Have we reached the tipping point? Dell USA is offering a Precision Workstation for $709. The Precision 370/470 n is available in Canada also, starting at $(CA)972, for small businesses for now. It will only be a matter of time before Linux moves to the mass market Dimension/Inspiron lines, and then …
Via Consulting Times.
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Regular readers knows that I often refer to The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you haven’t read it yet, take a look at the 95 theses, but I’d suggest that you read the whole book - online or in print. Scott Adams has taken the theses and re-mixed them for education. I’ve re-mixed a bit more, but don’t have the energy (yet) to address all 95:
Go ahead and play some more - this is fun 
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I was able to grab onto a free copy of the September edition of The Global Knowledge Review (paid subscription required), but only recently read it. I found that the two most interesting articles were by people whose blogs I read regularly - Dave Pollard and Lilia Efimova. Dave’s piece was focused on "What do knowledge workers want?" He summed up his interviews with over 100 front line workers with these general statements on their needs:
I’m a front line worker in my team of one and I thought about how I’ve been managing my knowledge for the past couple of years. I’ve already mentioned the benefits of blogging, so I’ll take it from there.
My blog forces me to make tacit some of my implicit thoughts and ideas. It also gives a place for some (rather limited) conversation through referrals from other bloggers and comments on this site. The real value is having a searchable database of these tacit tidbits. I probably search this site at least once a day, looking for something that I vaguely remember, in order to put it into a report or an e-mail, etc.
Recently, I’ve noticed that I’m commenting on other blogs more than writing on my own. I find this to be more intellectually stimulating and much better for my own learning. With about 100 blogs in my feed reader, there is always something to learn. Tracking these conversations is much more difficult, as different platforms have their unique requirements for following a conversation’s thread. It’s better than the traditional threaded discussion forum, though I still engage in some of these.
The other tool that helps a lot is Furl. This provides another tagged, searchable database of interesting websites. Furl also caches a copy for personal use, so the website will always be there for reference. Furl is very quick and easy to use, and great for sharing sites on a particular topic. For instance, I have a public education category to share with my wife.
Skype (voice over IP) is letting me have more and longer voice conversations. I use the free, computer to computer function for several hours at a time when I’m working with distributed teams. Free telephone service sure helps when your project partners are 3,000 km away.
So to get back to Dave’s statements on what knowledge workers want, I think that as an independent consultant, with my own blog and some free tools like Bloglines and Furl:
These cheap and simple tools have made the job of knowledge worker much easier, at least for those of us outside the typical corporate policies and firewalls.
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A recent article in the The Knowledge@Wharton Newsletter (requires free subscription) on blogging shows how mainstream the medium is becoming:
This article covers a wide variety of perspectives on blogging and is a good read for the uninitiated.
Blogging seems to be taking off much as the telephone did - people just want to connect. In many ways, blogging is not so much a new enabling technology, but a technology that has reduced the barriers thrown up by previous technologies and business models.
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Are you a teacher, educator or trainer? What kind of evaluation method does your organisation use? Which one makes more sense to you?
From Nine Shift, are a number of critical posts on the state of Western education.
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This week at the LearnNB quarterly meeting the key area of focus was gaming, especially Serious Gaming. The interest in gaming reminds me of the interest in online learning around 1997. I think that e-learning, however you define it, and serious gaming, however you define that too, each have their place - as possible interventions for improved performance.
However, there is still a lack of pertinent discussion around the essential component in this whole business - analysis, or figuring out what solution is best. We have to better understand how we get from perceived problem to viable solution when dealing with human performance. How do we go from, "Our sales staff aren’t producing" to "let’s use the sales simulation game". ISPI provides a venue for those discussions, but sometimes it’s a voice in the wilderness.
