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

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

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

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

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

(The picture is where all the good ideas happen :-)) The premier episode of "Root and Branch" focused on how I thought that while brilliantly written by Dan Pontrefact, Marcia Conner and Kerry Brown, their piece; Revolutionize Corporate Learning, didn't go far enough. Now I'm thinking that I need to go further as well.   So let's say we change the names of the products/activities that we're talking about to something more reality based - instead of e-learning we'll call it "training" or "performance support" or "collaboration"...then we've changed the curriculum of all the ISD programs in the country to reflect new design sensibilities and to incorporate the latest research on things like how people remember (HT to Jay Cross). After we've done all that, we've also basically convinced the rest of the organization that training is a good thing yadda yadda. You might think we're at ne plus ultra but I don't think so.  The first additional hurdle is organizational structure. This article is a great start to thinking about new organizational structures.....the sad truth is though that 99% of the org.s out there, even the ones talking a good game are still organized in a way that Frederick Taylor would easily recognize. There isn't a whole lot of room in that structure for outside-the-box thinking trainers to move and innovate so even if we've changed all the other stuff, we're still stuck with an Industrial Age system of lines and channels (see also: Silos of Excellence). The second bonus hurdle is our system of accounting. If you thought using an Industrial Age org model was bad, how about a system of accounting that was codified  in the 15th century by a Franciscan friar? Ever get a look at those books? Tell me how people are accounted for. Simple, they're liabilities. They are a drain on the profits of the organization. What's amazing is that in the face of such widespread reaction to and recognition of things like a "talent war" and trying to recruit and retain the best and brightest - at the very base level of finances, we still regard and treat people as liabilities. Want to know why it's hard to do ROI on training efforts? One reason is because it's hard to look at the ROI on a liability. Have you ever seen a spreadsheet that reflects an uptick in the value of an employee because they completed a training course? Maybe org.s need what those of us who've been playing RPG's for most of our lives are super familiar with...the character sheet...tell you your attributes, skills, points to the next level.  So...semantics, curriculum, marketing, organizational structure, accounting methods...that's starting to be a good list for a revolution. 

I have a Mini Cooper (that's it under the snow - Winter IS Coming). Great car. Over 100K miles on it and I just keep putting oil, gas and tires in/on it and it just keeps going (knock on wood). I've also had a lot of cars - not like a Jay Leno lot of cars but a regular amount I guess. Here's the twist though - when I bought my Mini, one of the things that I got was a username/password to the "Mini Owner's Lounge"...then when I was driving around, I noticed that other Mini drivers would wave...it dawned on me that I was part of a community. So let's fast forward to now. The car does have a lot of miles and I am looking around but now I have a different decision to make - do I not only buy a new car (other than a Mini) and if I do, that also means I have to leave a community...I have to choose to not be a "Mini Owner" anymore.  How many people do you think feel that way about your products? Do your clients feel like they are part of a community? Do you think that it would be difficult for them to leave because they feel so linked to you? Let me ask this a different way - what is the cost (your sales team should know this answer) for your company to acquire a new client and what is the cost to keep an existing client? So when someone asks you what the possible ROI scenarios are for training  - think about crafting a response that includes customer-facing efforts to train/educate your customers...then <gasp> think about letting your customers train/help/educate each other...help them build a community that'll be hard for them to leave. Become social don't just do social. 

