Yan know what?

A Methodology of Learning

2005-04-01T16:15:00.000-04:00

I believe that every new tool or technology usually goes through 3 main phases:

Phase 1: Look at what this thing can do!
Phase 2: We can do a lot more, but we keep replicating our old ways of working. Is there a way to be more efficient, effective, and creative?
Phase 3: Here’s a methodology that will streamline our processes, reduce duplication and focus on quality output.

ITC is a spectacular example of that. Just think of when new programming/analysis paradigms (OO) or business applications (CRM, ERP, portals) arrived. Each followed pretty well the 3 phases. A more recent case is e-learning/learning. Inspired very much by OO, the learning object concept was coined as a possible solution for reutilization and productivity, with mitigated success. While working on the learning object concept, I remembered conceptual analysis classes I attended at Université Laval with Daniel Pascot, Robert W. Mantha and Dzenan Ridjanovic. Most conceptual views of system design usually focus on identifying critical information first (database structuration), and then build treatments and interface upon it. The justification is rather simple: data is the most stable part of an information system. Treatments and interface are more likely to change often as opposed to data. This 3-tier architecture (database, treatment, interface) is now a de facto standard in system development, although it is sometimes criticized. Nonetheless, this formalization of system development has led to impressive gains in terms of productivity, quality and persistence.

Let’s translate this stability imperative to the learning field. What’s the most stable element of the learning experience?

Content/Information? Certainly not.
Systems? Nope.
Social networks? Not even.
The learner? That is indeed the most stable element of the learning experience. The one that is the less likely to change.

The learner is also to least understood element and the most difficult to conceptualize. There is no way the learning experience can get significantly better without a clear representation of what a learner wants and needs in terms of learning. Sorry folks but all the rest (learning objects, collaboration tools…) is gravy. Learning objects won’t make a huge difference, neither social networking. They are all related to creating a learning context, but that in itself is inextricably linked to the learner concept, the foundation of learning.

No gain in the understanding of the learner, no gain in the learning. I don’t think our R&D efforts go at the right place…

About “Performance Technology – the missing piece”

2005-03-24T14:44:00.000-04:00

Harold comments this week’s LearnNB event held in Fredericton that I also attended, and for which I helped design the program.

There is indeed an important piece of the puzzle missing in most e-learning/serious games discussions: how do we make sure that we help support performance? It all starts with understanding performance as a systemic phenomenon rather than an individual one, and being able to measure it. In some cases, even the best training doesn’t help better performance. The reason is usually quite simple: the problem wasn’t there initially.

Even if it has been over-exploited during the last decade, I like the toolbox metaphor a lot. First, the more tools you have in your toolbox, the better you can work on a limited set of tasks. Adding new tools always requires investment but can help you work better on current tasks and/or start working on new sets of tasks. Serious games are a new (but still expensive) tool. The problem is that we have a very bad understanding of how and when to use our tools, and especially this new one.

About Wikiversity

2005-02-21T14:24:00.000-04:00

Part of my work is to report on new trends in education and training in general, and also more specifically for community colleges. I’ve been saying for a while now that the value of educational content is going down as more open material gets freely available. MIT Opencourseware was the first spectacular demonstration of this a few years ago. Now initiatives such as Wikiversity bring a lot of people to question the value of what is being sold in higher education.

I’ve been asked by a number of people (often jokingly) if Wikiversity is something serious, if I think it can succeed. My answer: “I don’t know if this particular project will succeed, but the concept certainly has potential. After all, Wikipedia has now become a comprehensive encyclopaedia, and it’s free.” It’s usually the moment when I see the laughs fade away. “What! An encyclopaedia has been written following this principle? In only a few months?”

A critical question for higher education institutions is then to determine what it is that they are selling. If it’s content, they are in big trouble. If, it’s something else (certification, experience, social learning environment, reputation), they might be better equipped for what’s coming. In any case however, current educational business models will need to be changed.

Competitive Environment in the ITC Job Market

2005-02-15T09:39:00.000-04:00

A shift is occurring in the ITC job market. Harold describes how graduates in technical fields, such as CS, have to have some social skills on top of technical skills. Last fall I wrote a report for my employer that stresses this reality. Here’s an excerpt:

Outsourcing or Offshoring

In a globalized competitive environment, an organization is competitive either because it can produce at a lower cost (price-based differentiation) or because it can produce goods and services of superior quality (quality- and innovation-based differentiation). North America's traditional competitive advantage was based on quality and innovation. The North American work force was better educated and consequently more capable of producing high-quality, innovative goods and services than the work forces of other countries. Because of that advantage, workers were able to command the higher remuneration corresponding to North American living standards.

Offshoring is not a new phenomenon. The basic consumer products manufacturing sector, for instance, is now concentrated mainly in Asia, obviously because of the availability of abundant cheap labour. Most of the jobs and activities outsourced involve manual tasks requiring little specialized knowledge.

The nature of offshoring is changing, however, mainly because of rising educational levels in two countries: India and China. These countries are now producing millions of college and university graduates annually, and their skill levels are comparable with those of North American graduates. Therefore, North America's competitive advantage in terms of quality and innovation is diminishing as these two giants produce new professionals with globally competitive skills. Increasingly, North American jobs in business-related fields and especially in ICTs are being outsourced to China and India. This does not appear to be a passing trend. In fact, given the demographic weight of China and India, combined with their vigorous economies, lower living standards, and high-quality education systems, it is a trend that may well grow stronger in the coming years. That view is shared by Warren Jestin, chief economist with Scotiabank.

The Open Source Movement

The open source philosophy can be simply stated as follows: a community of interest decides to work together to develop free software applications. The movement is gathering momentum with technologies such as Linux and OpenOffice, which are capturing a considerable market share. It might seem at first that an industry that gives its products away could not possibly thrive for very long, because its workers still need food and clothing. In fact, however, the open source movement is simply a new business model. Profit-seeking companies such as Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are definitely in business to make money, and yet they are among the leading companies in the open source movement, paying thousands of employees to develop free software applications. The trick is that while the software is free, the technical support and training are not. The application per se has therefore become a loss leader that creates a market for the ICT service industry.

The open source movement is exerting strong downward pressure on the prices of other software applications. Market value is therefore shifting from production activities to service activities.

