Dave’s Whiteboard

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.

Common Craft (which means Lee and Sachi LeFever) uses, as they say, a simple format and real-world stories to make sense of complex ideas.

Laura Jeffrey at knowledgework posted this Common Craft explanation of Twitter:

Between this, and comments from people like Alan Levine and George Siemens, I’m going to give Twitter a try (though I can be a bit distractable). (My ID, oddly enough, is dave_ferguson.)

Laura’s post reminded me of other effective Common Craft videos, like those on social bookmarking, RSS, and online photo sharing.

An article in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye: over 9 million people still use AOL’s dial-up service, including one man mentioned in the article who also has a high-speed internet connection.

But what kept my eye was this observation by Paul Saffo:

Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of change. Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a word in which only early adopters got to choose, we’d all be using CB radios and quadraphonic stereo.

I don’t know that I’m a laggard (well, I know that I am, but not in this particular area), but I’m often a techno-skeptic. From working with frontline people in organizations, I know how stressful and even illogical new technology can seem.

It’s true, of course, that many people actively avoid technology. The corporate training field still includes many people who want nothing more than to do stand-up courses, and a dispiriting number of clients think that’s just great.

I don’t know if there are studies on this, but my own hunch is that most people move from the specific to the general, rather than vice-versa. So for them, hearing about open source or social networks,or blogs is like reading about traditional Scottish music styles instead of listening to Buddy MacMaster.

During my time with GE Information Services, use of our proprietary email service expanded from mainframe consoles and dumb terminals to the newly-released IBM PC. Mainframe users who could make Fortran tapdance saw the PC as a passing fancy; PC-using early adopters tended to get all wound up about using QEMM to squeeze another 10 or 20 kilobytes out of DOS.

Somewhere in between were people who saw ways that people in an organization could communicate efficiently and effectively via email, without having ever moved jumpers on a circuit board.

After a false start with a competing product, I’m happily using the Jabra BT500 Bluetooth headset with my cell phone.

I’m not big on talking while in the car (especially since I have a 5-speed), but I’ve been making two-hour drives lately. The headset allows me to receive the (rare) incoming call.

Then, earlier today, I read this post at Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project. The post told me about Jott, a service that turns voicemail into email.

Since I’m even worse at writing notes in the car than I am at dialing the phone, I really like the idea of being able to record a short message to myself and have that message show up as email.

I registered on the site, confirmed my email, indicated the phone number I’d use, and then called Jott from the cell phone to send myself a message.

There are other features, like creating a list of people so that you can record a single message and send it to all those on the list. There are probably others, but the key for me was: could I send a message to myself using the headset?

Yep.