When in the course of human events.... As a nation, the United States declared its independence from Britain over 230 years ago. I've been thinking this 4th of July weekend about independence on a more personal level. First, I'll say that being independent does not equal being alone, in fact I couldn't think about declaring independence from these things without my wife and partner - I'm thinking more about things I want to break away from.  I want to declare independence from holding myself back; sounds trite and very "successory" I know but sometimes there's a grain of truth in there. I will say that I've already done some work in that area and I feel lighter than I have in years. Some of that is physical, I'm literally lighter than I have been in a while - I'm a stress eater so getting into great shape tells me that I'm on the rigth track. My soul feels lighter too. My son has made great strides in school - he made honor roll 3 out of 4 times this year and I could not be more proud. My wife and I have also been tossing out some literal and emotional junk that we've held onto for years. It's amazing how when you dump, slough and toss all that extraneous crap out, you're able to focus on what's really important and what really makes you happy.  So I'm declaring my independence from the following:  From quantity over quality From things that suck life out of you instead of building you up From fearing to succeed From not trusting people  - especially people I really should trust There's more I'm sure but that's a good start. So since we're here, about halfway through the year and consequently about halfway from our New Year's Resolutions, I think this is a good time to think about declaring independence. I'd like to encourage all my non-US friends to join in too :) What will you be declaring independence from?

So this morning, I had a not-so-random thought. Inspired by a comment made by Eugene Eric Kim - the thought went like this:  "Organizational learning" never took hold because we are unwilling to envision new orgs & we don't know what we mean when we say "learning" I tweeted it, G+'d it and "updated" on LinkedIn (what do we call that anyway?)...I did it on all those channels because I think I'm part of some different communities on each and wanted to see what each had to say. That was about 4 hours ago...to date, ut's been retweeted twice, had one like on LinkedIn and over on G+, has sparked two conversations in two different communities with one now up to 22 comments.  The big lesson I'm taking away here is that I need to make more of an effort to engage with folks on G+...but hey Twitter, still a couple more hours to go ;-)

Every week over on G+, I'm on a panel hosted and organized by the wonderful @LizCpher and @davidchris via Stop.Think. Social. One recurring theme is that "social" isn't something you do but something you become.  I think this is a critical point. This is what separates social systems from other enterprise-wide systems. No one ever had to ask about "becoming" a payroll system. I talk to folks all the time though who think that the all you have to do is buy and deploy a social platform and poof! you're a social business. (BTW, if you'd like to talk about Socialtext/Peoplefluent's offerings, I'd be happy to ;-)). Well its not true, to become social means to change any number of things about how you think about your business. There are whole books in here about this, 11 Rules for Creating Value in a #SocialEra is a good one. The point to this rambling post though is that I have one really good example of how far down this has to go. Follow this link to the Valve Software Employee Handbook. Find out why the desks have wheels. Find out how far your company needs to go to become social - it's not about technology. 

(from Full Metal Jacket) Colonel:Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man!Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir!Colonel: The what?Private Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir!Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?Private Joker: Our side, sir!Colonel: Don’t you love your country?Private Joker: Yes, sir!Colonel: Then how ‘bout getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?     There is a great discussion that started over on Facebook, migrated to G+ and now I want to blog about it...kind of the Oregon Trail of content. It stars a lot of my favorite folks (Greg Lowe @Greg2dot0, Luis Suarez @elsua, Richard Rashty @richardrashty) and it was this last comment of Richard's that prompted this little post.  To avoide a 1:1 scale recap - let me just say that we had come around to point about who owns "social" efforts and who should and so on - this is where the duality thing comes in (I know you were wondering). I find myself saying a lot of things like "social is different" but it is and here are some of the ways it has a dual nature.  Social is not reliant on any one tool, but often tools (like Socialtext for instance ;-)) can lend scale and speed and additional capabilities to efforts to make more of the organization visible and transparent. So we need at least two owners - we are going to need an owner who writes the check and an owner (can be the same as the first) who makes sure that all the tech details (LDAP integration, SSO, etc) are mapped out. THEN we're going to need someone (hopefully not the first owner) to "Own" the effort within the company to change behaviors to use th new system. Ideally senior leadership will jump in and start using it but if it's not them at first, it will need to be someone and that someone will have to be passionate about it. I don't want IT to take this wrong way but I agree with Richard that IT should not own the cultural side of social. It's too important and it has too much to do with changing behaviors to be lodged in any department, I believe, below the CEO level.  When implementing an Enterprise Social Network (ESN) one time, I was asked by senior leadership what I needed to make this effort successful. I knew what the question meant - how much money do you need to buy this? I responded the best way I could, I said "all I need is for you to change the way you work." Now who will own THAT?  

