(story link)"Open source software vendor Appcelerator has delivered the second preview release (PR2) of its rich Internet application platform for developers, called Titanium. As a way to help groups of developers collaborate more efficiently, the company has also thrown into PR2 Titanium Developer, social media and communications tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and a chat capability."So I didn't check while I was in Vegas on what the odds were on something that goes against AIR has but what do you all think? I know that its gonna be hard enough for me to get AIR past my IT people and it comes from Adobe. 

 So, the Chief of Staff at my little Defense Acquisition University came into my office late last week. This got my attention. He told me that he was aware that there were going to be some hiring needed to fill some new slots in our acquisition teaching corps. Then he said that he wanted to explore some of the more "2.0" ways that we could look for people to fill these slots. Part of reasoning is that these slots are kinda mid-career slots so the people looking at them might be early 30's maybe not long in terms of federal service or so on and they might be better tuned to those channels. I think he also just wants to try this stuff out that I've been talking about and see if it can actually do anything. Immediately, I put this call out to Twitter to see what I was missing or what ideas we could come up with. Here is what I got: 1. Twitter the jobs. Duh but thanks.2. LinkedIn. Good. That one could actually be productive.3. Listservs (Web Managers Listserv,) was the only one I could find - so if you have others and know the URL, lemme know4. Acquisition Community Connection: another easy one...So the meeting is tomorrow morning to review how we will do this...any last minute suggestions? Sen ;em in!Thx @govloop, @coelacanthro @adrielhampton @Quinnovator ...for the suggestions....

  (The Hero Factory)

This is so cool. Check out my network via Mailana.So you can put in your Twitter handle, your location or a search term like say "e-learning" and you get this awesome visual map back. Now according to this page, this network is using something like 210 million messages from almost 400,000 people. So what's cool about all this? Well, I'm still playing around with this but I find it very interesting that when you search on a term like "e-learning" - you get a map of the active conversations on Twitter on that topic. So you get to see who is talking to who, who is most active and you can even turn and go into those conversations. That's just tremendous. What's also tremendous is that this is just a demo of what Mailana is actually supposed to do. Evidently this tool was designed to extract meaning from corporate email systems. Now I want to get it installed at work! So now we get to the arrogant portion of the post - the part where I offer suggestions to someone as smart as Pete Warden about how to make this tool better - I want this as an AIR app...I want to see a drop down menu feature like the little gem in TweetDeck, I want that menu to allow me to follow people - maybe see their most recent tweets and so on...I want the "info" link to pop up the conversation in a side panel...Seriously, Mr. Warden, you've got like a mild form of attention-heroin here, with a little tweaking - it could become insanely addictive.

So, last week I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the TTI/Vanguard conference "re:Learning" in Washington, DC. Sure, I got to give my talk on virtual worlds and take questions from people like John Perry Barlow and Alan Kay (search Twitter for #ttiv for relevant Tweets) but we also got to see a demo from the forthcoming "Wolfram/Alpha Computational Search Engine" from Stephen Wolfram. This article is a nice write-up and actually has a couple links to other write-ups but in the interest of redundancy, I'll add my own. This is not a Google killer. They are different. Ask Google "coastline of England"and it'll return web pages that talk about the coastline of England. Ask W/A (sorry, just not going to type out 'Wolfram/Alpha' every time) that question and it will actually try to compute the distance of that coastline. Easy right? Its the difference between search and computation.The demos are fairly amazing in terms of the reults returned in terms of data display but there are some issues. The biggest one is that it currently runs on "Curated Data" - that is data sets that have been scrubbed specifically for the system. As I understand it, this process is partially automated and partially human-powered - that can present scaling issues. That doesn't bother me so much though because I really see this as an enterprise tool.So I work in Defense Acquisition - as you can imagine - our projects can generate HUGE amounts of data. Having access to a computational engine that would be able to troll that data and deliver answers not just search results could be ridiculously powerful. The bigger your data sets, the more powerful W/A becomes. My question(s) then is - what impact(s) do you see this having on or field? We all know how Google has impacted our learners (its their main tool for learning), what kind of impact will W/A have? Will wee need to teach different skills for dealing with an engine that computes versus searches?What kind of uses will be able to put this capability to inside our enterprise in support of our users?

