The Year of Learning Dangerously
The spirit of discovery is precisely what inspired an experiment in learning at the Portland, Oregon, headquarters of advertising maverick Wieden+Kennedy. In April, W+K launched a pioneering advertising school called "12." Instead of a formal curriculum or full-fledged faculty, 12 offers 12 students 13 months of real work for very real clients.
This kind of apprentice-style education is set to rise. It provides a place where energies can be focussed into experimenting and learning -- the essential ingredients that foster innovating thinking.
Add tag Permalink | Saturday, January 08, 2005
Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?
Nice analysis by Louis Rosenfeld on the limitations of folksonomies. He has a point, these user-generated meta-tags are not precise or scalable in the long term. And they are certainly not viable in a business environment.
metadata Add tag Permalink | Saturday, January 08, 2005
Sea gypsies’ knowledge saves village
By the time killer waves crashed over southern Thailand last Sunday the entire 181 population of their fishing village had fled to a temple in the mountains of South Surin Island, English language Thai daily The Nation reported.
"The elders told us that if the water recedes fast it will reappear in the same quantity in which it disappeared," 65-year-old village chief Sarmao Kathalay told the paper.
So while in some places along the southern coast, Thais headed to the beach when the sea drained out of beaches -- the first sign of the impending tsunami -- to pick up fish left flapping on the sand, the gypsies headed for the hills.
What's really interesting about this story is not that the sea gypsies had a wise saying about impending tsunamis but the fact that they managed to act on it as well. Tsunamis of this scale are quite rare. The seas don't recede everyday. So how did this group of people decide that they have to move to the hills after witnessing a rare phenomenon? My guess is that these sea gypsies are obsessed with disaster. They revere the sea and respect its power. They picture and play out possible disasters everyday of their life.
In their book, Managing the Unexpected, Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe analyze several sea gypsy-type behaviors in the corporate world. They call these organizations high-reliability organizations or HROs.
"Research reveals that certain organizations have been highly successful in honing their abilities to act reliably and handle adversity. These are called high-reliability organizations (HROs). They include aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants and firefighting crews, which consistently deliver high performance in unpredictable situations where the potential for error and disaster is overwhelming."
According to Weick and Sutcliffe, HROs have a kind of "mindfulness" about them that helps them to be wary and act on unexpected events. One characteristic feature of this mindfulness (they list 5 characteristics in their book), they reckon, is the HRO's preoccupation with failure. So even if nothing is going wrong in these organizations, they are obsessed with forming worst-case scenarios on the slightest indication of some weak failure signals. It is this constant playing out of worst-case scenarios that prepares people in these HROs to act on events that are rare or non-routine -- they learn to manage the unexpected. So, in some way, the sea gypsies are a high-reliability group.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, January 07, 2005
Virtual Schools for Jocks
More high school athletes are taking online classes. Does electronic ed work?
Ten or so years ago, budding athletes only had an "either-or" option when it came to considering education and sport. As this article reveals, e-learning has empowered such people by giving them an "and also" option. This is exactly the type of change we need in developing countries where for many the very existence of only the "either-or" leads them to a path of inaction.
school Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 06, 2005
Asia Quake Relief Efforts
This interactive from the BBC shows the different ways food and water is being delivered to the survivors.
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, January 06, 2005
Hope
This picture says so much. It shows how vulnerable the human race is when it has to confront nature's wrath. It also portrays the resilience of the human sprit. The hope that emanates from the lone house is within each one of us. Life will go on. We will survive.
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Putting Context Into Context
This is a nice article that tries to analyze context, or elements of context that can influence design outcomes.
- Goals: What is the user trying to accomplish? How do the user's actions fit into the objectives of the organization?
- Process: What are the steps the user will follow? How does information flow from one step to the next? What are the various roles (such as creator, contributor, editor, or approver) that are involved?
- Inputs & Outputs: What materials and information will the user need to successfully use the interface? What will they need from the interface to continue with their overarching goals?
- Experience: What similar things has the user done in their past? How has the organization survived without this design in the past?
- Constraints: What physical, temporal, or financial constraints are likely to impose themselves on the user's work?
- Physical Environment: How much room does the user have to work? What materials on their desk? What access do they have to necessary information (such as user manuals)? What is taped to their monitor?