(Spoiler alert) I just finished re-reading Ender's game and now I can't wait to see the movie. I hope Harrison Ford nails Graff and Rackham is played to the hilt by Sir Ben and I hope that the relationship between Valentine and Peter comes through as important as it is but all that isn't really the critical part. What I hope they get right and why I'll go see this movie even though I find Scott Card's personal beliefs appalling is that the core of the book isn't Buggers or Battlerooms or games that aren't games (cue music of Games w/out Frontiers), it's about understanding. That's what Ender's genius was. That's the heart of the book (and the next two btw) and in bringing THAT, that lesson across, I hope the movie makers are truly successful. I also hope that in an Ender-like twist Scott Card has been too clever by half. He has created a compelling hero whose genius is to so completely understand an alien race that he can think as they do. Ender's message is the antithesis to Scott Card's. The Locke to his Demosthenes if you will. If the movie brings that message out, that will be awesome and inspiring and if it doesn't but it inspires more people to read the book, the same goes. It has already inspired more and more conversation around the topic of human rights and I'll always think that's a good thing. So yes, I'll support with my patronage, any message or story where the hero is gifted with the ability to understand and to even love those who might be seeking to hurt him. Hmmm, where have I read another story with a hero like that? Namaste y'all.

Thinking out loud.....From Vintage Tomorrows:  "A subculture is a group of people whose values or behavior set them apart from the cultural mainstream. A counterculture is a subculture that seeks to change mainstream culture. Fact: steampunk is a subculture. Hypothesis: steampunk is a counterculture. Keep an eye out for change." I think we have a truckload of subcultures but I think we need a more unified counterculture. Unified is the wrong word. I'm interested in change, change at a large scale. I think that the 'net is great at creating subcultures or allowing them to bloom but is it the same for countercultures? We also talk a lot about cultures in organizations...what about sub and countercultures inside organizations?  What are elements that can be present in counter and subcultures that can make them more or less appealing? 

I've been to a lot of conferences and so much that is good about getting that many people together are the conversations that happen. I think that applications like the brilliant Intronetworks are great ways to start those conversations beforehand and maintain them afterwards but I've never really seen anything click in that "during" phase.  So we're missing a way to powerfully surface conversations but the good news is that we're not missing a chance for it. Almost every conference with an expo floor also has a reception on that expo floor at some point during the conference. How about this.... First, let's stock that reception with craft beers or craft bourbons (ok, that part isn't critical but I thought I'd include it just in case). Second, we get rid of the drink tickets (don't worry, we'll get to them evetually). Now instead of just getting drink tickets, there is a huge whiteboard or mural-sized slab of paper and baskets and baskets of the finest post-it notes.  The way you 'earn' drink tickets is by writing down and posting ideas from conversations you've had, want to have, people you want to meet, etc. You can also earn tickets by using the yarn that's also available to make connections between the post-it notes.  You're right though - we have to have some QA here so I see people standing off to the side/mingling/browsing, watching what you post and the connections you make and voting somehow (cheers, hisses?) based on the quality of your addition. That's right, your role in the community isn't just to add content but to help the community evaluate that content - think of it as live curation.  The only other piece I'll add is that I'd like this board/process be running from after breakfast on the first day. OK, so we good? 

I know how trite it is to go all definitional and all but it's my blog so I'll cut myself some slack. So from Merriam-Webster we have for technology: 1 a : the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area     b : a capability given by the practical application of knowledge; 2 : a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge 3 : the specialized aspects of a particular field of endeavor Therefore, what we do is technology - therefore it follows (at least to my simple mind) that when I read in a book like Vintage Tomorrows the following quote, I have to think it applies to us and to what we do.  "We learned that people really do want a different relationship with their technology. They don't see technology as a cold dead thing that is cut off and separated from people. When you grow up with a smartphone in your pocket, technology is a part of your daily life.......We learned that people want their technology to have a sense of humor, a sense of history and most importantly a sense of humanity." This is all a long way to go to ask a simple question; if what we do is technology and this is what people want from their technology, how are we using these deeply held human desires as design principles?