Keywords

The two trends described above do not appear to be temporary phenomena, but rather new systemic realities. Like the manufacturing sector in the past, ICT manufacturing as such (programming, hardware, etc.) is increasingly being outsourced outside North America. However, the service that adds value to the product sold is still provided here, because the biggest ICT market is still here (i.e., in the United States). Since we know that value added is now generated more by services than by products, it would be wise to redirect our training initiatives toward development of service expertise, be it in ICTs or in business. Here is a list of keywords suggested by the above-mentioned trends.

Service
Client
Training
Support
Consulting
Management

These keywords indicate where North America's strongest potential lies for the coming years. The offshore competition is still at a disadvantage when it comes to the service sector. Also, since product value is decreasing as service value rises, the service sector is the one in which salaries will probably be highest, which means it will be more in keeping with our North American lifestyle.

The Art of Listening, Or How to Really Manage

2005-01-24T11:52:00.000-04:00

Listening has become a forgotten art over time. People have developed the habit of rushing through newspapers, TV programs and conversations. Listening is not about accessing content, it’s about reflecting about it, make meaning out of it and connecting better with people by understanding them better.

I think it’s James Farmer who wrote that most people, instead of listening during a conversation, are usually busy getting their reply ready. That is so true. Modern conversations have become simultaneous monologs. True listeners are rare, and I’m not one of them though I’m working on it.

For me management is more about listening than talking. However, most managers are usually much better talkers than listeners. Listening is critical in management in that it’s the first step in putting information and thoughts together. That is fundamental in organizational meaning-making.

My impression on James’ Bad Management or Too-Much Management would be that we just lack quality listening.

Ethics of Advergaming

2005-01-19T09:24:00.000-04:00

The use of videogames as advertising media is a new trend that is gaining a lot of momentum. GameDev.net has just posted an interesting article on the topic:

To reach kids and teens to promote Disneyland's 50th anniversary this year, Walt
Disney Co. will use one of the hottest — and most controversial — gimmicks in
the media business: "advergaming." Advergaming is when companies put ad messages in Web-based or video games. Sometimes the entire game amounts to a virtual commercial for a TV show or product. Sometimes advertisers sponsor games; sometimes they buy ad space integrated into them.

…

But ad critics such as Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital democracy decry
them as "digital infomercials" that blur the lines between content and commercials and often collect data on consumers playing the games. "These are not just harmless games. It's part of the brainwashing of America," Chester says.…

Forrest Research predicts advergaming will grow into a $1 billion business
this year. As marketers try to target kids and elusive Gen Y consumers, Madison
Avenue is waking up to the fact that Webwise younger consumers like video games — and disdain pop-ups, banner ads and other less-subtle forms of online
advertising. And rather than get a kid's attention for just 30 seconds with a TV
commercial, advergames can capture them for minutes or hours.

Ethical issues will obviously come out of advergaming. One of them is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to determine whether we are being exposed to ads or to “content”. With TV ads for example, we usually can differentiate main programs and ads. Advertisers are however increasingly inserting marketing messages into the programs themselves, like with a cereal box left very visibly on a table.

Watching TV is a passive activity as opposed to the immersion of gaming. The active interaction with advergaming then has a tremendous marketing power, as well as much mass manipulation potential…

Meaning-making in Leadership

2005-01-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

Harold Jarche treats of something that is really important to me in Thinking Longer. Because of the financial pressures of modern economy, organizations focus a lot on short-term ROI as business continuity is now seen more as a 3-month issue than a 5-year one. At 30 I’m professionally old enough to remember a time when businesses were doing 5-year and 3-year strategic plans that would remain relevant throughout their expected lifetime. Strategic planning is now seen more as a “work-in-progress”, meaning that by the time we get it right it’s already outdated and needs to be reshaped.

A discussion I had yesterday highlighted the fact that many modern senior managers are actually managing financial performance and public image rather than being leaders. That leads to the inevitable question: what is leadership. Here’s an interesting discussion on the topic. It states that despite the fact that research on leadership tends to focus on financial performance, a large portion of it is actually related to “meaning-making”. Many modern senior managers who are very poor meaning makers are still considered great leaders ($$$). It’s OK to make money, but it’s much better to do it with a smile.

Instructional Design Models

2004-12-22T09:11:00.000-04:00

Ouhhh! Neat resource about instructional design models.

George Siemens points to this very useful - and very comprehensive - list of instructional design models, organized by epoch (modernist and post-modernist) and model, pointing to resources, writings and home pages for each model. By Martin Ryder, Dece,ber 1, 2004

It's kind of funny. In my work I often have to explain to instructors that there are many ways to train people, that the traditional intructor-students relationship is not the only viable way of doing things, that we can do better than that, that replicating traditional teaching in an online format is a lack of opportunism. Maybe I could show people this page. I wouldn't expect everyone to read everything that's in there but that would surely show them that there are indeed other models and alternatives to teaching...

Via OLDaily and George Siemens

Harold Hits the Mark

2004-12-13T10:57:00.000-04:00

Harold Jarche’s Guest Word: e-Learning is dead. Long live learning sums up superbly how the focus of e-learning has transitioned from content to infrastructure over the last couple of years and how it’s now ready for a new (r)evolution phase. Both content and infrastructure are becoming commodities nowadays. My guess is that what has yet to come is context or, if you prefer, the optimal mix of content, infrastructure, collaboration and… opportunities that will make learning emerge.

Marc Prensky – Design Learning that Digital Natives Will Love

2004-12-08T15:58:00.000-04:00

Today I attended a presentation by Marc Prensky at the LearnNB event in Fredericton, New Brunswick. The entire presentation (audio and video) should be archived here in a matter of days. I highly recommend it to anyone interested to better understand the rationale behind the use of video games for learning purposes.

Here is my coverage:

Prensky puts a lot of emphasis on understanding what people he calls “digital natives” expect in terms of learning, training and work. The central notion of the presentation is that digital natives want to have fun, they are used to having fun and are expecting it in every aspects of their lives. If you are boring, you are losing them.

