Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
Khan Academy is popping up everywhere! Sal Khan’s videos have helped millions of students learn algebra, biology, finance, and more. Singlehandedly, Sal Khan has done more to shake up the traditional notion of schooling than anyone since Horace Mann. Everybody’s thinking about how to flip the equation. Provide the content before class — and use class time to figure out what it means. Brilliant.
But what happens when you’re a kid, before you’re ready to tackle algebra and finance? That’s when you turn to eLearning for Kids.
Established eight years ago by my friend Nick Van Dam, eLearning for Kids serves up free lessons to millions of kids aged five to twelve. Take a look at the courses.
eLearning for Kids is run by volunteers and funded with contributions. If you want to donate to a good cause, assured that your money’s going to do some good without being scalped by (ahem) “management fees,” make a contribution to eLearning for Kids.
A synopsis of my remarks to Emerging Directions in Global Education 2011, Delhi, India
For the first 60 seconds, we listened to Yoyo Ma playing Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G as the flowers unfolded.
As time speeds up, we perceive that what once appeared rigid is actually fluid.
Progress is unfolding at an unprecedented rate. More happens in one of your minutes than in one of your grandfather’s hours. More information has been created in the three days I have been in Delhi than in the sweep of human history from the dawn of civilization until 2004. Futurists tell us the 21st century will not contain a mere one hundred 20th century style years but tens of thousands of them.
As the years speed by, we can appreciate that educational systems that once appeared rigid are actually fluid. We can nurture them to grow this way or that. We can “flip” them, that is, reconfigure the pieces. I’ll suggest that we can, and should, rearrange the components of schooling to democratize learning.
By democratize, I don’t mean giving students the vote. Rather, democratizing learning means giving students the knowledge and permission to realize their full potential. Democratization gives students a voice in their own learning.
Be forewarned: I am an alien in your midst. I am an American, a Californian, with scant knowledge of India. My specialty is corporate learning, not higher education. And I tend to live in 2016, not the present.
Nonetheless, I’d like to share a few stories with you. Perhaps they can serve as catalysts as you consider how to reshape India’s educational systems and policies to meet the demands of the future.
Hewlett Packard Engineers
Let me tell you a story that predates the internet. In 1974, a group of Hewlett Packard engineers who had been watching lectures on electrical engineering on the Stanford Instructional Television Network were reassigned to an HP facility in Santa Rosa, California, two hours to the north and out of television broadcasting range. An instructor, Jim Gibbons, sent videotapes of the lectures to Santa Rosa. It didn’t work; the engineers weren’t learning. Accompanying the tapes with a graduate assistant didn’t work either.
Next the engineers tried something that did work. Whenever anyone did not understand a concept in a lecture, he would raise his hand. This stopped the tape. Most of the time, someone else in the group had the answer. They proceeded this way, learning without a teacher, until the end of the semester. Then Jim Gibbons carted the engineers to the Stanford campus to take the final exam.
Mind you, these engineers lacked the test scores to become Stanford students, yet they scored significantly higher grades on the exam than the resident students. Why? I think it’s because they took charge of their own learning. They learned from one another, in the course of conversation. Furthermore, they were learning in order to become better engineers, not to earn a credential.
The HP engineers had flipped the educational process. They did away with face-to-face lectures. They set their own pace and answered their own questions. They took charge of the way they learned. In other words, they democratized their learning.
Corporations
Western corporations are broken. Workers hate their jobs; customers complain of lousy service; investors receive meager returns. There has to be a better way.
In January 2012, two dozen authors, managers, and agile software developers met on a mountain top in Stoos, Switzerland, to try to reverse the situation. How could the practice of management be updated to work in a complex, unpredictable world?
The organization-as-machine, the model that served us from the dawn of the industrial age until the beginning of the 21st century, leads to a quest for efficiency. That works in stable, unchanging times, but it’s a formula for disaster amid incessant, disruptive change. The living network is a better model for today. Organizations need to conceptualize themselves as networks of individuals and teams who perpetually strive to create more value for customers.
This flips the corporation into an organization that respects people for their contributions rather than seeing them as cogs in the machine. The new order democratizes the workplace.