Seriously, it's like Vogon Poetry: "masterful article which i trek be conversant with against a long-winded savoir faire i metamorphose into solidly bookmark it on holler thanks representing this brobdingnagian souvenir" Right?! Probably too long for a t-shirt. 

Today was the end of something quiet and amazing. This was the 9th anniversary of and the end of the road for a regular call hosted by Jerry Michalski (@jerrymichalski) and co-founded by Jerry and Pip Coburn. The call was named Yi-Tan and as Jerry informed us every week, that means conversations about change in Mandarin.  Ostensibly the call focused on tech issues like the Commons, changes in UI, the Singularity, the State of the World - small topics. Subversively though, the call was a community, a space...a space in which people from all stripes and walks came together to listen, talk and debate (gently). It was quite remarkable really.  Much of the credit for the remarkable nature of the space came directly from Jerry. Rarely do you get to meet someone of such rare gifts; intelligence of breadth and depth, a quick wit, an ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate items and somehow make those connections seem obvious without making the rest of us (me really) feel slow for not seeing them earlier. Layer that with an amazingly generous personality and you get someone and something special. Thanks Jerry for making that possible.  Now let's be clear - Jerry isn't dying (no more than any of us are) - he isn't going to another planet (or at least he won't tell us) and a large part of the call today focused on what could become of the space and conversations that Yi-Tan had created and hosted. We're still working on that but it should be testament to the impact of Yi-Tan that nobody on the call today really wanted to let it go. I hope to be a part of whatever comes after this and I'm willing to help out in any small or big way I can - 9 years on and this conversation isn't stale, hasn't degenerated into partisan arguments or personal attacks - that kind of achievement needs to be remembered and in some other form, continued.  That's all except that I wanted to write about it and make sure that maybe a few more people knew about it. I was always torn about telling people about it. On the one hand, you want to bring more people in to share but on the other hand, you kind of want to guard it. So I'll close with thanks again to Jerry and Pip and leave you with these links that you should use: Yi-Tan: the main site and home to an archive of all the past calls REX: the Relationship Economy Expedition (Jerry's ongoing venture) Make me 12 Again: an amazing talk Jerry gave on rebuilding our education system Jerry's Brain: No, seriously.     

Now I'm normally not one of these folks who goes to get the mail and the writes a blog posts about the penetrating insights gleaned from a typically, mundane task BUT this is different; here are the moments that struck me.  Everybody (ok, not everybody but a lot of people) are running for someone else. I was honored to be invited to run on "Team TJ" - a group of friends and family who run to remember SPC Thomas J Barbieri of the 82nd Airborne, who was killed on August 23, 2006 in Iraq. I never knew TJ but I know one of his brothers and let me tell you, if you don't think it makes a difference to run a race like this with someone's name on your back who died in the service of this country, well then I guess we just come from radically different places. I know the couple of times I thought about feeling tired, I thought about our fighting men and women not having that luxury and I kept my civilian butt moving.  One of the speakers at the start of the race was a Special Olympian. I never knew but now I'll never forget the Oath of the Special Olympics. "Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." I'm getting choked up just thinking about that moment. Again, it was one of those events that pierces the fog of worrying about your shoes or if your number is on right and makes you remember that if the greatest physical challenge you face is feeling sore or achy, then you need to stop and remember how lucky and blessed you truly are.  I was also reminded that the running community is incredibly supportive and encouraging. Everywhere along the route people were cheering runners on and runners were looking out for runners too and congratulating people and keeping them motivated. At the end of the day, all of us were really competing against ourselves. I wish that happened more in more places.  Lastly, I learned that if you train and prepare then you need to trust in your abilities and let go and just run. The Blerch can suck it. 

Keep being thankful...and do something. I'm sorry I didn't start doing that 30 days of thankfulness thing with a lot of other people, I've got a lot to be thankful for. A loving and lovely wife, a great son, a good and challenging job w great coworkers, couple of pretty cool dogs and some social networks I'm pretty fond of (that means you guys).I want folks to stop for a minute though to think about the things we don't even notice that other people are thankful for - if they have them. Think about water. Often, it's just a side item - "you want water with that too?" - we hear that all the time. Imagine being thankful that you have access to clean water.  Imagine trying to do as good as you possibly can in school...all the while trying to ignore how hungry you are. Be thankful for food.  Imagine wondering if that pesky little mosquito bite you just got carries malaria. Be thankful to not live with that fear.  Have all your arms and legs? Be thankful you do - some people don't.  Now I'm not trying to be a downer and I'm not saying to not express gratitude for the things we do have  but that's not sufficient is it? I am thankful for the things I have like water and food that give me a baseline, a foundation for my other hopes and dreams...and I want others to have that foundation. So I'm listing some of my favorite charities below. Some don't take a lot of money at all to help and some don't even require money to help. On this day though, when we in the U.S. are celebrating what we have, let's all make an effort to spread those gifts to others. Thanks! :-) People around the world spend 3 hours walking for water. Take 3 min to learn why from @charitywater. Video:  How's lunch? *> Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge. http://freerice.com Pledge to support Nothing But Nets & b part of the generation to end malaria deaths http://www.nothingbutnets.net >  Support the Wounded Warrior Project and help the largest generation of wounded service members in U.S. history   1 in 5 U.S. kids struggles w/ hunger. Together we can make #NoKidHungry a reality. Get involved  http://www.nokidhungry.org/problem/overview  Rotary Clean Water for AIDS Campaign  Epilepsy affects 2.2 million Americans.  Support the Epilepsy Foundation-donate, walk share your stories   The USO Wishbook: recognize a special occasion while directly benefiting troops and their families" 

Cyborg Anthropology/Donna Haraway/Cyborg Manifesto/1991/subfield within AAA/Macy Meetings 1941/boundaries of technology and culture/'interface culture'/actor networks/activity theory/social network theory/fractal production of value/frictionless production of value/value crisis/participation architecture-danah boyd/Identity production and the Second Self/Non-places - Auge/Simultaneous Time/Continuous Partial Attention/Panic Architecture/Social Punctuation/Ambient Intimacy/Automatic Production of Space/Manipulation by Defaults/Gibson's Affordances/Norman's Design of Everyday Things/Social Life of Information/Nine Principles of Innovation Networks/Gate's 1995 NGA speech/Shirky - Here Comes EverybodyShirky - Cognitive Surplus/Imagined Communities ~ Benedict Anderson/Histories of classroom/the 'classroom' as technology/TextbookAssertions of authority/the Course/Curriculum/ISD/Ralph W Tyler/Benjamin Bloom/General History/Why don't we have compliance training for PPT?WEB 2.0/Shifts in the Way We Work/Abandon Stocks and Embrace Flows/How Technology Evolves/Subliminal v Liminal/"Please. Don't silence your cell phone"/Hierarchies of expertise/Narrate your work/Fear Control Trust/Saying the wrong thing/Saying "bad" things/Fog of systems/All learning is socially-mediated/Transmission Loss/Inevitability/Consumerization/Blurring line between work/life/Intuitive situational awareness/No more courses. No more universities. No more answers - only questions/Pattern recognition/Curation/Be human/Field Independent v. Field Dependent/Cognitive habituates/Carpentered world/Susceptible to linear illusions/How are Piaget's Universals impacted by culture?/Ecological Validity/Infrastructure Structure Super-structure/Foucault / BenthamPanopticism/Start Small/ Think big / Move fast/Subject-Matter NetworksCan we think of these as kinship systems?/World Cafe / Conversations That Matter/Social Network Analysis/Production v consumption/media has ALWAYS been social/cave paintings as social/TV, the Great Wasteleand, was 'consumed' socially McLuhan/Innovation Diffusion/Speed/Media (Virillio)/Public Sphere/Development pattern of literacies/Paving deer paths/  

