Dave’s Whiteboard

Created by Michael Wesch and a couple hundred students at Kansas State.

Speaks pretty well for itself:

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Despite telling an online colleague that I needed another time sink like a hippo needs a harpsichord, I decided last month to sign up at Second Life.

In part I’m interested in seeing how businesses and other organizations try to harness the potential of virtual worlds, whether for structured, formal-training activity or for less hierarchical collaboration, or for simulation, or for…who knows?

I happened to show up at Metaversed just as an online conference began. I missed the overview of the topic, but in a sense that didn’t matter. I got a chance to observe a panel discussion.

Some presenters appeared in avatar form; some appeared only on the audio track. Whiteboards displayed PowerPoint-type information, and there may have been a video as well (I thought there was, but couldn’t find it).

Oddly but somehow unsurprisingly, the presenters appeared on a stage, and the several dozen participants sat in rows — just like back at GE, except with a far looser dress code, and a few attendees with wings, fur, or both.

I found information flowing through several channels:

• The audio track, which presented the speakers’ voices.
• The whiteboards, which displayed diagrams or bullet points.
• The open chat window, which shows typed comments from any participant or presenter.
• The instant message window, which delivered one-to-one comments.

I might have thought, ahead of time, that the open chat would distract and detract from the presentation; I’ve seen that happen in other settings. Here, though, possibly because most of the participants seemed familiar with the format, the open comments tended to stick to the topic.

For example, when a presenter mentioned a link, someone typed, “Can you put that link into the chat?” Other participants posted links to share additional material or other points of view (”See O’Halloran’s blog at www.whatever.com”) .

The session was looser than typical, real-world panel discussions, although the instant messages struck me as very similar to comments you’d whisper to a colleague in mid-session, either out of inspiration or boredom.

Having glimpsed the value of this format, I’m hoping to participate in a fuller session soon.

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Stephen Downes points the way to yet another impressive application of technology. Here’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED, demonstrating Photosynth, which creates amazing compliations — like multidimensional representations of Notre-Dame de Paris, build from photos available online.

Watch for my favorite — the entire text of a book, starting smaller than a thumbnail photo. Mrs. Pardiggle (pictured on the left), who monitors my printer, would approve.

I really enjoy the TED talks, and I’m glad Stephen’s post reminded me to visit the site more often.Here are two TED theme pages that each group several presentations:

• How the Mind Works

• What’s Next in Tech

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Many people, I think, work in the world of formal training for a time, then gradually broaden their perspective. Courses and classes, organized instruction seem to make sense for getting people started with basic skills and knowledge that they lack. When Amtrak designed a completely new reservation system, it planned training for the 2,000-plus employees who worked with the previous one.

I’ve heard “These people need training” at the start of countless projects, and often they did need some training. Usually they needed something else as well, and at times something other than training.

Joe Harless, a past president and longtime contributor to ISPI, loved grappling with on-the-job performance. Along with his enthusiasm and insight, he brought a deceptively quiet approach to helping a client explore an apparent problem.

“Never ask a client, ‘What do you want people to know?’” Joe advised.

Why not? “Because he’ll tell you. And usually what he wants people to know is something like appreciation of widgets, and the history of widgets, and great widget makers, and widget policy, and…”

Instead, Joe said, the question to ask is, “What do you want people to do?”

The difference between the two questions may seem obvious to you, but for me it was like being in the ocean after only having seen pictures.

Even if the client’s model of training involves only lectures and PowerPoint, “What do you want people to do?” shifts the focus to the reason they’re on the job — the results they’re supposed to accomplish. (If the client focuses only on how they perform, you can ask about the results they produce — whatever’s left over when the workers go home.)

The magic in this question is that by starting with the desired outcome, you can more easily explore with the client different factors affecting that outcome. When the client believes that “training” is a solution (and when you actually do have a skill/knowledge gap), the conversation can include how to maximize the impact of the training and how to address other barriers to performance.

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George Siemens pointed the way to Stephen Downes’s videocast, “Web 2.0 and Your Own Learning and Development.” It runs about 22 minutes; I found myself scribbling a few notes (since I didn’t want to hop back and forth between screens and write here real-time).

Downes sets out three principles for personal learning: interaction, usability, and relevance.

One idea, radical in its simplicity and maybe obvious till you start trying to apply it, is: “Place yourself, not the content, at the center.”

Downes argues that information is a flow, not a collection of objects. I confess I do tend to think at times about a body of knowledge — the notion that there are things (facts, concepts, principles) that knowledgeable people in a field would agree about. The more I examine that notion, though, the less useful it seems in specific areas.

Perhaps the insight for me is that the more specific my need to learn, the greater my responsibility to take charge, to set my own direction. The standard “systems” for learning aren’t likely to help.

Image from Wetsun, made available under a Creative Commons license.

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