Corporate Learning
In America and Europe, the corporate learning function is dead or dying. A 2011 study by the Corporate Leadership Council reported that 76% of managers are dissatisfied with their corporate training function; 85% deem training ineffective; and a mere 14% would recommend training to their fellow managers. Workers and managers learn their work though conversation, collaboration, and on-the-job experience. My colleague Jane Hart calls this “learning without training.”
Enlightened corporations trust their people to pull in the resources they need. They’ve flipped corporate learning by putting the learners in charge of defining the curriculum. These corporations concentrate on building self-sustaining learning ecosystems, what I’ve called workscapes, instead of individual programs.
Education in India
India needs to train 500 million people in the next ten years. Some have proposed building thousands of new schools and challenges. Yet if the building program began in earnest tomorrow, there still wouldn’t be enough time to build the required classrooms — some six times what India has today.
What would those schools teach? The half-life of a professional skill is down to five years and is shrinking fast. It makes no sense to train people on skills that will become obsolete in short order. I’ll suggest that people need to learn meta-skills, such things as:
India has neither time nor resources to prepare teachers to transfer these skills to hundreds of millions of people. The answer? Flip Indian education. Delegate the delivery of content to electronic means, and focus teachers on coaching, leading discussions, helping people over hurdles, and relating lessons to real life. Also, teach students and workers to help teach themselves.
The time is ripe for India to democratize education, to help students to think for themselves and realize their potential.
Reflection
A couple of days after my talk, nine of us piled into a van to visit the Taj Mahal.
Hour after hour, we honked and careened our way through chaotic traffic. We passed numerous private schools and academies. Mostly, we saw tens of thousands of abjectly poor people passing the time of day in hole in the wall kitchens and shops, wandering around in rubble, or defecating in fields. I wondered what comes first, educating the millions or giving them toilets.
By 2030, India’s population will outnumber China’s. The people we talked with at EDGE are entrepreneurial and optimistic. They are accustomed to thinking things over on an enormous scale. Never before in human history has a democracy of 1.3 billion people tried to reform education. Such transformation is mind-boggling.
Where is this headed, I wondered. By this time, our discussions about educational systems were over. I tossed about in bed in anticipation of an early morning flight home and reflecting on India.
What change does India want to see? Do we expect education to flatten a highly stratified society? Will the boys and girls playing in the dirt lead more productive, fulfilling lives because they can read and write? Will they have the patience to put up with the conservatism and cronyism of the Government of India? How will India create the jobs to challenge their young minds? Might not educating the masses be akin to showing the people of the former Soviet Union the riches of the west on television?
The more I learn about India, the less I understand India. I wish my new friends and their country well. They face the largest challenge I have ever seen.
Welcome to my new home on the web. If you want to keep up with my blogs, thoughts, learnstream, and so forth, please subscribe below. Internet Time Blog will echo here, so this is where to subscribe to see everything I’m working on.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for or have a suggestion, please leave a comment below.
This is also my working site; I stash things here I may want to recall, both funky and formal.
The site’s also a museum. I began blogging in the last century, back when most bloggers knew one another. The stream indexes thousands of posts that document the early days of eLearning, the sweep of informal learning, and the genesis of the working smarter meme.
Don’t miss the goodies
 Download a free book. |
 Zoom the Informal Learning Poster. |
 Watch us build the Internet Time Lab.
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 Seminal articles and video |
Look around. The Stream is a river of posts from the Internet Time Blog, Unmanagement.org, the old Informal Learning Blog, and my learnsteams. The Core is 16 categories of Jay: books, reference, and Just Jay. That last one includes The Berkeley Diet and Unmanagement.
Thanks for dropping by.
West Coast Wikiconference 2011
WikiPedia turned 10 years old today. I attended a delightful unconference with a hundred Wikipedians at the Hub in San Francisco.
How’s this for a deal? $25 paid for breakfast, lunch, a full day’s events, presentations by Ward Cunningham and Kevin Kelly, and even a celebratory t-shirt.
Hundred of events like this are taking place around the world.
It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely success story than Wikipedia. From the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet:
Eugene & Ward
Ward is also a leader in the Agile Software movement and the thought leader in Software Patterns.