- Tools In use: What hardware and software does the user currently use?
- Relationships: What are the interconnections between the primary user and other people who are affected by the tool?
interface Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2005
What does 150,000 look like?
It's chilling to picture so many dead.Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2005
First Animation of the World Found In Burnt City
Check this out: "On this ancient piece that can be called the first animation of the world, the artist has portrayed a goat that jumps toward a tree and eats its leaves."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Thesauri links
Here's a nice collection of links on thesauri, taxonomies, ontologies and facets.Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Classroom Re-design: Desks out, Podiums in
Little things make a big difference: "She disapproved of the stooped stance at the teacher's desk, and the way that trailing wires seemed to snake in all directions. She didn't like the way a teachers' desk occupied valuable space at the front of the room, or the fact that the laptop screen was itself a distraction when the teacher wanted pupils' eyes to be fixed on the whiteboard. She went looking for an alternative - and eventually found one... Her laptop sits on the angled lectern at the top of the podium. There are power and data sockets and the wiring is routed inside the podium through to a conduit in the floor. There's a lockable cupboard below the laptop stand for personal belongings and the unit comes with or without castors." It would have been nice to have a photo of the change :)Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
Wonderful treatise on folksonomies.metadata Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 03, 2005
How Did Animals Escape Tsunami?
This is bizarre: "Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found."Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 03, 2005
Asia’s Deadly Waves
NY Times has an interactive which explains how and why the Asian tsunami was created (see the right-hand side column). The height of the waves in Banda Aceh is simply mind-boggling. I went into a daze after watching the before-and-after pictures of the devastation.Add tag Permalink | Monday, January 03, 2005
Merry Christmas
Here's wishing all of you a Merry Christmas!Add tag Permalink | Friday, December 24, 2004
The Accidental Guru
Malcolm Gladwell is on the cover of the latest Fast Company. He talks to FC about his new book, Blink. "We talk endlessly about what it means to think about a problem, deliberative thinking and rational thinking, but we spend very little time talking about this other kind of thinking, which is happening in a split second and which is having a huge impact on real-world situations."Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, December 22, 2004
NewsU: e-learning for young journalists
NewsU offers e-learning courses for the budding journalist. Very nice and sincere effort here. Check out this E-learning Rocks Flash introduction.Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 20, 2004
Situate Follow-Ups in Context
Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box: "Make new or follow-up information easily accessible from the location of the original information or transaction." Jakob gives an example of an e-learning site: "We recently tested an intranet's e-learning area as part of our new round of intranet usability research. One of the e-learning area tasks was for users to cancel their scheduled participation in a certain course. Rather than use the intranet's registration management feature, almost all users went straight to the course page where they'd originally signed up. Unfortunately, this page offered no link for withdrawing from the course."Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 20, 2004
ePortfolios
George Siemens has written a comprehensive article on everything you ever wanted to know about ePortfolios. Thanks George.Add tag Permalink | Friday, December 17, 2004
Amy Gahran on narratives and decision-making
Amy Gahran has followed up with two detailed articles here and here on my previous post using e-learning as a narrative technique. Wonderful stuff. "If you want to treat e-learners as human beings, give them narrative. Save the exposition for backgrounders in your library." "Effective e-learning candecision-making, narratives Add tag Permalink | Friday, December 17, 2004
It’s all about rich e-learning experiences
Here are my thoughts on the current discussion between focusing on tasks and focusing on information in an e-learning course. Amy Gahran points out that a task-oriented approach is more effective in most e-learning than an information oriented approach. My point is that a decision-making or an execution-based approach is even better. Decisions are what business organizations are about. The need to perform a task or to acquire information really depends on the decision you are trying to make. Thus, know-how is equally important as know-why or know-what, it really depends on the decision.
For example, if you are a research analyst looking into mergers and acquisitions, knowing what to look for is as important as knowing how to perform an analysis. The decision you as an analyst have to make is to figure out if there is compatibility in the two companies seeking to merge, for example.
This brings me to learning objectives. Amy mentions that a learning objective can clarify what kind of approach is needed. For example, if you have to use “know” or “understand” then an information-oriented approach is suggested, but if you use “list” or “order” or “assemble” then a task-oriented approach is suggested. This is true only for micro-level instructions. In business organizations, people demand the micro only when the macro is justified.
