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.
Most of the three dozen people convened by the irrepressible Aaron Silvers for a recent retreat in Sedona, Arizona, would say they’re designers, but not instructional designers. We’re software nerds, change agents, standards developers, experience designers, game developers, and problem solvers. We came together at Up to All of Us to compare notes, find connections, and share the tools of our craft.
Sedona is a magic spot in the high desert, about two hours north of Phoenix. Kurt Hanks led a two-day workshop on Paradigm Mapping before the official two-day event kicked off. The following two days were peppered with short sessions on design techniques and concepts that we then applied to projects we were working on.
You don’t hear about tools like these at ASTD meetings and traditional training gatherings. At UTAOU, we were more into developing platforms than programs. We focused more on performance and less on training.
Mindmapping. My colleague Clark Quinn mindmapped the main event. Mindmaps are excellent for visualizing relationships.
Visual Language. Dave Gray inspired us to Just Draw It. This is vital. We were all sketching like mad throughout the weekend. Anyone can draw. JFDI. It will open your mind. And help you open other people’s minds.
Personas. Picture your users. Empathize with them. Respect them. What are their motives? Their likes? Tell stories about them. Especially important for engineers (because “they don’t get empathy.”)
Learner Experience Design. Envision cascades of resources, activities, artifacts, and reflections.
Bodystorming. Physically act out a situation to understand it. Do a skit. First person. People can represent systems or objects. We modeled a stranded passenger dealing with an airline’s telephone customer support, both real and how it might be.
Gamestorming. “Knowledge games are models of business scenarios, environments and interactions. Games not only model systems, but at the same time they allow the players to experience those systems from within, just as customers do. People participate in games because they want to, not because they have to or because someone told them to – just like real customers.”
Cognitive Apprenticeship. Nearly a quarter century ago, this seminal paper outlined what it takes to make apprenticeship work in the knowledge era:
• identify the processes of the task and make them visible to students;
• situate abstract tasks in authentic contexts, so that students understand the relevance of the work; and
• vary the diversity of situations and articulate the common aspects so that students can transfer what they learn
Improv. Be fast, not right. No negatives (Yes, and…) We did word games. We fenced with our hands. We did living sculpture. Loosen up. Let go of restraint.
Journey Mapping (AKA Experience Mapping). We did this following bodystorming. Breaking an experience down into AEIOU steps enables you to suspect judgment and shape the change conversation. (AEIOU = Activity, Environment, Interaction, Objects, Users).
Rapid Prototyping. Make a model. It can be paper or 3×5 cards. Leave it messy. Use it once and toss it.
Storyboarding. Tell your story visually. Co-create it. Make it tangible.
Sand table. Someone suggested letting people model scenarios with puzzle pieces purchased at garage sales. (I keep a bunch of toys, games, and magic tricks handy at the Internet Time Lab.)
Value proposition. For __________ who _________ we deliver __________ with _________ that __________.
For (customer) who (motivation) we deliver (service) with (detail) that (benefits). Make sure you have one that’s crisp. Similar to the Elevator Pitch.
70:20:10. In the workplace, 70% of learning is experiential, 20% comes from interactions with others like coaches and mentors, and 10% is formal.
Business model canvas. From Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation.
These additional design techniques and frameworks popped up in private conversations:
Story Borrowing. Tell other’s stories as if they were yours.
Shadowing. Follow the customer.
Self-actualizing organizations, meta coaching, international coaching federation, mindlines
Marketing Metaphoria, Zaltman
One of my two main objectives in attending UTAOU was to rekindle my use of design thinking. I love to draw and doodle and design things, yet left to my own devices, I revert all too easily to text. Now I’m back in drawing mode and I hope to stay on that plane. If only it were easier to scribble in blog posts!
My other objective was to advance my thinking about converting today’s dysfunctional corporations into tomorrow’s lithe value-creating organisms. I’m throwing the design tools at the dilemma. My fingers are crossed.
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.
Kevin Kelly is a force of nature. He spoke at the West Coast Wiki Conference yesterday.
From my Seminal Documents page:
Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World . Kevin Kelly. “The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.”"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.” Also New Rules for the New Economy. “The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade.”"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.”"To prosper, feed the web first.” Also, read We are the Web.
