in the group that recognized Jack Kirby's artwork on the wall. I have a Flaming Carrot action figure, love the Tick, Arthur and the Man-Eating Cow. I think Demon in a Bottle is possibly one of the best story arcs ever and yes, I still have my pull list at local comic book store.  Wizardry was a constant companion from Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord to the Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I remember being in a open field to the west of a white house. I finally found the Coconut of Quendor while upstairs in my fraternity house's computer room while there was party going on downstairs. I'll never forget that when I typed "get Coconut"  - my inventory was too full. I've had pets named Jason (of the Argonauts not Friday the 13th), Romulus, Remus and Loki. I have a dog named Gambit and used to have a dog named Remy LeBeau.  Saw Videodrome, in the theater. Could watch Scanners right now. I love Peter Jackson because he made the movies we all saw in our heads when we read Lord of the Rings. I got my hands on a bootleg VHS copy of Highlander from Japan because it had like an extra 3 minutes on it (the part about where he got his secretary).  Winsock, Telnet and Pine - that's how you got to email. Mosaic? That was one sexy beast. I remeber when most of the places I went online started with alt.binaries. I've owned a C-64 and a TRS-80. Atari console? Sure. Activision? No doubt. Dreamcast? Yeppers (worst controller ever). PS1, 2 and 3? Done, done and done.  There for a while, I never used to have to spend quarters in the arcade because I had the high monthly scores on Tempest and Red Baron. I also rocked Robotron 2084 and Galaga, was pretty good at Joust but some kid was better. I was also in the KISS Army and yes, had all their solo albums.  My first credit as a published author is a chapter in The Cyborg Handbook entitled "From Captain America to Wolverine: Images of Cyborgs in Comic Books." I had another piece published in grad school that talked about the cultural meaning inscribed on PEZ and have about 300 of those sitting around (the ones without the feet are the older ones).  While I was in the Pentagon, I delivered briefings with images of Johnny Mnemonic and DOOM. I have this tendency to decorate my office with blown up maps from XKCD, like the one of IPv4 and one of my favorite things that sits on my desk is a little solid metal statue of Gort. Whenever I shop, I shop smart at S Mart and I will leave Jack Burton out of this. I have a son who is using Netflix to work his way through all the Dr Who that's available and earlier this year I got him the complete set of Ultraman episodes.  Now things change to be sure. They always do. But as I sit here typing this post in a hoodie from 2012's DragonCon, I reckon that I can still hang with some geeks...On the Bounce and By The Numbers!

A few days ago I tweeted a question about why Peter Senge never seemed to be mentioned in learning circles along with folks like Bloom, Gagne, and Kirkpatrick. : #crowdbooster told me that I was RT'd 7 times on that tweet and reached a potential audience of about 18,000 people. Exactly zero replies though. I mean I can attribute part of that to people saw the tweet and just didn't know what to say or that I am generally very easy to ignore. Either way, it was a point of interest for me.  I don't work squarely in the learning and training field anymore and am quite happy being in the social media for the enterprise space and working for an awesome company like Socialtext. I still think though about L&D from the standpoint of social being the glue that brings together vectors like HCM, L&D and more. I also have 10+ years of experience in L&D and can't quit looking at some things through that lens.  So I have to ask - why no Senge? I have been to conference after conference in the L&D world and I don't think I have ever come across a single session on Senge, the Fifth Discipline or his ideas of a "learning organization." I am confused by that. I have seen session after session on how to think about adult learning, cognitive overload, game-based learning - full disclaimer - I've done quite a few of those presentations myself.  Here is what I'm confused by - why haven't we been talking more about "learning organizations"? Have we and I've just been missing it? (entirely possible) Its just seems to be that approaching this discussion from a holistic standpoint make so much sense. It puts L&D in a strategic role across the organization - places L&D in a central role of generating a competitive advantage - this seems to be a much stronger organizational position that fighting for some loosely defined and poorly appreciated ROI.   While we're at it - where is Chris Argyris and Overcoming Organizational Defenses - the subtitle of which is Facilitating Organizational Learning - I mean am I just being a rube here? Did I miss some big discussion that went on before I got here in which we all agreed that these people wouldn't be brought up? Because honestly, I almost want to believe that happened as opposed to the other idea which is that we've just ignored this stuff.  So this is a little plea to go along with my tweet - wassup y'all? 