Another source of information is Jay Cross, with workflow learning, based on some of the principals and theories of HPT. Jay recently highlighted some excellent presentations from Training 2005, and Harold Stolovitch’s handout is a great aide-memoire for any HPT practitioner. You have to have some background in the field to decipher these notes, as the detailed explanation is lacking, but just the section on feedback is well worth reading. Feedback is often misunderstood, and frequently misused. Jay also refers to a Rummler-Brache white paper on business defragmentation (neat term), in this post. As anyone in the field knows, Geary Rummler has advanced much of our praxis.
Until we extend performance analysis into the everyday business workplace, we will continue to chase after each new performance tool. Every tool has its place, but good diagnostics, based on validated theory & practice, will help to make real progress in improving performance.
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For the first time, the Canadian Society for Training & Development (CSTD) will be holding its Symposium outside of Ontario. The 2005 Learning Innovations Symposium will be held in Fredericton on 16 & 17 May. We expect an intimate gathering of about 200 attendees and another 200 or so for the live webcasts. The event will be digitally archived. The host agency is LearnNB, of which I’m a member and I will be presenting, with my colleague Albert Lejeune, two sessions, one French & one English, on a case study of a healthcare project that we did with my partner company, Mancomm Performance.
Apprentissage et communautique en services de sant?ɬ�
En 2003-2004, l?��Ǩ�Ѣ?ɬ�quipe Mancomm Performance a collabor?ɬ�, avec le Centre hospitalier Pierre-Le Gardeur (Lachenaie, QC), ?ɬ� la mise en place d?��Ǩ�Ѣun cours en ligne pour les infirmi?ɬ�res portant sur l?��Ǩ�Ѣapproche McGill, ainsi qu?��Ǩ�Ѣ?ɬ� la cr?ɬ�ation de communaut?ɬ�s de praticiens. Depuis l?��Ǩ�Ѣanalyse de la performance au travail jusqu?��Ǩ�Ѣ?ɬ� la livraison sur des plateformes MOODLE et MAMBO (logiciels libres), l?��Ǩ�Ѣ?ɬ�quipe a travaill?ɬ� ?ɬ�troitement avec le personnel hospitalier au moyen d?��Ǩ�Ѣontologies de domaine. Dans cette s?ɬ�ance, vous allez :
eLearning and Communities of Practice in Healthcare
During 2003 ?��Ǩ��� 2004, Mancomm Performance Inc worked with the Pierre LeGardeur Hospital in the Montreal area to implement online learning for nurses as they adopted the new McGill nursing care methodology, as well as the creation of virtual communities of practice for social workers. From the initial performance analyses conducted on the hospital wards, to the implementation of the open source Moodle and Mambo technology systems, the consultants worked closely with the hospital staff in the development of their knowledge base, using domain ontologies.
Other guests include Clark Aldrich, Jay Cross and Stephen Downes. The price is very reasonable [as low as $(CA) 299 or $(US)247] and you can get a discount on CSTD membership as well. Hope to see you there.
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Lee Lefever at Common Craft has an extensive list of lightly annotated business blogging links. A nice resource for anyone examining how to use blogs for a wide variety of non-academic, non-diary applications.
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I came across this reference from Linux?ɂ�?du-Qu?ɬ�bec to a study (in French) on the comparitive costs of proprietary and open source portals in education. The study was conducted by Michael Wybo, a visiting professor at the Montreal business school, HEC, who specialises in open source. According to Wybo:
The OS system in question is based on the MILLE project (an open source framework for education). According to the comments on the extract, the complete report is available from CRIM, but is not readily available to the public, even though it appears that public money was used to fund this study.
Does anyone have any more information on this study?
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Elliott Masie reports from Hong Kong that e-learning in Asia may have some advantages due to its later start than in North America.
This got me thinking about my recent conversations with Jon Husband :
Our comfortable, established mental models slow us from accepting new ones. I guess that’s why it’s so much fun to work with the young.
One challenge in this business of designing learning systems is to constantly question our models and assumptions - a very McLuhanesque perspective:
A saying we had in the Army was that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into an officer’s mind was getting the old one out [yes, I was an officer].
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