Kevin’s thesis is that we need a theory of technology. He thinks he’s found it. Lo and behold, evolution is it. And evolution is nothing more that information processing.
Technology is a cosmic force. What does tech want?
Technology has its own agenda. This is parallel to Richard Dawkins’ looking at the world from the vantage point of genes. Everything’s a struggle for procreation and replication.
Technology is inevitable. You could think of it as a seventh natural kingdom:
Kevin thinks big. There’s wisdom in his viewpoint. It’s in humanity’s best interest to pay attention to the biggest picture.
Nonetheless, I still can’t wrap my head around what Kevin’s saying. It sounds like an alternative religion.
Kevin traces the march of technology all the way back to the Big Bang. How could this be? It’s like the fall of the tree not making a sound when there’s no one there to hear it. Absent people, technology does not exist.
Kevin’s logic would make more sense if he just labeled his Technium tools. Or perhaps nature. Or stuck to the positive impact of evolution.
Eugene Kim announced that Ward Cunningham was our opening keynote speaker for the West Coast WIki Conference. Only after the talk did he mention that Ward invented the wiki (1995) and is a prime mover in both the Agile Software Movement and Software Patterns.
The wiki was born in an age when the people who were writing software knew a whole lot more about writing software than the academics. Getting programmers to narrate their work and talk about the way software is written changed the software development process. (There are of course direct parallels to how people learn their work in general.)
You don’t own your own text. That’s the foundation here.
Think how liberating this one idea is. It says collaboration is okay; it’s the norm. It makes everyone a potential participant. It recognizes that there’s always room for improvement and encourages the user to do it.
Ward began playing with a Hypercard stack at Tektronix in 1987 that foreshadowed the capability build into wikis. He incorporated the concept put forward by Vannevar Bush that people should be able to edit one another’s text.
The Hypercard app ran on Ward’s desktop machine — there were no networks at the time. People would take turns sitting at Ward’s desk entering information on people, projects, and ideas.
Using CamelCase links, a wiki can show conceptual interconnections. (CamelCase? “Wikipedia took off when they got rid of that one.”).
Wiki Design Principles describe how wikis work.
Things build upon one another in the structure of the wiki.
I am taken by the add-ons to Ward’s basic principles, although he says they hold little interest to him.
“Publish, then polish.” Follow the principles of Wabi-Sabi: something can be valuable – and beautiful – even when it is not complete.
To Ward, the whole internet was made to do wikis. They just left out the config file. Things turned geeky for a while. We were watching streams of code on screen.
Ward believes in the transformative power of video. Let’s take a paragraph from Wikipedia, this one about the Louisiana Gulf oil spill. Imbed videos taken from different points of view.
.
.
We need to establish a video vocabulary parallel to the vocabulary used by programmers and engineers.
Co-creation is coming. Manipulatable video. Video mash-ups.
The youngest among us asked whether the video format might not impede innovation. After all, we can’t all trek down to Louisiana to shoot video.
Well, it might hold some things back but that’s the current exploration, too: figuring out how to slice, dice, and mash-up video elements.
Ward appears to be a great guy. Not only is he a software whiz of the first order, the projects he describes empower people to take part, to grow, to co-create… all of the things we strive to put into a workscape.
I’m simplifying and cleaning up my sites for the new year. I’m not quite finished weeding this online garden, but things are a lot more tidy than last week. I’m particularly happy with the way the Stocks & Flows page is turning out. My home page is less cluttered but still suffers aesthetically.
Who’s got a site worth stealing ideas from? What are your “Oh, wow” favorites?
I’m experimenting with WordPress plugins this morning. Chris Brogan recommends these:
“ShareThis” was a cinch to install. In the plugins panel, search for it and install. The little tags that let readers forward posts to Facebook, Twitter, eMail, etc., automatically appear on every page now.
“Yet another related post” selects and displays related posts. You can tweak the selection algorithms. I made a minor tweak to the way the list is displayed.
Since mobile is increasingly the way of the world, I’m alos going to try WPtouch.
Description Installation Faq Screenshots Changelog Stats
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.