Digital natives are, generally speaking, people under the age of 20-25 that grew up with the Internet and video games. Prensky plugged some interesting stats about digital natives:

By the age of 21, they have in average:
- played 10 000 hours with video games
- sent/received 250 000 e-mails or instant messages
- had 10 000 cell phone conversations
- watched TV for 20 000 hours
- been exposed to 500 000 ads
- spent less than 5 000 hours reading

Digital natives are currently downloading 2 billion ring tones a year, 2 billion songs a day and are sending 3 billion text messages a day. Their interaction with the world is indeed different.

A good quote:

“brains like ours alter profoundly to fit the technologies and practices that surround them”

Those “altered” brains process information:
- Faster
- Randomly as opposed to step-by-step
- In parallel as opposed to in line
- With a preference for graphics and symbols as opposed to text
- By playing
- In connection as opposed to stand-alone

If there are digital natives, there are digital immigrants. At the age of 30, I often feel much more like an immigrant than a native. Prensky says that immigrants have accents that take the form of:
- printing out e-mails
- not thinking of using the Internet first for doing a task
- Not using instant messaging at work
- Typing with fingers instead of thumbs (game controllers)
- Thinking that real life happens only offline

Other quotes:
“ Students think that their Internet cookies know more about their interests than their teachers”

“What counts is not what we give them, it is what they get”

For Prensky, the solution is to put engagement before the content. I totally agree. This is why the current focus on learning objects is to me a complete loss of resources. A question: Do Digital Natives care about learning objects? I’m pretty sure that the answer is no. But they do care about learning and having fun. This is what should be the starting point of so-called e-learning R&D projects.

Gamers spend an average of 30-100 hours per game, which is almost equivalent to the time spent on an average semester course.

A James Paul Gee quote:

« You can’t beat a game unless you learn it »

Games are the most intellectually challenging format we have at the present time.

The average student asks a question in class at every 40 hours. In games, decision-making is continuous.

Ouf! A lot of ideas in a very short time frame… I was already convinced but it now gives me some more to think about. Again, I really recommend the presentation.

From E-learning To Serious Games To… Augmented Reality?

2004-11-26T14:12:00.000-04:00

I’ve been playing with concepts around the Serious Games theme for some time now. My wife, Natacha Bosse-Simard, is currently writing what I think is a groundbreaking paper on how to use Augmented Reality for learning purposes. Talking to her about the subject is giving me a lot to think about. My thoughts are still chaotic so I’ll try to bring some order in the house by writing down my main reflections. I believe that Serious Games (or games for learning?) are the next big step in the learning evolution process and that Augmented Reality will one day change the way we interact with our environment by bridging gaming to what we call reality.

Some random thoughts:

·E-learning is slowly dying, or at least e-learning in its current form. Traditional e-learning’s focus on content has proven to be a rather weak approach. Failures are leading us to put emphasis on collaboration, and rightly so.

·Collaboration, the way we experience it in even the most collaborative e-learning initiatives, is very limited in that in most cases it happens through written communication or, when lucky, with videoconferencing.

·Richer environments allowing people to interact at a deeper emotional level with both so-called “content” and with others are needed, which explains the current hype around serious games and simulation.

·I suspect that in a number of years we will criticize serious games because of their lack of roots in the physical world (I use physical world as opposed to reality that is only a personal interpretation of personal perceptions, everyone has his/her own personal reality). Virtuality leads to an inevitable delay between learning and influencing the physical world.

·The need to better link gaming with reality will push forward a concept that is already the subject of early work: augmented reality

The distinction between reality and virtuality is seen in Milgram’s continuum as the level of augmentation that we apply to reality. If that augmentation happens on demand, in real time, then we create an altered reality where knowledge is created on-the-fly according to a very precise context.

Just imagine the potential…
A worker facing a difficult task (plan a marketing strategy for a new service for example), would be offered advices by “mentors”, be it real people or agents, would be presented all relevant information, and would in fact learn by doing it for real with all the necessary support and collaboration. This individual would be learning the way humans have traditionally been learning, by doing it for real.

In my example, I used a single individual within a defined concept. What if we extend the concept to a large group of people across various settings that see their lives “augmented” by learning, knowledge and collaboration?

Humans have always been augmenting their realities in some way. People stop at a red light when they’re driving even if we could well drive cars without having red lights. What makes the red light “real”? The fact that it’s made of matter? No, just the fact that it is something that we accept and recognize as being part of our reality. Virtuality and gaming might become quite real one day… Or maybe I’m just drinking too much green tea.

CIT – Low Budget Interactive Learning Objects

2004-11-09T16:30:00.000-04:00

I don’t like to comment on low-level presentations but I’ll do it this time because a comment made by one of the presenters really struck me. I felt like being back in the 90s: the key to e-learning is to turn every faculty member into an independent producer!?!

Hey! That doesn’t work. If you just want to create low-level static html pages it’ll work. If you want to do high-quality learning experiences you need a lot of very specific and deep expertise. Just let faculty members do what they are good at: design learning experiences and mentor learners. The remaining has to be assigned to people who know (and like) what they are doing, be it multimedia design, project management or linguistic revision.

Are car owners building their cars on their own in their backyards? No, unless it’s for fun. It is much more efficient in terms of quality and cost to “outsource” the job to a very large number of highly specialized workers. The same principle is also true with e-learning.

CIT – Carole Twigg

2004-11-09T16:11:00.000-04:00

Carole Twigg’s keynote speech Improving Learning and Reducing Costs: New Models for Online Learning certainly grabbed my attention as doing better and more with less is essentially what everybody is trying to do with IT in education.

Carole first started by refuting some common assumptions about technology, which I found very appropriate as I deal with a lot of people who have those beliefs:
· Improving quality does not necessarily equals increasing costs
· IT does not necessarily increase costs
· Technology-delivered learning does not necessarily threaten quality

Then Carole stated that the biggest obstacle to innovation is thinking that it can be done the old way. She cited the famous example of the Pony Express that reacted to the invention of the telegraph by hiring better riders and buying better horses while their business model had in fact been rendered obsolete by technology. Another example she gave is the ATM, which was initially used in… banks. The real revolution came when ATM were put in malls, bars and other public buildings.

