Dave’s Whiteboard

I have mixed feelings about CoComment: I like having some record of where I’ve commented, but I haven’t spent enough time figuring out any but the most basic features.

Looking at my comments today, I saw about twelve pages of comment history. I decided to act like a brain and prune this back a bit.

For one thing, a bunch of the comments were on my own blogs — this one and another I think of as the most narrowly-focused blog around (I created it for my parents, so the average number of hits a day is “one”).

And, from time to time, I’m willing to let a conversation go. If I commented somewhere four months ago, and only one other person did as well, and there hasn’t been anything added since then, I feel safe in no long tracking.

When I had a corporate job and a corporate cubicle, I strongly resisted retaining too much paper. I had a small bookshelf and one filing cabinet. When the files got up to 90% capacity, I’d weed them back to about 66%. I think it was Robert Townsend of Up the Organization who said it’s not the stuff you throw away that gets you in trouble; it’s the stuff you keep.

Naturally, I like to think my pruning is scientific and purposeful, though I suspect a fair amount of it is simply ripping out what looks rippable at the time.

So I managed to toss around 20% of what was being tracked — which is way above that magic number of seven plus-or-minus two. I chose the “natural pruner” picture that I did because this little guy couldn’t do too much damage in too short a time (unlike the ‘antler rats’ I used to have to defend my shrubbery against).

I did find myself coming up with informal guidelines for what to retain, and why, so the exercise paid off and not only in reducing the number of comments I was (theoretically) tracking.

“Serious pruning” photo by London Permaculture;
“Informal pruning” photo by Ben Cooper.

I mentioned the Xyleme Voices podcasts the other day. I particularly liked Conrad Gottfredson’s concept of learning at the moment of need. He talks about providing performance support to address each of these situations:

• When learning for the first time
• When learning more
• When remembering and/or applying what’s been learned
• When things go wrong
• When things change

The first two situations lend themselves readily to formal training ( though I’m sure some will disagree). The other three don’t fit well with traditional training modes; performance support tools make even more sense in these cases.

You’ll find an invitation to discuss performance support, and lots more, at PS: Learning @ the Moment of Need, a blog written by Gottfredson and Bob Mosher.

Looking at “when things go wrong” and “when things change,” I find myself thinking about an article in yesterday’s New York Times. For the Elderly, Being Heard about Life’s End discusses “slow medicine” — and approach providing less aggressive medical care at the end of life.

I’m sensitive to this because my parents are quite old, and my father in particular has faded in the past year or two. Although they still have their own home, the realities of their situation remind me that things always change and often go wrong.

My parents in the Red Rows, ca. 1951.

In our hyperlinked, hyperconnected world, it’s easy to think that technology trumps everything. The Times article demonstrates strikingly how facts can trump impressions.

…9 of 10 people who live into their 80s will wind up unable to take care of themselves, either because of frailty or dementia. “Everyone thinks they’ll be the lucky one, but we can’t go along with that myth,” Dr. McCullough [of Kendal at Hanover, a retirement community affiliated with Dartmouth Medical School] said…

A 2002 study, published in the journal Heart, found that fewer than 2 percent of people in their 80s and 90s who had been resuscitated for cardiac arrest at home lived for one month.

So that’s maybe a reminder with two edges:

• Make my own learning (for my work and for my life) a regular priority.
• Use time when I can as insurance against time when I can’t.

George Siemens, writing about wikis, pointed to a Business Week article from last year. BW’s Rachael King notes both successes of, and impediments to, adoption of wikis at work.

Musing about situations where a wiki or some other tool could produce results, I thought about what might impede ordinary people (as opposed to, say, open-source zealots) from putting them to use. Most folks don’t know much about wikis, of course.

If they do, they know Wikipedia. That’s not always a good thing. Once, looking up the Scottish poet Robert Burns, I found more than a third of the entry devoted to… Burns’ membership in the Masons.