Seriously, what do we do compliance training on? Ethics? Sexual Harassment? Information Assurance? Sure. How often do those vectors impact our business on a daily basis at the individual worker level? I mean, there is someone sitting in a cubicle or an office and they're doing their job - are those and other compliance topics impacting them? Maybe. What are they doing though? Sending email. Creating powerpoint slides. Working on Excel. Do we have ANY compliance [read mandatory] training on those topics? Why? Please tell me why - if we are going to understand that there are some topics that are so critical that we need to make sure that everyone is trained on them - then please tell me why we don't force training for things that we do and use every single day? It's not like it doesn't exist. It's not like people wouldn't understand the relevance. Then let's buckle down and use the idea of compliance training for good. Maybe we should also add some compliance training on collaboration - you will collaborate and you will enjoy it! 

I try to be a runner. I run about 5-7 times a week. I'm slow but I plod along. I'm also an app freak. Love em. Constantly installing and trying and then removing them so it's not odd that I currently have 3 running apps on my phone. My goto apps have been RunKeeper and MapMyRun. Why two? Well, simply RunKeeper is the better mobile experience and MapMyRun is the better Web experience. Runkeeper's main web page looks boring and it's tough to know where to go to get the information you want. Contrast that to MapMyRun's web page which has a dashboard architecture and shows my recent runs, achievements and so on right there.  On the mobile side though, Runkeeper brings it. I think Runkeeper has a better display in terms of getting to information quickly and seeing things like split times on different runs and comparing times on runs of similar length.  I can also rank order these apps in terms of how tough they are on you in terms of time/distance. Runkeeper is easily the harshest one, meaning my pace is consistently recorded as slower on this one than on MapMyRun and Runtastic is the most lenient with my times beating my RunKeeper times by as much as 30-45 seconds.  I will say that Runtastic has two great features - the heat map and the countdown. The heat map shows your pace as a colored line changing from red to green (hot to cold) as your pace changes. Great visual reference. The countdown is so logical I can't believe no one else has it. You hit the "Go" or "Record" button and Runtastic gives you a countdown from 15 seconds to get your gloves on or get your iPhone stored in your running armband. Great feature.  The thing that kills me about Runtastic though is how much they've chosen to hide behind their "Pro" level. $4.99 doesn't seem like a lot but when I've already got two apps that work pretty well and the features that differentiate you from then look like they can be developed fairly quickly, you need to woo me more before hitting me for the $$. The thing that running apps have going for them is that I can't export my data easily from one app and import it into another. I'd love some version of an OPML file for running. That just means that every time I run, I'm making a decision on where I store that part of my running history. Stats are important to runners - we like to see improvement and track it. Hitting me right away for $4.99 just so I can get voice feedback on a run - too much too soon. I hope one of these apps nails all the strengths from the other two. We're out here waiting. 

We all have rosters of the people at work. Names, phone numbers, physical locations maybe even their Twitter handles or link to their LinkedIn Profile - all there. There is so much missing though. If every employee is an ambassador for your brand (and they are whether or not you believe it) - then what do you really know about your ambassadors? How many connections do they have on LinkedIn? How many followers on Twitter? Do they blog? Write on Medium? What is the ACTUAL reach of your organizational network? Now in no way do I mean that companies should have access to employee accounts in a username/password way - I do think it's only smart for a company to know what networks (size and shape) are represented in it's employee pool.  Now I'm thinking about how you'd do or represent this. I don't know about having some internal-viewable Klout score (this would be different than having an internal Klout score related to an internal network)...but something would indicate size and vectors of networks - it's probably not critical to know that an employee at a IT company is a leading quilt blogger but you never know. I'm also not advocating for any kind of censorship at all  - just an awareness of the potential reach of your employee's networks.  Still a formative thought - open for input.