We discovered a common interest in learning from pictures and video. Periodically his company’s software staff gets together for a day-long retreat. Quarterly was not frequent enough, so they invented “micro-quarters,” of which there are six a year. At the conclusion of each retreat, people draw pictures of what they’ve accomplished. With the camera on his laptop, Ward takes a video of each individual explaining his or her picture. He edits out the ums and ahs to prepare a fast-moving video documenting the event. People use these to review the event and check on progress when the next micro-quarter rolls around.
Ward’s original wiki was geeky beyond belief. It relied on CamelCase and oddball formatting conventions. It was not pretty. I mentioned that ten years ago, my glossary defined wiki as “a way to stop a conversation.” So I asked Ward how he felt about today’s spiffed-up, user-friendly wikis. He told me that a few days after he released the first wiki, another developer had hacked out a different version. Didn’t ask permission or anything. Ward thought about it and decided that was okay. He was happy to contribute the wiki to the public good. I’ll cover the content of Ward’s presentation in another post.
Eugene Kim introduced the open space session masterfully, getting the participants to explain the rules of open space. Whatever happens is what is supposed to happen. If it’s not beneficial, move on.
The first breakout I attended dealt with getting new people to create and edit posts. Many people approach Wikipedia who don’t realize they can edit the content. More fundamentally, they don’t see themselves as editors. I called up the Wikipedia home page on my iPad. It’s totally intimidating. There’s no on-ramp for new users. When I brought up instructional design, forty faces went blank. I suggested putting together a few simple videos showing a user explaining what’s going on. Some people liked the idea, but some Wikipedia foundation people began explaining how hard it was to change the front page. (There’s enormous perceived resistance to change by the elite contributors.) Did I know how tough it is to make changes when hundreds of millions of people were involved?
This evening I discovered that there are already dozens of “how to edit” articles on YouTube. Maybe someone can convince Wikipedia to point to them.
In another breakout, Gordon Mohr encouraged us to explore how to make Wikipedia “Broader, deeper, and edgier.” This may have to take place outside of the Wikipedia framework. We touched on many topics. Some new articles would be better positioned as “not ready” rather than “not good enough.” Wikipedia would feel less exclusionary without the distinction made between members and outsiders. Why not consider all users members — and therefore editors? It occurred to me that Wikipedia has scant room for discussion. It’s still just an encyclopedia; it might be better by adding commentary and a forum for discussion.
Another breakout discussed Wikipedia – the next ten years. What should evolve?
I wanted to be able to walk around in the knowledge space, sort of the Library of Alexandria meets Second Life.
I also pushed my current passion, the workscape. Why not give readers the option of checking a box that would prompt periodic reinforcement? Battle the forgetting curve with brief, spaced reminders built right into the system. One of the old hands said you could already do this. All it took was remembering what pages you’d viewed and revisiting them. Another Wikipedia said c’mon, nobody’s going to do that; they won’t even remember what pages they’d visited. I don’t sense the group was very interested in people learning things beyond their initial exposure. If you have encyclopedia DNA, it’s hard to think outside of the encyclopedia box.
Toward the end of the day, Kevin Kelly gave a closing presentation on What Technology Wants, his new book. I’d heard Kevin’s pitch two months ago in Berkeley and departed in confusion. I’ll detail today’s version in another post.
Participants at Educa are enthusiastic:
You can watch a longer version of the party video here. When did you last see this enthusiastic a group of learning professionals?
Six of the Business Educa track sessions in Berlin were streamed and recorded:
Social Media & Mobile Learning
Games: Should you be doing this at work?
Working Smarter with Learning Networks
Preparing for Business Educa 2011
Overall Business Educa Video Archive
Tony O’Driscoll was up at 5:00 am to present his thoughts on learning in 3D from North Carolina. The Tech Staff do not recognize that Macs exist and did not have the right cable to bring in the Skype session. Here is my implementation hack. We could hear Tony clearly; seeing his face on the screen was a bit tough.
Show’s over.
Gnomedex X
Gnomedexers self-identify as geeks. Attendees share the belief that technology is good (awesome! cool!) and can help make Earth a better place to live. The badge of honor is to do something with tech, not just talk about it. Old hands share knowledge with novices. We respect one another’s expertise. We build on one another’s ideas. Participants are authentic.