Like a lot of people, I read Anil Dash's "The Web We Lost" and I read Hugh MacLeod's corollary piece. I'm split on how I feel here. The essence of both pieces, if I may be so bold as to try and boil down thoughts by folks like Dash and MacLeod, both of whom I respect greatly, is that the Web used to be cool and open and edgy and egalitarian and now, now its not. Or not as much. But its still cool and it can still be cooler. Or cool again. And edgy. And egalitarian. Again.  I don't want to play Devil's Advocate but I kinda feel like someone should. We may have indeed lost some things but we have gained many as well. Everyone I know now is online somehow. Back in the good ole days, it was no mean feat to actually meet people who didn't live online like I did. I like that. I like that more and more people are experiencing a networked world. I think the more minds the better.  So what if Technorati isn't exactly what it used to be? We have analytics out the YinYang for Twitter, Facebook and every other network we're on. Why don't the Walled Garden nuance of these new networks bother me? Because simply the barriers to replacing them have never been lower.  Anil laments what it will take for us to teach a new generation what it was like for us when the Web was cooler. You ever hear of Neoterics? Probably not. They're in this amazing story by Theodore Sturgeon called "Microcosmic God." (copy of it here on Scribd [a new network we've gained]). The idea is that this scientist invents a race of beings that cycle through a generation in something like 8 days. That means that problems that take us multiple generations to find answers to (meaning decades and decades) - the Neoterics could find in the same number of generations but that would mean something like a month. We are the Neoterics. Anil doesn't need to worry about explaining the way the Web used to be to a new generation - we've already cycled through multiple Web generations since say 1995. Web generations are not lived in human years, they're lived in Internet Time (hi Jay Cross et al) and in Internet Time, its been multiple multiple generations since The WELL, AOL, Web rings, the primacy of blogs, and Web 1.0.  Now I'm thinking about my fav passage from William Gibson, @GreatDismal, and his book Pattern Recognition: "We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition"  This is where we are. Between Neoterics and Pattern Recognition...we go forward...we don't look back so much...we rapidly iterate and we do so in a world of ever-shrinking barriers of entry. Ever seen this great collage of businesses and the garages they were started in? We don't need garages any more. We don't need office space. We need a power outlet and WiFi and we'll start the next network that will suplant Facebook. Or Twitter. and when we tire of them, we'll tear them down, chew them up and grow something new. We haven't "lost" anything...we've moved on. 

I'm soooo onboard with this post. (*You REALLY have to go and read the whole post) I do want to say though that Google Glass is like when you really think about if there were superheroes wouldn't they address global issues in-between super-villain threats. ..here is a company with untold billions and influence and the greatest thing it can come up with are some cool glasses that let people look at twitter without using their phone. Awesome. Nice legacy.  

From the latest issue of First Monday: "There is a chance that Wikiversity will become the Internet’s free university just as Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia on the Internet. The building of an educational entity demands considering a number of philosophical and practical questions such as pedagogy and organization. In this paper we will address some of these, starting by introducing several earlier approaches and ideas related to wikis’ potential for education. We continue by presenting three commonly used metaphors of learning: acquisition, participation and knowledge creation. Then we will present the main principles of two existing alternative educational approaches: free adult education and free school movement. To test these educational approaches and practices on Wikiversity and increase our understanding of the possibilities of this initiative, in the spring of 2008 we implemented an experimental course in Wikiversity. We conclude with several recommendations essentially advocating for Wikiversity and the use of wikis in education. However, more than just presenting our opinions, as authors we aim to make an educated — traditionally and in the wiki way — contribution to the international discussion about the future of education for all in the digital era."

Yes, I watched the whole thing. The animation appropriately tells the riveting story.

From the McKinsey Quarterly: The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale What’s in the workflow is what gets used Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets The right solution comes from the right participants Balance the top-down and self-management of risk I like point number 3 - what's in the workflow is what gets used. The key here is to work the process to include the new technology and prove that this is more effective. If you have a culture that is aligned with Web 2.0, this task just gets easier. See Google for example. "Google is an instructive case to the contrary. It has modified the way work is typically done and has made Web tools relevant to how employees actually do their jobs. The company’s engineers use blogs and wikis as core tools for reporting on the progress of their work. Managers stay abreast of their progress and provide direction by using tools that make it easy to mine data on workflows. Engineers are better able to coordinate work with one another and can request or provide backup help when needed. The easily accessible project data allows senior managers to allocate resources to the most important and time-sensitive projects."

"IdeasProject, a project of Nokia, brings together the most visionary and influential 'big thinkers' to contemplate exactly these questions, in a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering not only the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications, but also the connections these disruptive ideas. The conversation contemplates what technologies, applications and themes will most change out culture and communications -- and shows us the ideas, the people, and how their ideas are connected - sometimes in the most surprising ways."

Clark Quinn writes about 'minimalist instruction'. And I subscribe to it. We're living in a day and age where the information to 'fill in the gaps' can be assembled easily. We have to focus on the essentials of the learning. "We develop full courses to incorporate motivation, practice, all the things non-self-directed learners need. But there are times when we need to provide new information and skills to self-directed learners. When we’re talking to practitioners who are good at their job, know what they’re doing and why, and know that they need to know this information and how they’ll apply it, we can strip away a lot of the window dressing. We can just provide support to a SME so that their talk presents the relevant bits in a streamlined and effective way, and let them loose. That, to me, is the role of rapid elearning."

