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Home of Jay Cross and Internet Time Blog

Last chance for Berlin workshopYesterday

If you want to attend my workshop December 3 in Berlin, you’d better sign up now and send me an email. You see, everyone in the workshop will receive a copy of Informal Learning and of Learnscaping, and I have to send the books now to get them there on time.

and

Participants are coming from Germany, Kuwait, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Russian, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland. It should be an exciting workshop. We have five places left.

Phone-fuYesterday

Three days ago, my land line went dead. That evening I saw a phone company guy in a cherry picker working on the phone pole across the street. I figured he’d fix the problem. He didn’t.

I went into my default mode of dealing with craziness. I asked myself, “What am I supposed to learn from this?”

I decided I’d learned that I no longer need a poorly performing, monopolistic phone company to provide my business phone service. Skype and my iPhone are plenty. If you want to reach me, use this new number: 1.510.323.5380. Better still, Skype jaycross. If I’m not on line, it’s not a good time to talk.

EtherPadYesterday

My programming skills are so lame, I just locked myself out of my personal Drupal environment and can’t find the back door to get in. Hence, I’m turning my attention to something simpler: EtherPad. Give it a shot.

The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years OnNovember 20

Stephen Downes has posted a brilliant, encyclopedic paper on The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On. It’s follow-up to one of my favorite Stephen essays, The Future of Online Learning (1998).

I have but two quibbles, mere grains of sand on Stephen’s immense beach. The title doesn’t tip the reader off that Stephen’s essay is really about education, or learning in educational contexts, not online learning overall.

Also, Stephen writes, “Just as people no longer need publishers to create content for them, they no longer need organizers to create community. Rather, just as, with access to powerful content-creation tools, they can create their own content, in the same way, with powerful community-building tools, they can create their own communities.” True, true, but in the corporate sector organizations need a hand in creating their communities because it entails breaking through bureaucratic barriers, unfounded fears, and resistance to giving up control. It’s the old issue of the installed base.

On my wiki, I maintain a list of two dozen seminal documents in learning.

Ivan Illich, Doug Engelbart, Kevin Kelly, John Bransford, John Seely Brown, Tim O’Reilly, and Roger Schank are there. With this essay, Stephen becomes the only

Zany times at Corporate Learning TrendsNovember 20

Sometimes things go so far off the rails that all you can do is chuckle at life’s absurdity. Today at Learn Trends, I demonstrated my ability to screw up everything technical within reach.

Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Jane Hart, and I had planned to lead a session at noon today to explain the thinking we’ve gone through to develop a lightweight, turn-key social learning platform.

Reading the enthusiasm around the more experimental presentations this week, I decided it would be cool to have a four-way conversation, sort of an online fishbowl. Instead of a presentation, we’d have lots of pieces of content on my desktop ready to call up in response to specific questions and topics. That was the theory.

What happened? First off, the computer with all the assets died right before the session. Not a problem; I have other computers hereabouts. Then we got a report that Jane was stuck in terrible traffic on the way to Oxford. The moderator I had hoped to have running the software was trapped in a low-bandwidth environment and couldn’t join us. Screen-sharing didn’t work for rapidly changing slides. Voices sounded like we were gulping helium. The screen exhibited Op-Art designs. People who wanted to ask questions found they couldn’t.

Harold managed to app-share my wiki, which contained some of the day’s presentation graphics. I encouraged him to speed up the pace. Ba