Everyone is excited about learning new things and putting them to use. I probably take away more than most because this crowd is not in my traditional comfort zone.
It’s hard to describe what gives Gnomedex its mojo: while it is irredeemably geeky, and often covers trends in technology and society before they hit the mainstream, it’s neither a dry technical meeting nor a science-fiction con. In a way, it’s like an annual online-community family reunion, except all you need to do to join the family is show up. I’ve made lots of friends and deepened other friendships there.
Derek has terminal cancer. Three years ago he addressed the crowd from his hospital bed. Yesterday I asked Derek how he was doing. He’s thankful for every year he lives. He’s not going to get better. I asked if he was doing everything he’d always wanted to do. Were this not Gnomedex, I wouldn’t ask something like that. By the way, Derek wrote “The Gnomedex Song.”
Listen to the Gnomedex Song
Gnomedex takes place at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. The food is superb. Snacks, ice water, coffee, and soda are always available. There are plenty of nooks, sofas, and meeting spots to foster conversations. The main meeting room is just the right size for our 300 people. Rows are tiered so everyone has a view. Chairs are comfortable.
Sound is professionally monitored. 
Professional sound
Tiered seats remind me of business school
Two very important elements which should be de rigeur at any tech-oriented event:
All presentations take place in a single room. Concurrent events would water down the focus and energy level. Presentations are held to 20 minutes. Most are catalysts for questions. There is always time reserved for questions. Runners take portable microphones to the questioners and don’t let go of them; not giving up control of the microphone insures it’s being held in the right place. 
Sex educator Violet Blue delivers her 20 minutes. She told me this was the rare conference where people weren’t hitting on her. We gave Violet a standing ovation for her voice against censorship.
The backchannel is very active. Between sessions and during announcements, the Twitterstream is projected onto the main screen. Tweets add viewpoints and keep people on their toes. I sometimes learn as much from the Tweets as from the core presentation.
Twitter backchannel on the big screen
Both genders and all ages take part. This year four eleven-year olds blew everyone away. They conducted interviews with Scoble and many others. They manage a business remotely. They are astute at tracking their web stats and reacting strategically. They get a lot more page-views than I ever have.
Geeks and cameras go together. A vast array of high-end SLRs, pocket cams, video cams, and Flips are continuously recording events and interviews. All of Gnomedex is streamed live. You can view recordings of every session after the fact. As a result, the influence of Gnomedex reaches far beyond the 300 people meeting in Seattle. Furthermore, we’re green; we didn’t have a printed schedule this year.
I don’t like sloppy presentations, something you rarely see at Gnomedex. But at the other extreme, I don’t enjoy presentations that are too slick. For me, this guy qualifies:
He began with a great analogy: how people at the airport crowd the baggage carousel, making it impossible for the rest of us to see. So let’s be more considerate. Back up a few steps. We’ll all be better off. Spread the meme and the whole world wins.
This message is being delivered flawlessly. No ums. No ahs. Perfect pitch. Dramatic movement around the stage. To slick. It almost lulls me into overlooking the subtest: Buy my book. Hire me to help you figure this out. Give away copies. The e-version’s only $15. Trickery! I was about to barf.
If you missed Gnomedex X, you can still listen in. Look at the Gnomedex site. Also, search for Gnomedex on Flickr and YouTube. Look at the MindMaps from Jeff Barr What went on? See The Sense of a Gnomedex and Notes Great events leave a healthy trail of breadcrumbs. The online artifacts of the event stay on line — enabling you to find people, links, and stories after the show is over.
What goes on in the hallways is more important than the presentations. Breaks are frequent. There’s a party every night. People get to meet and learn from folks they’d otherwise never know. You knew that.
Opening party
Over the years I’ve enjoyed shooting the shit with Mike Arrington, Adam Curry, Dan Gilmor, Steve Rubel, Robert Scobel, Charlene Li, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, Darren Barefoot, Steve Gilmour, Mark Canter, Sarah Lacey, Vanessa Fox, and other geek luminaries.