It’s like something Garrison Keillor said once about the radio news program All Things Considered — it’s terrific, unless you want to know right now what happened. Then you get a six-minute word portrait of loggers in Montana who are planning a festival of Shakespeare’s history plays.

Tom Gilbert defined worth as value divided by cost. He was a vigorous advocate of tools to increase performance. So I took a shot at ways Gilbert might have suggested measuring the quality of social software like a wiki.

Take a look:

(The “website” was done in Comic Life, but don’t blame just me.)

“Cover photo” by Les Chatfield.

The eLearning Guild’s annual gathering is in Orlando, Florida this week. One of the events is the Immersive Learning Simulations challenge, in which designers grapple with some challenge for which they’ll propose an ILS (a “serious game”) — a virtual environment in which people deal with actual problems.

From the challenge intro:

This is not a session about templates or tools or rapid development, but rather is an inspiring session about how thinking differently about tough problems, using an ILS/Serious Games set of tools and theories, can lead to extraordinary solutions. The goal is for you to be energized, and motivated by this session into exploring more deeply how you can implement ILS/Serious Games and great design within your own organization to improve learner outcomes.

This year’s challenge: a North American conglomerate has acquired two other companies, one in Africa, the other in Korea. These acquisitions will directly affect your own job. Design an ILS to help align the three entities and share their cultures. “Oh, and the big shareholder meeting is coming up too. Go.”

I have no idea what I would have come up with, but it would not have been what Alan Levine did. After reading — or experiencing — his post, I’m wider awake at 5:35 than if I’d managed to get downstairs for coffee.

This isn’t thinking outside the box — this is ripping the cardboard apart and finding six different uses for it.

See for yourself:

The Great Design Challenge (Hey, Mom) by Alan Levine (cogdogblog).

Photo by tew / t whelan.

So, in the fifth century B.C., Heraclitus had Web 2.0 pretty much figured out.

Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.

(Everything is in flux;
nothing stands still.)

Ray Sims wrote the other day about What 2.0 Memes to Me. He shared ways that he’s grouped various 2.0 characteristics (the glosses here are mine):

• It’s all about me: user-generated content, diversity, personal tags, informality
• …and my networks: connections, interaction, sharing
• It’s open: open source, transparent, encouraging feedback
• …emergent: innovative, light, not “managed”
• …fast: easy to start, easy to use, rapid responses
• …and always on: global, less and less dependent on particular hardware platforms

I like this arrangement. I did think, as I said in a comment on his blog, that I might pull out another category that I call pragmatic. I’m seeing 2.0 things as good enough for now, but by no means permanent, like renting a place to live.

Right now, for example, I’ve got my blogs (thanks, WordPress). I use NetVibes, and CoComment, and del.icio.us, and I’ve started using Twitter. I set up MediaWiki on my own site to play with that.

So far, they do what I wanted them to do (except, perhaps, Twitter, since I’m not sure what I want it to be doing). I have no illusions that in, say, 18 months, I’ll be using any of them, and I’m pretty sure some new tools will come along.

The old notion of a toolbox is as a container for a certain amount of stuff, and for most people, that stuff stays the same. Physical tools don’t change much; new ones don’t come out every week. (Craftsman claw hammer 3.2, compatible with Mac and Linux?) In the working world, Heraclitus would feel pretty much at home.

Ray Sims does talk about several of these “pragmatic characteristic: “perpetual beta, never complete, frequently changes, fast to appear, sometimes fast to become irrelevant.”

The “pragmatic” label is really a reminder for myself. Sometimes I prefer to concentrate, to go deeper, and constant changes can throw me off balance (or annoy the bejabbers out of me). I like CoComment, for example, but it seems that every so often it just plain forgets to retain comments I make. Where do they go? Why? I’m not interested (or crazy) enough to pursue this, which means I tend to treat CoComment like my tack hammer with the loose head: I use it, but I don’t count on it.

I feel more balanced to think of the stuff I use as pragmatic, like my current computer and other office set-up. This is what I work with now; it’s bound to change. Everything is in flux.

“For rent” image by greenkayak73.