Too much e-learning is focused on the conditioning mindset – provide the cheese crumbs to the caged mouse and he will ‘learn’ to find his way to the exit. This is where the behaviourists have ruled for so long. The sanitizing and listing down of bullet-objectives with carefully selected words that make complete sense only to the instructional designer is the most visible indication of a behaviourist or a Fredrick Taylor-ian slant. So, what’s a better approach? Write a simple 1-2 paragraph blurb of how learning the content or the steps to a task will help you execute a decision in your practice. See how HotWired does it. Treat learners as humans and they will love you for it; treat them as cogs in a wheel and, well, they’ll just click the Close button!
Here's a simple story from Learning To Fly which describes British Petroleum’s knowledge management journey. Professor John Henderson of Boston University tells this story to senior BP managers.
I interviewed a colonel. Now this colonel was a colonel in the 82nd airborne, one of the more elite groups in the US Army. He got a call on Saturday morning at 8 o’clock reminding him that a hurricane had just hit. He was told that the current administration had very strong ties to that particular part of the country that they did not believe that this should be left to the reserve group because they wanted no “screw-ups”.
So the orders to the colonel were very clear: go down there, provide any support necessary to the people after this hurricane and don’t screw up. Clear orders. The Army calls it intent – strategic intent. The strategic intent was clear.
This particular colonel was a very highly decorated combat soldier – he had never done this in his life. He had never actually commanded any type of civilian-related activity. He’d always been right on the front lines in hot action. It turns out as part of the executive education in the army he had been exposed to the ‘Centre for Army Lessons Learned’ as part of their executive education process.
So he got on his laptop computer he dialled into Army net, hooked into the Centre of Army Lessons Learned’ and asked the following question – ‘what does the Army know about hurricane cleanup?’
Within four hours he had:
- A profile of the deployment of troops in the last three hurricanes that occurred in North America that the army was sent to provide support and clean-up including types of staff, skills, numbers of skills.
- A pro-forma budget – both what budget was required and what the actual budget was and where the cost overruns were.
- The ten questions that you will be asked by CNN in the first 30 minutes on your arrival.
- A list of every state agency and federal agency that had to be contacted and coordinated with and the name of the contact person that he had to contact, and the army liaison person who was currently working with that group some place in North America.
- Established a Lotus Notes advisory team of three commanders, who agreed to be his advisory group in the command structure.
Now, if we were to design an e-learning episode, or a knowledge asset as BP calls it, on hurricane clean-ups, how would we design it? Would we design based on tasks or information? Would we begin with a list of bullet-objectives? Here’s where I differentiate between designing an e-learning course and designing a rich e-learning experience, with all its real-life ambiguities. This is where the prospect of using e-learning as a narrative technique rocks. I'd love to hear your comments. E-mail me at maish-at-elearningpost.com.
instructional design, decision-making Add tag Permalink | Thursday, December 16, 2004
The Right Trigger Words
Jared Spool on the importance of using the right 'trigger words' in hyperlinks: "Trigger words are the words and phrases that trigger a user into clicking. They contain the essential elements to provide the motivation to continue with the site." [via column two]Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Designing an Intranet User Survey
"A survey is an excellent tool to keep in touch with the changing needs of the user community, and to help intranet owners gather requirements for improving and advancing an intranet." Here's how to go about designing and effective intranet survey.Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Corporate E-Learning: Focus on Tasks
Amy Gahran is quickly learning the reality of corporate e-learning: "In my opinion, too much corporate training is basically an information dump rather than skill development." Her solution is to create e-learning that focuses on the task and on new information that an employee would be interested in. I would simplify it even further and focus on the decision-making. For example, providing learners the answers to "The 10 most important things you need to know about this task" or "The 5 most important decisions related to this task" will help the them to focus on the execution of the task. These checksheets can also be linked to detailed documents for the learner to dig into if he/she wishes.decision-making Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 14, 2004
KM Conference in Singapore
Just a reminder for the KM conference in Singapore from Dec 13-15. Registration prices are a steal. Dave Snowden, Rob Cross, David Weinberger and Josef Hofer-Alfeis will be keynoting. Also there will be many interesting case studies up for discussion.knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Thursday, December 09, 2004