Chris Pirillo has his fingers on the pulse of the social web, is a bundle of energy, and seems to know everybody who is anybody. Perhaps more important, he’s a straight-shooter. Chris sets the direction, recruits the speakers, plans the event, is master of ceremonies, and schmoozes with hundreds of people.
Chris’s mother Judy is the official timekeeper; Joe runs the microphone to those who ask questions. Both are all over the place helping out. This year, both of Chris’s brothers joined in. At the final session yesterday, the family trooped on stage for a reminiscence.
Joe and Judy Pirillo
Some of you will remember that Elliott Masie’s mom and father-in-law took part in his early TechLearn events. His wife and sister-in-law are heavily involved. Unless one was raised by wolves, inviting one’s parents to an event sends a real statement. It says “I’m proud of what I’m doing. I want to share it with you.”
Why was this the last Gnomedex? Essentially, there’s not enough Chris to go around. It takes too much to put an event like this on. Chris says the only way he’d resurrect Gnomedex is with solid sponsorship and a professional events manager. He fears any sponsor would want to take control; professional managers would be out for quantity, not quality. I’m not so sure it would have to be like that.
Funding Gnomedex would build a company’s reputation in front of influential geeks like nothing else. Putting on a two-day event in Seattle would cost a pittance compared to any ad campaign. Think of the value Robert Scoble brought Microsoft by giving it a human face. I expect Son of Gnomedex to appear in 2012. That will give us true believers time to crowd-source our thinking and find a sponsor with deep pockets, long-term vision, and a pure heart.
Why Do Geeks Gather Here?
Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s two-day intensive for geeks, takes place August 19-21 in Seattle. I’ve been to the last five — and I’ll be there again this year. Every time, I meet people who become movers and shakers in tech and move ahead of the curve for a while. Join me — it costs only $300 including parties and meals.
Chris’s single-track semi-unconference is described in Informal Learning. Last year was my first Pecha-Kucha:
I can see why Gina Bianchini resigned. This is not the deal we signed up for at all. From $0 to $50/month? I don’t think so.
This is the email I received today:
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As members of the Strategic Relationships team, we wanted to send you a personal introduction and let you know that we’ll be here over the coming months to discuss these company changes with you and help you transition seamlessly into an offering that works for you and your Ning Network.
We realize that you’ll have a decision to make about how to proceed with your Ning Network and which pricing plan will work best for you, and we are here to help!
If you would like us to reach out to you to address any question you have, please take a quick minute to fill out our brief contact form. A member of the Strategic Relationships team will make sure to get in touch with you as soon as possible to discuss your options, answer your questions and help guide you in the right direction.
In order to help process requests as efficiently as possible, we ask that you please fill out this contact form no later than May 14, 2010. Click on the link at the bottom of this email to complete the form.
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Conference hosts should take a lesson or two from Matt Mullenweg. Today’s Wordcamp San Francisco was simply great. Great line-up of speakers. Glorious weather. Some participants were so enthusiastic as to call for revolution and world domination by WordPress. (They see it as a platform, not a mere blogging tool. Most participants were making money from designing or installing WordPress sites.)
Admission was $50. It costs about $250/head; the difference is made up by sponsors. I didn’t hear an attendance figure: I’m guessing we had 600 people in attendance.
Ex-Google, ex-Zillow Vanessa Fox gave great SEO tips. Vanessa has a new book out. She’s one hell of a good marketer. (Her personal site used to be “vanessafoxnude.com.” No, there weren’t any pictures, just lots of visitors.)
Barbecued brisket & chicken and live jazz and great conversations.
Many opportunities to schmooze.
Some people think Richard Stallman a god for writing Emacs and inventing Free Software. No matter what his accomplishments, he struck me as a mean-spirited jerk. Criticizing the Apple “iGroan” and the Amazon “Swindle” is one thing. Saying that anyone who doesn’t openly give away his code is malicious and manipulative is nutty.
Host Matt Mullenweg is friendly, suave, well spoken, and simply cool. His staff are super-competent happy people.
I would not miss this one for anything! Last year’s Word Camp was what a conference should be.
Great speakers, gracious host, scrumptious food, open bar, free t-shirt, groovy people, $50.
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