The Cognitive Daily has a nice test that shows the experts do not really remember more stuff than non-experts; they just remember more details.

A wealth of ideas in this talk by Sir Ken Robinson on personal talent, education and more. Wonderful stuff. [Via e-wot].

Steve Baty has written a detailed article on analyzing research findings. I do agree with him that we don't have many analysis techniques in the interaction design literature. Here are the analysis techniques he describes. Deconstruction Manipulation Transformation Summarization Aggregation Generalization Abstraction Synthesis

Jakob Nielsen provides timeless advice for online writing: Assume your information will be used out of context. Content might be either displayed in different contexts or users might read only a selected bit of the full page. (The hints above can help you determine whether your information works out of context.) Modularize your information, so that each content chunk addresses a single issue. If you cover two things in one chunk, the second will often be overlooked. Use specific language. Concrete terms are more likely to help people who have a different perspective on the content. Generic or broad terms can be misinterpreted — or overlooked, as we saw in the example.

Matthew Clark writes about the components of a web collaboration model: Collaboration is action-oriented. People must do something to collaborate. They may exchange ideas, arrange an event, write a report, lay bricks, or design some software. To collaborate is to act together and it is the combined set of actions that constitutes collaboration. Collaboration is goal-oriented. The reason for working together is to achieve something. There is some purpose behind the actions: to create a web site, to build an office block, to support each other through grief, or some other human goal. The collaborators may have varying motivations, but the collaboration per se focuses on a goal that is shared. Collaboration involves a team. No-one can collaborate alone. Collaboration requires a group of people working together. The team may be any size, may be geographically co-located or dispersed, membership may be voluntary or imposed, but there is at least some essence of being part of the team. Collaboration is co-ordinated. That is, the team is working together in some sense. The co-ordination may follow some formal methodology, but can equally well be implicit and informal. There needs to be some sense at least that there are a number of things to be done, some sequences of actions, some allocation of tasks within the group, and some way to combine the contributions of different team members.

Peter Tittenberger and George Siemens have crafted the Handbook of emerging technologies for learning wiki with a goal of helping educators use new technologies in their teaching and learning activities.

An article by Christina Wodkte published in A List Apart on the 3 attributes of social architecture and how to cater for it: Identity, Relationships; and Activity. "While your designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. The psychologist Kurt Lewin developed an equation that explains why people do the crazy things they do. Lewin asserts that behavior is a function of a person and his environment: B=f(P,E). You can’t change a person’s nature, but you can design the environment he moves around in. Let’s explore some of Alexander’s patterns I’ve observed in my work and the design work of my fellow practitioners."

Issue 1 of the Journal of IA is now available for download. Here are the contents: Dorte Madsen's Editorial - Shall We Dance? Gianluca Brugnoli - Connecting the Dots of User Experience Helena Francke - Towards an Architectural Document Analysis Andrew Hinton - The Machineries of Context James Kalbach - On Uncertainty in Information Architecture

Patrick Walsh continues his analysis of managing intranets the lean way and comparing it to how car manufacturers manage their factories the lean way. "So, there you have it. Basically, in the Lean Intranet, information professionals will be removing barriers, minimising and assessing content and continually improving their intranet using a customer-focused approach. Hard to achieve? I won't say that the transition to a lean approach in intranets will be without problems but I know it's possible. I've seen ‘lean' working for many years in the automotive sector helping to produce better cars through more efficient processes. Why not better, more efficient intranets?"

Jakob has grouped his article around two issues: structure and navigation. His views around structure are the same I come across in IA projects: Why focus so much on structure when we have such an fantastic (read 'expensive') search engine? "The most notable structural problem is when designers treat a site like one big swamp with no organizing principle for individual items. Yes, users can fish the swamp using search or by following links from current promotions or outside sites. But whatever they dredge up is it. No opportunities for understanding the site's other offerings or locating related items."

Craig Bromberg writes about the recent blog entries on Content Strategy (CS) and tries to make sense of one angle: big and little CS. As far as I can see, this is the real differentiator between CS and most other content work: Unlike traditional editorial work, content strategy isn’t steeped in grand narratives so much as in bits, in data. "CS big" isn’t custom publishing (although there are definitely narrative and brand strategies one wants to be aware of). And "CS little" isn’t just those deliverables: content without context, from the container to the brand, is all essential if you want to sell in the Googlesphere.

Erick Schonfeld analyses the changing pattern of content on the web. First it was all about 'pages' and now it is about the 'stream'. It started with RSS and now its galloping ahead with Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and the like. "Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled."

Alexis Wichowski traces the emergence of tagging and how it relates to other information organization systems. "Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information "survival" — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies."