Things I like: model trains, Italian food, picking wild blackberries, taking snapshots, Vespas, Tabasco Sauce, longhaired dachshunds, postage stamps, early Joni Mitchell, cognac, grilled fish, Mark Leyner, optimism, mountain trails, motorcycles, crawdads, Macs, gummi bears, farmers’ markets, garlic, fountain pens, MOMA, Sean Connery, impressionism, barbecue sauce, the sound of crashing waves, cypress trees, lakes, sorbet, medieval passageways, beachcombing, onion soup, psychology experiments, vests, Swiss Army knife, exotic cars, venison, gaspacho, half-timbered houses, the Michelin man, Indiana Jones, sea otters, Old Europe, bears, roquefort cheese.

Things I dislike: jogging, clutter, sniffling, wasting time, slime, chain stores, phone trees, financial engineering, pretention, fundamentalists, tight shoes, sack suits, Republicans, lawyers, parking meters, computer viruses, speed cams, coach class, Windows, pitbulls, slugs, fat people, natto, ingrown toenails, bean counters, poison oak, brutalism, airport inspections, allergies, rotting seaweed, cats, football, bolo ties, golf, Facebook, spam email, learned helplessness, plagiarism, frequent flier reward programs, Christopher Walken, cable t.v. companies, lectures, water boarding, assault weapons, rats, pennies, athlete’s foot, hurricanes, spiders.

Founded in the late 19th century to promote good design practices in the Berkeley hills, the Hillside Club today supports the arts and culture. I’m a member, although not a very active one. The Hillside Club is the spiritual home of iconic Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck.

DeskTime, a firm that automates time sheets, posted an absurd infographic yesterday. This snip made me chuckle:

Most people I know think using the net makes them more productive. “Socializing with co-workers” is the primary way they learn things. Probably some of the long lunches and breaks occur because people learn more in coffee rooms and cafeterias than in classrooms. These are time-wasters?

As for the applications, my colleague Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011 has Twitter in the #1 slot and YouTube as #2. Unproductive? I don’t think so.

And email and Word are productive? Give me a break.

I would really, really hate to work for these guys.

Salim Ismael, founding executive director of Singularity University, joined a few dozen of us for lunch in Berkeley yesterday to discuss “Seeing the Next Disruptive Technology.”

Singularity University is neither a university nor about singularity. It’s not a university so much as what the founders hope universities will evolve into. Currently the main program involves 80 grad students who come from around the globe to attend a ten-week summer program. The first half is intensive exposure to a host of mind-blowing speakers on exponential technologies; the second is an incubator for dent-in-the-universe projects. Not only is SU not accredited; one of their sponsors, the Kauffman Foundation, said they’d withdraw funding if SU were to be accredited.

Singularity is the point where the collective intelligence of machines surpasses that of humans. When this happens, maybe as soon as 2045, a form of snowballing super-intelligence erupts with thoughts we humans won’t be able to fathom. My personal interpretation is that we hit the singularity when the pace of time has accelerated beyond our ability to comprehend. It’s the light show that crops up in the journey to the future in the movie 2001. It’s chaos.

Since SU’s goal is understanding rather than being swamped, I suggested to Salim that maybe it’s the Un-singularlity University. The folks at Kauffman Foundation call it an un-university. So maybe we’re dealing with the Un-singularity Un-university. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The goal of Singularity University is to rewire students’ brains so they can escape the incremental thinking that bogs most of us down. Students learn not only about exponentially accelerating technologies such as DNA sequencing, communication, nanotech and AI, but about the interplay among them that will lead to “manifold intertwined technological revolutions.”

Here’s Ray Kurzweil, the popularizer of the concept of singularity and the “Law of Accelerating Returns:”
“This is the nature of exponential growth. Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.”

“As exponential growth continues to accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century, it will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and linear perspective of contemporary humans. The progress will ultimately become so fast that it will rupture our ability to follow it. It will literally get out of our control. The illusion that we have our hand “on the plug,” will be dispelled.”

Is your head spinning yet? Most of us don’t think in these terms. The University’s mandate is to find and create a new generation of leaders who can.

The main campus is at the old NASA Ames Research Center on Moffett Field in Mountain View. (Ironically, we set up one of the first groups to participate in what evolved into the University of Phoenix at NASA Ames more than thirty years ago.)

This summer 80 participants selected from 2,200 applicants will trek to Mountain View. Tuition for the ten-week program is $25,000. The goal is to assemble a student body that’s ⅓ female and ¼ from developing countries. Most students have multiple masters degrees or PhDs and are wildly tech-savvy. Google, Autodesk, Cisco, and others provide money for scholarships.

Salim has become SU’s Global Ambassador and is setting up SUs around the world; early results are looking good.

“Large companies can’t innovate,” Salim told us. Silos are comfortable. When innovation rears its head, the corporation’s immune system goes to work to eradicate it.

Excerpts from an article by CLO’s Deanna Hartley:

Determining Relevance: Tangible vs. Intangible 
Starting with a business goal or problem to be solved around corporate culture, knowledge management or even systematic training can eliminate a narrow measurement focus, or as Jay Cross, CEO of the Internet Time Alliance, a knowledge exchange organization, explained it, getting hung up “on doing that part right rather than asking again and again: ‘Is this improving the business?’ ‘Is this helping us attain our current objectives?’ ‘Is this delighting our customers?’ And if it’s not, they shouldn’t be doing it,” he said.

Some learning leaders — perhaps fearful for their budgets and status as business partners — may be wary of seemingly unquantifiable learning initiatives such as social learning, but hard numbers aren’t always the best indicator of success. A focus on formal school or executive education-type learning involving tests, for example, may not provide valuable metrics anyway, Cross said, because grades or test results in school are unrelated to anything outside of school. They are essentially the wrong measures.

Cross said there is actually a significant amount of learning taking place in formal situations that fails to translate to behavior change on the job. To increase the likelihood of behavioral change, gathering immediate metrics — smile sheets for example — might not be as beneficial as waiting to ascertain whether learning stuck and is being applied on the job.

“When I measure the effectiveness of a learning initiative, I want to go in and talk to people six months later after they’ve had a chance to forget it or not,” he said. “I’m going to go after a period of time and I’m going to talk to people about: ‘What are you able to do now that you couldn’t do before?’ ‘How did you learn it?’ Then generalize from talking to the sample of people to the whole organization.”

Ultimately, the learning function exists to solve business needs, so CLOs should ask themselves exactly that: how are they helping to solve a business problem?

“Where CLOs make a mistake is by not talking in advance about what capabilities the organization needs and delivering on that and reporting back on that,” Cross said. “Instead, the CLO [should get] together a governance body where they [have] people in charge of the organization who say: ‘What do we want the people to be able to do that they can’t do, and what part of that can learning address?”

Summary: I was hacked last Saturday night. My nine sites went down. Three days later, everything’s back in order but it was no fun. I hope it never happens to you, but just in case, I’ll document the blow-by-blow below. In the end, an online service called Sucuri put things back in order.

First thing Sunday morning, I dropped in at the Internet Time Alliance water cooler on Skype. Jane had posted a warning that my sites had been hacked in the night.

Google issues alerts like this to warn visitors of malicious sites. I began to get nervous.

I called BlueHost, my ISP. They had backed up my sites around midnight. I asked them to restore everything from the backup. Alas, the hackers had broken in earlier, so the back-up was ridden with malware, too.

BlueHost has been a great ISP. They offer all kinds of services and nearly unlimited storage for $10/month. They answer the phone! They are generally very helpful. When I called them back, however, all they could offer were a few pages of general anti-malware advice and the suggestion that I look through my directories for suspicious files. Hmmm. I’ve been online for years. I maintain more than a dozen sites. I have about 28 gigabytes of material in some 90,000 files. Too much to eyeball.

My associate Paul Simbeck-Hampson got on the case, feeding me information on malware he found on the net. I was frantically scanning files on jaycross.com and internettime.com, the sites that seems to be generating the error messages. Needles in haystacks. This was going nowhere.

I didn’t know what else to do at this point. Sucuri offers a fix-it package for $89 for one site. I had nine sites I wanted to keep. Hence, I signed up for their $290 business deal. I’m glad I did.

Around 3:00 pm, I submitted a Malware Removal support ticket at Sucuri. They emailed me that I need to complete one ticket per site. Half an hour later, they notified me that I had given them a bad FTP password. I didn’t see the notice until 24 hours later. Half an hour after that, Sucuri was cleaning malware out of the sites and locating obsolete installations of WordPress on my site.

The next day, Sucuri started emailing that this site or that one was free of malware. However, a few of the sites gave me 500 Server Errors or would not let me log in. Sucuri went back to work, looking at file permissions and so on.

The Google alert notices were still up. In fact they were proliferating. Sites that linked to internettime.com were receiving warnings. My Gmail stopped functioning because it was connected to internettime.com. My wiki was quarantined. I pinged Google to re-check the health of my sites. Then I discovered that it generally takes 10 hours after a site is pristine for Google to take down the warning.

Supposedly, everything is back in working order now. I’ve followed Sucuri’s advice for preventing this in the future.

I’ve spent the better part of three days clearing obsolete material from my sites and looking for prank code. Miraculously, I found a rogue script that had been injected into a .php file and quashed it. Most of the time I felt like I was playing a game in which I only knew half the rules. I was nervous that I’d lose huge swaths of material that I should have backed up — but hadn’t. These three days have been among the least productive of my life. Malshare got all my mindshare.

How did the bad guys get in? I’ll never know. It could have been one of the obsolete versions of WordPress I’d forgotten about. Or a rogue script we’d brought in to handle contact requests. Or a file with the wrong permissions. Heaven only knows.

One site remains off the air. When I try to update a couple of others, I receive Server errors. These are minor annoyances compared to what’s been happening.

I am so glad this nightmare is over.

I’ll be keeping my WordPress installs and extensions up to date from now on.

I recommend Sucuri for dealing with malware. All our correspondence has been through trouble tickets and email but they have been quite responsive.

Next month at this time, I’ll be boarding a plane for Delhi. In the sixties I dreamed of visiting India but never made it. Finally fulfilling the dream has me totally jazzed.

I’ll be taking part in EdgeX,  an event that covers two important themes for education – Learning X.O (the emergence of network based, collaborative, social, informal and community-led approaches to learning) and Simulations & Serious Games (being able to seriously use these advanced learning tools at strategic scale).

EdgeX aims to be disruptive. With the likes of George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cornier, Alec Couros, Clark Quinn, Grainne Conole, and me on board, I’m confident it will be.

There is a revolution brewing in our conception of what learning is and how educational systems can be rethought. Influenced in large part due to the efforts of the speakers on this theme, the conversations around alternate ways of conceiving learning and the learning experience have centred around the following key aspects:

• Informal Learning, Communities of Practice, Connectivism
  Personal Learning Environments, Open Distributed
  Learning, Net Pedagogy, Learning “Design” in a 2.0 world
• Learning Analytics, Ubiquitous learning
• MOOCs, OER University, Stanford AI
• Role of teachers and coaching in an open distributed learning environment
• New forms of assessments

These key aspects present a coherent and urgent picture of the imminent changes in Learning and Teaching. All aspects of the teaching learning experience are impacted by this change.

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.	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.

Today I attended two learning events in Paris, in the morning the iLearning Forum hosted by Sally Ann Moore and this afternoon Expo-Langues, the conference where Peter Isackson and I will be speaking tomorrow morning.

Looking at other cultures inevitably teaches me about nuances I had failed notice in my own.

Buzzwords travel from the U.S. to France incredibly fast.

Lots of French vendors are touting social learning although they no more get it than American LMS providers promising systems to manage informal learning. One outfit here claimed to deliver social learning experiences on CD-ROM. Catalog of courses? Social? Huh?

Gamification is big but here it’s always Serious Games. This is because French companies don’t believe learning should be fun. (And you can’t call these things joux serieux because in French the all-important adjective comes after the noun.)

Some concepts were missing in action. For example, no one was touting user-generated content or peer-to-peer. My friend Peter’s Learnscaper moves user-generated (and instructor-generated) content center stage but when he was explaining it to someone, we realized there’s no term for the concept in French!

The Internet Time Alliance and I have been pushing the meme Working Smarter for several years. The French are into smarter in a big way:

This one is right out of the Colbert Report, n’est-ce pas? “French, a language for tomorrow.” For whom?

How’s this for a lost cause? Learn Provençal, the dead language once spoken in Southeast France.

I saw some luscious graphics although the company showing this one admitted that it’s just the demo.

I don’t mean to be so negative. We had wonderful conversations at both events.

On Thursday, I’ll be addressing the social web and its impact on practical education at Expo-Langues in Paris. I plan to talk about the shift from push learning to pull that refocuses language learning from courses to learning environments. Du pousser au tirer. 

Today started with a black swan event: snow on the French Riviera:

I used to bring California weather with me wherever I travelled. Now I seem to bring snow and ice. Brrrrr….

Just got back to my apartment in Paris after a lovely dinner (grilled sardines, lieu noir, creme brûlée) discussing innovation, Sarkosy, and whether the Stoos vision of management will ever fly in France. (Oui, non, peut-w)