This site just amazes me. Both the quality of the content and the quality of the UX design are exceptional. From the ability build playlists of courses to providing a citation for the video with 1-click to the "dim the lights" feature...this is so well done. I am working my way through the course on Game Theory. I watch the lectures, can grab the syllabus and do the reading if I choose and I can even look at past exams and solutions to past exams. The class video also includes the questions from the students and the professor's answers. So I am just wondering; does this raise deeper questions about the value of a university education? Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE universities, I love campuses and student unions and libraries and so on...some of my fav places in the world really - BUT - do we need to be a bit more honest about why students are paying to go there when all of this content/interaction is available? I mean if we extrapolate and see a day when all of a college's content is online like this...what the are you paying for with tuition? Student-to-student interaction? Teacher-to-student interaction? That's a shift isn't it? Then we're selling interactions and not content...and we can now engineer interactions in a whole myriad of ways...

Do you know what whuffie is? Do you have any? Can you spare some? Did you know that it came from a book and that there is a whole book about it? The whole idea is reputation-based currency. Instead of money, your ability to move through society is based on an aggregate score of how people regard you and your actions - the other catch is that this score - essentially your community-determined worth - is instantly and always visible to others. So when we are talking about implementing social media for learning within organizations, we can see the value of having something like whuffie right? I mean it would help us determine at a glance, how much we initially trust sources or data. It could also help re-structure entire organizations' hierarchies of expertise by making the basis of your 'organizational wealth'  - how much you are helping the organization. Dan Gillmor had a recent article on this and about how we could maybe begin to create an aggregate model by pulling in your eBay rating and maybe your ratings from other social network sites that you may be involved in. Got me thinking about how we could think about creating this kind of currency within organizations to help spur the use of social media...could we create a universal standard for this as a currency and those standards could just be applied to groups at an organization's discretion...and the REALLY important question...what could you spend your whuffie on?

(link) Excerpt: The U.S. government is taking a giant leap into the virtual realm with the creation of a parallel world intended for training, education and networking. What began as a platform to improve collaboration of emergency management personnel has evolved into a benefit for all government agencies. The project is government-owned and incorporates techniques and technologies unavailable in civilian efforts, offering a robust, powerful tool for conducting business."

So I'm doing a couple of things at DevLearn 2009 this year. I'm doing a pre-con workshop on Social Media and Learning and we're also doing a Social Learning Camp that will run throughout the conference. Of course I want to use Social Media to develop the ideas, themes and focal points for these events and I've always found that you can't really learn if something will work unless you actually try to use it for something - so here goes. I always liked using post-it notes and whiteboards (I know, how very 0.5 of me) for general organization of something so I like this metaphor that PinDax is using.The image you hopefully see below is a live view of the PinDax board I'm using to organize thoughts for DevLearn. The full board is here. It's not perfect - I want to be able to edit notes once they are posted and I want some way to export the whole thing to my desktop for an archive - but the price is right and I think its got some good functionality. I've checked with a couple of folks and while you should be able to view the site without signing up, you need to sign in to be able to leave a note- should take a few seconds - pls let me know if there are any problems. Anyway, once you are signed up, please feel free to add, move, comment, etc - there is also a synchronous chat app so we might check that out - but I do believe that We are better then Me at putting something like together and would love and value your input. Thanks and Happy Posting!

"Most forms of collaboration in the classroom are considered cheating." Henry Jenkins (video)

"Years of research have shown us that textbooks are among the least effective ways to teach, but they're in every classroom" James Paul Gee (video)

We've located a video that we think is the first one to come out of the initial area affected by the zombie outbreak. There is important information here. Critical. You really MUST watch this video. Seriously. Watch it

We already know that Zombies will be attacking...I mean just look at what they are doing to the logo! If you aren't already clues into that part of it, you can learn all about it here. Aside from fending off the undead, I could use a little help personally - if you're already headed out that way (and if you're not, registration is still open!) The main thing that I could use some help on is a little crowdsourcing for my Social Learning Workshop and Social Learning Camp.  I'm embedding a widget below that links to the post-it board I've been using to help develop the material for both of these. Please feel free to visit the site and contribute anything you think that fits - resources, links, success stories, strategies, etc. You're also more than welcome to use whatever you find on that site in crafting your own presentations, talks, whatever - I mean, this is supposed to be social right? :-) I guess that's it for now - except a blatant call to get on out to San Jose. This year's DevLearn is going to be awesome - great speakers - an alternate reality game and debrief - a Tweetbook already being planned - c'mon - you don't want to read about this one on Twitter. ;-)

You know, I always feel like I should just take a few days and watch all the videos from Pop!Tech. I soooo wanna be able to go to this conference one day but until then, I'll just feel glad that they post all this amazing material to the Web.  PopTech | Nina Jablonski from PopTech on Vimeo.

Social Networking Trends. ABC News interviews rep from Pew Internet Project. 

So I totally forgot about this yesterday! I am doing this Social Learning Camp at DevLearn 2009. OK. So, developing the materials for it here, yadda yadda. Anyway, we are going to be running quick (40 min) sessions throughout the conference on a bunch of different topics (you can see the schedule at the link above). We also have some real superstars coming through like Jay Cross, Koreen Olbrish, Mark Sylvester, Robin Paoli and Aaron Silvers - to talk about a range of Social Learning topics. Here is the kicker though - I can talk believe me - those of you that know me, know I am not kidding. Now I am more than thrilled, proud and happy to talk through the rest of the sessions but what I REALLY WANT TO DO - is use at least some of that other time as a bit of a 'BarCamp'  - that is - ping me somehow and let's work out a time and topic - case study - plea for help - strategies for implementation - for YOU to share with US. C'mon now, this is supposed to be SOCIAL so if you got two AWESOME slides and ideas you want to share - let's do it! You got a question you want answered? Bring it. Wanna vent? Rant? Well, OK but just watch the language. ;-) Anyway - let's make sure we use this time to get YOU what YOU need to take these ideas home and use them!

Ted Leonsis, for those who don't know, is a guy who made big bucks at AOL and is now owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team (CAPS Let's Go CAPS!) Ted also writes his own blog -really he does - and recently he posted this piece. In this post, Ted (yes, I call him Ted) asks if it ever does any good to blame the media for your troubles. He concludes that it isn't. He talks a lot about what he thinks you should be doing if you're in a position to need to control your image in the media and while that's helpful - I really like the article for what its not explicitly talking about.The fact that it is Leonsis presents us with a nice comparison. Look at the beating that Dan Snyder (owner of the Washington Redskins football team - who aren't doing very well) is taking right now. Do as Ted suggests and go Google "Ted Leonsis" and see what comes up and then Google "Dan Snyder" and see what comes up. It's clear which owner is shaping the message - by PARTICIPATING in it.   This is a central lesson about social media - people are already talking about the stuff they don't like and the policies they don't like - by not fully embracing not just the technology of social media but its attendant CULTURE of openness and transparency (as Leonsis recommends) all that happens is you prevent the sharing of all the good stuff.   I think one of the big pieces here that might get missed is that Leonsis is not talking about a technology shift - he is talking about a mental shift, a cultural shift, a shift in how he thinks about his relationship with the media. I'd humbly suggest that organizations looking to implement social media or social learning (whatever the current term of art is) are confronted with a similar option-make this about more technology or make it about changing your culture and using technology to help. If you are putting together a Social Learning plan are you budgeting for organizational design and change management issues? Have you thought about doing any ethnographic research before moving forward? Have you thought about how using these technologies might re-shape your corporate culture? We need to be thinking these things. These things are at the heart of what we need to do to really move forward.