The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.
The theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WPtouch view and your site’s regular theme.
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?
I’ve been a tremendous fan of Flipcams, the $150 pocket-sized video cameras with an interface even a first grader can figure out. The one downside was sound. Audio is more important than picture when shooting video. Flipcams have no jack for an external microphone.
Charles Jennings showed me an awesome Kodak mini-cam that solves the problem. Check the specs of the $180 KODAK Zi8 Pocket Video Camera:
File formats
1. video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC
2. still: JPEG
Capture modes
1. 1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps)
2. 720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps)
3. 720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps)
4. WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps)
5. Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)
Anyone want to buy a couple of used Flipcams?
Bob Morris pointed me toward this article that appeared in Strategy+Business last November:
by Andrew Sobel
The article describes how Green Berets, SEALs, and Air Force Special Tactics units learn to do their extraordinary jobs. The story contains invaluable lessons for corporations.
The training that SOF personnel go through is a key to their success in real missions. Their training is in-depth, realistic, and repetitive, and it is run by the most experienced SOF operators — not classroom-schooled educators. This type of training puts true meaning into the overused term total immersion. If you add up the different phases of training that SOF candidates must go through, including specialized courses (such as high-altitude free-fall parachuting) and advanced training in their units, it may take two or three years at minimum to produce a fully developed SOF operator.
Five important aspects of SOF training reveal why it’s so effective, and also why much of the one-off, classroom-based training conducted by private-sector companies is of limited value.
1. Only the best of the best complete the rigorous training. Few candidates are accepted. Many wash out. It’s an honor to make the grade — or even to get part way through.
2. Practice, practice, and practice again. These guys will practice a particular mission hundreds of times. (How many times do you practice a sales presentation?)
3. Make training lifelike. In role play, Green Berets “bleed;” make-up artists make the enemy look like the real thing.
4. Feedback is constant. Instructors, experts, and peers continually assess performance and are blunt in feeding it back.
5. Stress, like staying active for 100 hours, simulates real-life situations. Shared hardships bond participants.
Some special operations training is highly formal. (Of course, like all training, it’s part formal and part informal.)
The author correctly concludes that:
Companies in the United States spend more than US$100 billion on training each year. Much of it is little more than a one-time classroom experience punctuated by PowerPoint presentations. At the same time, it is well established that the skill improvement and behavioral changes that would truly affect on-the-job performance require a sustained program of interventions consistent with the concept of deliberate practice. Corporate training needs to become more realistic and sustained.
10MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3-inch LCD
$349.95
$362.42 with extra battery (which you will want to have)
I continue to be impressed with the Canon S90. Great in low-light conditions. (I never use the flash.) Fast lens. Vibrant colors.
While no camera is idiot-proof, I took all these in automatic (program) mode.
The ‘Learning Knights’ of Bell Telephone in the Op/Ed section of today’s New York Time is a case study of Push learning vs Pull learning.
In 1955, Bell Telephone was concerned about leadership development:
“A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.
Bell set up a program called the Institute of Humanistic Studies for Executives. More than simply training its young executives to do a particular job, the institute would give them, in a 10-month immersion program on the Penn campus, what amounted to a complete liberal arts education.
Drawing by Dave Gray
The Institute was deemed a success overall but Bell was disappointed its graduates tipped the scale of work/life balance more to the “life” side:
One man [said] that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”
Over the following five years, Bell phased out the Institute of Humanistic Studies. Old ways die hard and once again, control preempted autonomy.
Today’s companies are grappling with the same issues Bell faced a half century ago. Are we confident our organization is preparing leaders who will be able to deal effectively with the challenges of the future?
I fear the training community is on the wrong side of these questions. The world is open-ended; it’s not assembled from black and white answers. Real life is painted in shades of gray.
You can’t measure discovery learning with an LMS but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. This does it mean you shouldn’t use an LMS to monitor compliance and formal learning either. In a healthy learning ecosystem, “Pull learning” and “Push learning” are symbiotic; you need a bit of both.
We need fewer drifting straws on the stream of American business, and more discontented thinkers who listen thoughtfully to both sides of our national debates.
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