So, following Carole’s idea, the real gains of IT will be reached when we stop doing things the old-fashioned way with it. Not a new message but always a relevant one. Here’s what she proposes:
· Redesign the course, not the class
· Replace single-mode instruction with differentiated personnel
· Rely heavily on existing software; independently or in teams
· Create small within large (customization)
· Use a CMS for monitoring
· Assess all the time
· Emphasize active learning
· Provide 24X7 access to resources
· Increase on-demand, individualized assistance
· Automate what can benefit from it

Her redesign models:
· Supplemental (soft change)
· Replacement (blended learning)
· Emporium (move all classes to a lab setting)
· Fully online
· Buffet (customization of learning, refers a lot to O’Banion’s Learning College)

Not bad stuff. However, to talk about redesigning courses and programs seems a lot like putting ATM in banks to me…

CIT – League for Innovation in Community Colleges Coverage

2004-11-09T15:46:00.000-04:00

I’ve been in Tampa for 3 days now attending the Conference on Information Technology of the League for Innovation in Community Colleges. I had high expectations before getting here as the conference had been warmly recommended to me by a number of people.

Well, so far it’s been quite disappointing. The level is just not there. It’s not that the subjects are bad or not interesting to me. In fact there is always something like 20 sessions running at the same time so I have been able to always choose subjects that really interest me. The problem is that my enthusiasm falls flat after 10 minutes. Most presentations just represent old, if not outdated, concepts. When one of the most interesting presentations is Jeb Bush’s, to which I reluctantly attended (especially with the sun shinning outside), you can tell that there’s a problem.

Anyhow, my next posts are my coverage of some presentations that still deserve that I write something about them.

By the way, the weather has been great…

The Price of Having Ideas

2004-11-03T10:32:00.000-04:00

James Farmer's post depicts quite well a common ethical dilemma in organizations. Does one have the right and responsibility of proposing a good idea, even if it goes against the views of some direct managers.

My comment to James' post:

Hello James,
I can strongly relate to what you’re describing as I am an internal e-learning consultant working for a community college.

First, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with expressing an idea with the goal of improving the e-learning processes in place. Your idea may be rejected, but proposing it shouldn’t be seen as threatening. I believe that your employer (the university) is probably comfortable with this. Tell me if I’m wrong but I think that the manager you are refering to is the person who selected or is in charge of the LMS. If your suggestion wasn’t pinpointing a critical weakness, the director wouldn’t have told you anything about it. You can see the aggressive reaction as an acknowledgement of the relevance of what you’re proposing.

Disciplinary action? I don’t think so. Who would lose the most form it? A dedicated employee working towards better quality or a manager trying to hide the weaknesses of a system under his/her responsibility?

Please keep going.

2004 Conference on Information Technology - League for Innovation In Community Colleges

2004-11-02T09:33:00.000-04:00

On Sunday November 7th I'm flying to Tampa, Florida for attending the 2004 Conference on Information Technology - League for Innovation In Community Colleges. I'll be blogging from the event, which promises to be quite interesting. Actually, the main problem I'll have will be to decide which presentations to attend.

Serious Games: Games as Mass Media Dialogue Devices

2004-10-21T13:50:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Ian Bogost, Cheryl Bernard, Chris Chambers, Nicco Mele

A look at how games can be used to shape behaviors. Games are now a not only a publicity tool, but also an effective propaganda means. The ethical implications are obvious.

Serious Games and the military

2004-10-21T13:45:00.000-03:00

I wouldn’t want to finish my coverage of the Serious Games Summit without mentioning the overwhelming presence of the US army, more specifically its America’s Army group. This group is in charge of developing the army’s games and simulation. The games are of course of exceptional quality (technically speaking).

I don’t necessarily have a problem with military using gaming and simulation for training purposes. What I have a problem with however is when those games are freely distributed to the general public in order to boost recruitment. The games are all about killing, which is, by the way, what a very small portion of the military personnel is doing.

I have a suggestion, why not make the games more realistic with features such as:
1. Having the game console shoot real bullets back to the players
2. Having a device that disperses a strong burnt flesh odor and sprays body liquids in the room when an opponent explodes
3. Having kids to shoot at you (with real bullets of course as in suggestion 1)
4. Allowing for group rapes, torture and public humiliation

Those suggestions are made exclusively for improving realism to a maximum so that it feels (and smells) like an actual battleground…(sic)

Serious Games: The Darwinian World of Game AI: The Current State of Human-Level Artificial Intelligence in Computer Simulations and Wargames

2004-10-21T13:22:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Dr. Ezra Sidran

A great introduction to AI in general and how AI is being used in gaming with a special focus on 2-player, zero sum games (always a loser and a winner). Such games include: chess, checker, tic-tac-toe and, according to Sidran, most war games.

In general, AI techniques attempt to draw a decision tree and then minimize the number of interesting branches in the same decision tree. This approach allowed Big Blue to defeat Gary Kasparov.

For me Sidran’s biggest mistake is to treat war as a 2-player zero sum game. A zero sum game implies that the winner wipes out the opponent. There has rarely been in history wars where the losing party was completely eliminated. In most cases, the loser surrenders before being wiped out. It is also unrealistic, especially in today’s world to think that a “2-player war” is not affected by other entities such as the international community. Iraq is an obvious example…

Serious Games – Game Models for Traditional e-learning/LMS Systems

2004-10-21T13:20:00.000-03:00

Doug Nelson, Andrew Kimball, Shon Bayer, Paul Medcalf

A bit disappointing, but here are some good pieces:

Serious gaming is a compromise in a love triangle composed of subject matter expertise, instructional design and game design

Serious games development is a function of 4 variables:
f(content, design, form, delivery)

Of these 4 variables, 3 can be outsourced: design, from and delivery

The slideshows are not bad but lack in coherence and direction as they are more promotion tools.

Serious Games: Real, Real and Surreal

2004-10-21T13:16:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/. Johnny L. Wilson

Games are shaking the control balance in education in the same way e-learning does. It eliminates the need to have content-pouring faculty members and creates an opportunity for learning guidance, be it in a gaming environment.

Wilson’s definition of simulation:
Modeling of a system A by a less complex system B

I don’t really like this definition as it focuses on complexity when simulation is all about quality of learning.

Wilson talked a lot about games that changed him. Here are some of these games:
- Nuclear Disarmement
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Diplomacy
- Millionaire
- Planet Master
- Sim City
- On the campaign trail
- Sim Earth

On the campaign trail ironically taught Wilson years ago that in politics you always lose when you mention specifics because there is always a part of the population that disagrees. The only way to avoid that is to talk about generals like leadership and values. After all nobody complains about having leadership and values…

Nuclear Disarmement was about winning a nuclear war. The only way to win was to avoid war…

Serious Games – Into the Depths of a Large Commercial Games Studio

2004-10-21T13:11:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Dan Daglow, Stormfront Studios

Not much to say here. The presenter emphasized the importance of sound project management and software development management principles. His presentation, which will be available soon, is nonetheless of critical importance.

Stormfront Studios has produced games such as: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and the Nascar series

Serious Games: Experiential Learning Assessment Strategies

2004-10-21T13:00:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

David Williamson Shaffer

A powerful message:
Sophisticated skills such as medical training cannot be decomposed into a group of well-defined skills. Then their assessment cannot be captured by simple measures.

Skill-based training is then not a good vehicle for creating sophisticated knowledge. For Shaffer, problem-solving is about the mediation of conflicting interests, i.e. selecting the right question. Problem-solving is done within an epistemic frame defined by skills, identity, values and knowledge.

By allowing reflection in action, games are good at allowing this epistemic frame to evolve.

Serious Games – Assessment and the Future of Fluid Learning Environments

2004-10-21T11:47:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Aaron Thibault

A definition of fluid learning:
...adapts to a learner’s needs in a lifelong learning perspective

According to Thibault, gamers try to fulfill different sets of needs and make fun from different types of behaviors. For him there are 4 types of gamers:
- Player killers (eliminate opponents)
- Achievers (want to finish a game)
- Socializers (look for social interaction)
- Explorers (like to look around and discover)

There is a gap between the vocabulary of game developers and the vocabulary of instructional designers. A group focuses on fun and the other one on learning. I totally agree. It brings us back to the need of developing a common methodology. It’s not at all typical of serious gaming. Software development and e-learning have been through that as well.

When it comes to assessing a learner’s learning in a gaming environment, Thibault doesn’t offer us a comprehensive solution. However, his comment: “We assess each other all the time” seems to me like to key to the answer. Peer review? Performance technology? Hmm, probably a bit of all that.

A lot of people in the audience were academics of course. Many were looking at the presenter in disarray because they had started to realize that maybe what their employers (universities, colleges) are offering is essentially common pedagogical paths and accreditation. Pedagogical paths are getting always more customized (and distributed) and the current accreditation model doesn’t fit well with lifelong learning. Frightening to see that the current educational business model is in a dead-end.

Serious Games – Augmented Reality Games: Integrating Computer Games with Physical Environments

2004-10-21T10:49:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Steffen Walz, Eric Klopfer

AR being relatively unknown, a definition is always a good start. Here is Klopfer’s:

Augmenting real environments with location specific information…

The next step of a good start, the “why”
- Anytime, anywhere
- Using real time and real space
- Planning across real time and space
- Fostering special learning
- Motivating kinesthetic learners

There are degrees of reality augmentation, basically form light to heavy. Light augmentations can consist of using PDAs while heavy augmentation can consist of using a helmet coupled with a GPS system. The differentiator here is the quantity of information used for the augmentation.

Walz also has his own definition:

…immersion until it gets undistinguishable from reality. No computers anymore but a high number of “augmented” physical artifacts.

Some of Walz’ projects:
- Pong on a cell phone
- Carplication
- MAD Countdown

MAD Countdown is interesting because it pinpointed an unexpected issue. The game was taking place in a 5-storey building. Participants, equipped with wireless PDAs, had to gather clues about where a nuclear bomb was hidden in the building and on how to turn it off. The experience seemed so immersive to some participants that they didn’t hesitate to break through doors and tear posters apart in the hope of finding additional clues. The augmentation led those people to pose act that they would never had done in a normal situation.

Walz agreed with my comment:
Since reality is only a perception, altering people’s perception of their environment corresponds in fact to creating a new reality. It will become very hard at one point to differentiate the real from the virtual. That obviously creates an ethical issue in AR projects.

Serious Games – Non Combat Military Game Effort

2004-10-21T10:23:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/.

Brian Williams, Thomas Santarelli, Dov Jacobson, Bill Davis, Hannes Vilhjalmsson

One of the most impressive presentations, especially because of Vilhjalmsson’s and Santorelli’s contribution. Their latest projects are related to games for teaching US soldiers how to interact politely and effectively with Iraqis. It goes like that: in a 3D environment, players represent US soldiers that have to ask for information to locals. They can obviously choose the distance at which they talk to someone, the gesture that they want to use (for example posing a hand on the heart is a mark of respect), choose what to say and actually say it through a mike. The system then changes the Iraqis’ behaviors (welcoming or aggressive) according to their reaction to the physical posture, speech and even pronunciation of the soldiers. Interestingly, even the most aggressive response does not degenerate into unloading guns at each other... The presentation is a must.

Jacobson and Davis presented what I consider military applications so I won’t comment.

A question that I asked and that didn’t find a satisfactory answer:
“ Like e-learning did a few years ago, serious gaming is going through a hype cycle. We are still in the phase of oohs and aahs that characterizes an immature concept. Has any of you been working on (or with) a structured methodology for serious games development? If not, when do you think it will come?”

Serious Games - Jim Dunnigan

2004-10-21T10:20:00.000-03:00

All presentation slideshows will be available online within a few days at http://www.seriousgamessummit.com/. Most of them are simply spectacular. Enjoy.

Jim Dunnigan’s keynote can be resumed with a quote:

A lot of people like games but not many know how to make them.

Dunnigan is an advocate of operational research, which seeks to rationalize through dissection in a very Cartesian way. Therefore, his approach to serious gaming is to work very hard on analyzing a learning need or gap to the extreme and then provide an appropriate tool that fulfills the analyzed gap. It’s an oversimplification in my view. Being able to dissect an infinite number of infinitesimal sub components does not necessarily teach us much about a complex system. Even worse, it creates the illusion that we actually know what is happening. There were anyhow some pearls in this talk:

Keep the goal in mind. What is the system doing for you?

Don’t bother coding, buy (or reuse?) off-the-shelf

Design for addiction, even when you have to deal with boring stuff

Serious Games Summit

2004-10-21T10:02:00.000-03:00

Sorry for the inactivity. I will fix this today with my covering of the Serious Games Summit that was held in Wash., DC on October 18-19. One of the best conferences I have ever attended…

Conference Coverage

2004-09-27T16:28:00.000-03:00

My blogging time is currently very limited (not to say close to zero). However, in the coming days I will comment on Dr. Donald Simpson’s presentation at last week’s LearnNB gathering. Don Simpson’ message was not particularly new, but powerful.

I am also glad to announce that I will be blogging from the Serious Gaming Summit in Washington DC (October 17-19) and from the 2004 Conference on Information Technology – League for Innovation in the Community College in Tampa, FL (November 7-10)

About RDeL, part 2

2004-09-27T15:35:00.000-03:00

Harold’s presentation last week was definitely too short. One critical thing to add: Harold said that their initial intent was to create an Atlantic Canada e-learning community but they ended up with an Atlantic Canada open-source community.

We can put the conditions in place but it’s up to each community to define itself, unconsciously most of the time.

About RDeL

2004-09-21T13:00:00.000-03:00

A very interesting post by Harold. I was there in 2003 when RDeL was launched. That day Harold was given the mandate of organizing how this industrial CoP would interact. His conclusions now that the project is completed:

- A sense of community cannot be forced;
- Communities are self-defined;
- Communities are conversations; and
- Communities evolve over time.

- Face-to-face contact can be the impetus for online conversations, while
- Online contact can be the impetus for face-to-face meetings.

- Communities of individuals appear to have stronger bonds than communities of companies;
- Blogging helps to define dispersed communities; and
- Password-protected web sites do not encourage conversation.

I think it raises fundamental questions:
1) Can CoP be built?
2) Are CoP more an emergent phenomenon?
3) Should we be focusing more on creating CoP or on creating the conditions where CoP develop?

My instinct tells me that CoP just "happen" when the right conditions are there.

I will be watching Harold's presentation tomorrow at the LearnNB forum and will report about it (and about other interesting presentations).

What a beautiful life

2004-09-17T11:28:00.000-03:00

Sorry for the long inactivity period but I have a good excuse.

My wife Natacha gave birth last Sunday to our 3rd child. Our baby girl Ophélie is nothing but fabulous, beautiful and lovely. In a dad's eye she is what makes this life extraordinary. She is already an avid learner, so am I as I have to learn how to be the daddy of a girl...

About Offshoring

2004-09-09T13:34:00.000-03:00

I’m currently in the process of organizing an IT job market colloquium that is going to be held in Atlantic Canada in 2005. We are at the step of defining our main themes so I’m trying to list what I think are the main trends that are influencing the Atlantic Canada IT workplace. I have identified offshoring as being one of the main trends to consider.

During the last 20 years North Americans have been told that the best work opportunities were going to be in the IT sector. And that has been true in most cases, even if we have experienced the IT burst. IT workers usually still have a job and are well paid. We used to think that as long as we could handle the pressure, we would always be able to make a good living in this sector. That has changed in the past years. High profile IT jobs are increasingly outsourced to India and China where workers are as competent as we are for only a fraction of the price. Outsourcing is not exactly a new thing but previously the jobs outsourced were of “lower level”, typically in manufacturing. But now others are seeking a category of jobs that we thought of as untouchable. What about our job security? Gone? Well…Yes. And that’s a good thing.

Were North Americans overpaid? No, the level of offer has just changed. Are they overpaid now? Yes, that explains why jobs are flying overseas. North America has lost that differentiation element that allowed higher salaries. It is up to each individual to define how he/she can remain globally competitive. Maybe it’s time to stop mass-producing homogenous IT graduates and let people differentiate themselves so that they can fit well into their immediate work environments. Some call it being innovative, or being free and responsible.

Growth as a Global Cancer

2004-08-31T14:47:00.000-03:00

Pollution, resource depletion, hesitating economy, war, drug and the likes are parts of what makes today’s reality. We are getting used to be going nowhere but are at the same time hoping that things will get better. For my part, I like to believe that there is an economic model somewhere that can help humanity evolve in terms of interconnectedness and long-term sustainability. Idealism being something that I am slowly accepting to live with, I often read exploratory texts that expose big fat visions of what could be a better world. One of my last findings (even though the text was published in 2002) is worth discussing a bit today.

EGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications (intro, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) by Gary Alexander definitely had the title to grab my attention. Part 1 (the only one I read so far) describes humanity as a global cancer with many of today’s woes linked to the relentless pursuit of growth.

“Instead of being constrained and controlled by the needs of humanity, much less the natural world, our modern globalised monetary system has taken on a life of its own. Flows of money have become relatively isolated from physical constraints. In 1995, only 2 or 3% of money flows were to do with trade or investment. The rest were speculative – buying and selling currencies.”

“Sustained economic growth, that hallowed goal of politicians, central bankers and business people, appears sensible only in the context of an economy following local goals which are disconnected from physical reality. No natural process can ever grow indefinitely. It will always find some natural limit. A recession may actually be good for the environment because production and consumption are lower.”

I was hooked. For me the fact that money is created from growth instead of value creation in stock markets has always been a systemic problem. Just think of what makes up the value of stocks:
- The market value of current assets
- The actualization of future profits
- Speculation
No profit growth, no value growth. There is indeed a limit to growth and this limit is often reminded to us through crisis (economic, ecological, humanitarian). Yes, I was hooked.

Alexander obviously offers a vision of what would be is “ideal”, which I would describe as a network of hippie-like communities using IT as communication core structure. A bit far-fetched but I am open to bold ideas. But what I was really looking for was an alternative to the growth-driven economy. That came in the form of eliminating money and replacing it with a “footprint” system. Individuals would be paid footprints, instead of money, for their contribution to the community. Which would allow them to “buy” goods and services.

Unhooked (only for the economic aspect)! That is still money to me. Whether you call it dollar, euro, yen or footprint, that is still money. Even in a hippie-like community, there is always someone looking to get more footprints who is ready to lend footprints to those in need (at an interest rate) and who would speculate on how many footprints another individual or organization will get next year.

I am still looking for this sustainable economic model but I recommend Alexander’s text to those interested by finding a way to cure this world’s illnesses. I will probably comment on parts 2 to 4 shortly.

Via George Por

Clusters Theory: Is Geography Relevant?

2004-08-23T14:45:00.000-03:00

I know that most people who read this weblog are involved in some way in R&D. I then assume that you have heard about the Clusters Theory, which is now supporting a large part of the R&D funding structures in Western countries.

An oversimplification of clusters:
A region needs basic components to become internationally competitive in a given industry: internal demand, supporting industries, favorable conditions and internal rivalry. One of the most spectacular examples of a cluster is the IT industry in Silicon Valley. Governments see clusters as the best strategy for creating prosperity in a region and are trying to supply to 2 basic components through R&D : supporting industries and favorable conditions.

A cluster is about creating a critical mass for an industry in a region, which explains the popularity of business incubators and all sorts of regional associations. Good first steps! We are acting on the geographical limitations. There is however a growing debate as to determine if clusters can be constructed or if they just happen by accident. I don’t have an answer for that but I know that if clusters can be made, it takes many years (decades?) to do so.

The question I want to ask today is: should we focus on the geographical concentration of an industry or on creating strong links among many competitors irrespectively of their location? In New Brunswick for instance, we have finally understood that it’s better for the NB e-learning industry to cooperate in order to become more competitive externally. This is indeed an interesting first step. But wouldn’t the NB e-learning industry be better off to also start to cooperate with foreign competitors in order to become even more competitive? A cluster doesn’t necessarily have to be geographically bound. I am not fond of frontiers anyway. I don’t care about New Brunswickers, Canadians or Americans. But I do care about the people who live in these places. Walls exist around countries too.

Follow Up on Weblogs and Competitive Intelligence

2004-08-18T15:29:00.000-03:00

In one of my first posts I was discussing the use that can be made of weblogs in competitive intelligence activities. I promised to follow up on this topic so here we go, in a very non-scientific and non-academic way:

Topics:
1) Does it sell?
I discovered that senior managers don’t pay much attention to the sources used in a competitive intelligence report as long as it makes sense. Then, if the logic is good, the report sells well. “Academic” references are not necessarily seen as being of higher quality. A poor paper containing numerous academic references remains a poor paper. Furthermore, senior managers barely read reports. They prefer by far to get an executive summary or a short presentation. In these cases, the references are not even mentioned.

2) Does it contribute to a higher quality?
My last reports have been (I think) more provocative than they used to be and they are selling well. The ideas proposed are more on the edge and are supported by thoughtful arguments provided by inspired individuals. Quality here is hard to measure but I think my competitive intelligence reports are much better now.

3) Does it allow cost savings?
Competitive intelligence costs have 3 components: search costs, content costs and time costs.
· Search costs seem higher when I am looking for a well-defined topic but much lower when looking at larger topics and trends. In the first case, the need is more punctual, in the latter, more continuous.
· I never pay for content so this cost is not relevant for me.
· Weblogging is time-consuming. But the point is that I consider much of this time to be related to my personal learning and not only related to my competitive intelligence tasks. So yes it takes more time, but the outcome goes well beyond only fulfilling a competitive intelligence mandate.

Reverse Engineering of Public Relations

2004-08-18T11:43:00.000-03:00

As you know, every “serious” action in the corporate world is tagged as being “strategic”, i.e. it is intended to contribute to a corporate vision. A strategic action is then the product of the following process:
1) Environmental scan (a SWOT analysis most of the time)
2) Strategic planning
3) Operational planning
4) Action

This process is usually well documented in large corporations but is most of the time kept secret because of its competitive value. It is even kept secret inside the corporation and employees are only told what they must know. The same is true for stakeholders and clients. The secrecy of strategic planning creates an illusion of control and value for something that does not have value in itself. What corporations don’t seem to realize is that it is very easy to deduce their strategic goals only by looking at the corporate images they are trying to create.

Public relations and marketing are obviously produced by the strategic planning process mentioned above. Then, only by looking at the values and identity a corporation is trying to create in its TV ads for instance, we can easily identify its critical weaknesses and concerns because they are what the corporation is trying to overcome with the ads. When, for example, a large Canadian bank’s advertisement is presenting 3 or 4 employees and name them by their first names, I think we can deduce that it has a serious problem of service depersonalization. Simple enough. But if you ask that same bank if it has a depersonalization problem, the answer will likely be a rhetoric about how important are customer relationships at bank X.

Why don’t corporations just tell it as it is instead of trying to lure the public and themselves with an illusion of control? I have confidence that the public is smart enough to decipher corporations’ public relations and really understand, past the ads, the true nature of the corporations they are doing business with.

Cross-fertilization: Creating New Innovation Species

2004-08-10T14:03:00.000-03:00

Belonging to a community essentially means sharing a number of common values and being able to communicate with other individuals within that community. Humans are social creatures so they have always been trying to:
a) belong to communities to which they can individually identify
b) create new communities when necessary.
Acting within and through a group is both reassuring and empowering. Through a community we can indeed reinforce certain behaviors by approbation and then act more forcefully.

Metaphors are often useful for simplifying complex concepts such as communities. Here are 2 metaphors that I like to use in understanding communities:
· Filtering system: By approving certain behaviors and inhibiting some others, communities produce a purified output that is then being used as input. This output is made of contributions, beliefs and behaviors and constitutes the common ground of the community. The evolution of a community consists in the evolution of its common ground over time. A closed community is more likely to be constant in its evolution and follow a well-defined direction. An open one is more likely to behave chaotically both in evolution and direction.
· Organism: A common mistake is to look at communities in isolation. Like living organisms, communities interact with their environment by sharing information and members, by merging, by being born and by dying. Hence, societies are ecosystems in which communities interact, fight for survival, and evolve.

Understanding communities is difficult because of their level of complexity, which brings us to try to study them in isolation. This Cartesian approach certainly has value at a micro level but remains incomplete unless we study the macro level as well. It is like trying to understand the human body only by looking at the structure of cells.

I see cross-fertilization as representing the interaction between communities, as being this percentage of “alien” input that keeps a community from stagnation. I think that if we could better understand interaction between communities, it would be much easier to “manage” innovation. I see this field of study as a key to so many social and economical issues that I am amazed to see how little information is available on the subject.

Please let me know if you have some readings to suggest.

Tear Down The Walls

2004-08-06T13:26:00.000-03:00

Have you ever wondered why we often keep working the same way but with new tools? Just think of a new technology, no matter which one (Customer Relationship Management, Object Oriented Language Programming, LMS/LCMS, handhelds, transactional websites…). It is usually built around the need to be better at something. Then, when it’s mature enough, people start adopting it and using it. They almost always use it without changing the way they used to work before its introduction. Then, after a while, they realize they are not fully taking advantage of available features and start adapting their work processes. This is where the gains become reality. The use of ITC (e-learning) in educational contexts has not yet been through the last phase…

Management of educational institutions has always been designed around the notion of physical site (be it a building or a campus). We are used to having principals, directors, teachers and support staff being assigned functions within such well-defined physical sites. The walls are then not only serving as protection against elements, but also as organizational boundaries.

E-learning, by allowing distributed collaboration in course design, offers the promise of making physical constraints irrelevant in education. Distributed workflow and project management are now common features in most advanced LMS. Have educational institutions gained from these new features? Not significantly. We are still working between walls. The new features are being used, but people still have to use them within existing wall-derived management structures. Workflow and project management is indeed distributed, within the same building. Great gain: people can now spend a bit less time in meetings and more time in front of the computer.

Walls are in some way comforting, a workplace golden prison. Physical walls have less importance now than they used to, but educational institutions have replaced them with virtual ones. Today I want to send a message to the managers of institutions involved in or considering e-learning: Tear down the walls. There is no need for me today to sell you the advantages of distributed collaborative work. Software representatives have already done that. Just really challenge your organization to use e-learning to its full potential.

An Interesting Aggregator Feature?

2004-08-03T11:32:00.000-03:00

In a recent post I expressed my concern that recommendation systems, by recommending things that we like, might not be helping us create new knowledge because they don’t bring us out of the comfort zone. Well, today I feel like proposing the contrary. Let me warn you that I might well change my point of view again tomorrow.

Effective weblog readers have to be good blogroll managers. The reading of a selected list of weblogs obviously influences our present and future thinking. Choosing which weblogs to read is then a critical and even creative responsibility. That would be nice to see Bloglines proposing us new weblogs by comparing what people with comparable interest (expressed through their subscriptions) like.

Again, I am not sure that would be really beneficial. Not much cross-fertilization here. Swimmers attending the Olympic Games would never have made it if they had always kept swimming in their backyard pool.

The Stephen Effect

2004-08-03T09:38:00.000-03:00

Stephen’s 0 Links from 0 Sources: Breaking the Power Law post is a suggestion list of weblogs that return 0 references in Technorati. Technorati has the habit of returning weird results for my site. It returned up to 10 references only a month ago but was returning 0 references before the publication of Stephen’s post. Good for me! I am now a witness of the Stephen Effect. Yan know what stats have been exploding since August 1 (a record). I experienced a comparable increase in visits when Seb referenced the site. Harold’s references have also impacted significantly. Thanks Stephen.

Inspirational Perturbations

2004-07-30T10:34:00.000-03:00

This overview of Vygotsky’s vision of psychological development in a must for those interested by social learning theories. It describes psychological development as being essentially the progressive alteration of primitive (animal) functions by exposure to a social environment. According to Vygotsky, around the age of 7 there is almost nothing left of our animality and we become a pure social construct.

“Development of thinking has a central, key, decisive significance for all the other functions and processes. We cannot express more clearly or tersely the leading role of intellectual development in relation to the whole personality of the adolescent and to all of his mental functions other than to say that acquiring the function of forming concepts is the principal and central link in all the changes that occur in the psychology of the adolescent. All other links in this chain, all other special functions, are intellectualized, reformed, and reconstructed under the influence of these crucial successes that the thinking of the adolescent achieves... Lower or elementary functions, being processes that are more primitive, earlier, simpler, and independent of concepts in genetic, functional, and structural relations, are reconstructed on a new basis when influenced by thinking in concepts and they are included as component parts, as subordinate stages, into new, complex combinations created by thinking on the basis of concepts, and finally under the influence of thinking, foundations of the personality and world view of the adolescent are laid down”

I believe that most of the time we are desperately trying to adapt to our social environment. The problem is that one's social environment is a constantly moving interpretation. This situation produces an urge to adapt. We are then relentlessly chasing a projection of the place we think we should occupy in our own personal social environment. Insecurity is probably the driving motivational force in learning. Learning is then a desperate attempt to go back in the comfort zone.

Is security in fact a barrier to learning? It might explain why I never liked recommendation systems such as Amazon’s. If we are proposed only with things that we like, we might end up staying in that comfort zone where learning is less likely to occur.

Via OLDaily

Tomorrow's workplace

2004-07-27T14:55:00.000-03:00

Gautam Ghosh’s discussion of the future of organizations raises some fundamental issues about how individuals will adapt to the way current trends in business are shaping tomorrow’s workplace. Using a movie industry analogy, he describes how “superstars would dominate the market and command huge salaries while the others would be essentially struggling to survive. I share his concern. I described the issue in my own terms. I like to call superstars the “valued” and the others the “non-valued”.

The stress created by international competition is extremely hard to handle even for corporations. Can we, as individuals, adapt to being put under the same pressure? Via Harold

Emergence as a Collective Experience

2004-07-23T11:12:00.000-03:00

People are usually comfortable with the idea that emergent learning is about learning through social interaction. However Michael Feldstein’s reflection on Steven Johnson’s book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software puts an interesting and unconventional twist to the concept. Learning emerging from social interaction is collectively learned, i.e. the individual learning is almost insignificant. Colonies of ants exemplify quite well how a summation of “dumb” individual contributions can produce an intelligent behavior.

It really makes sense to me. When we look closely at how we act in our daily lives, we can notice that we are essentially adapting to what our neighbors (people we interact with) are doing. This co-evolution of behaviors is almost unnoticeable at the individual level but is indeed oriented towards finding one’s place in a social environment in order to maximize one’s contribution to that same environment.

Another example is fish banks. It only takes one fish to detect the presence of a predator for the entire bank to change direction in a second. Of course, not every fish is aware of the predator’s presence. Most of them just instinctively follow their neighbors, which is still a collectively coherent and intelligent reaction to a perturbation.

Our Western individualism makes it difficult for us to “give up” the conviction that we learn individually to some abstract collective learning. We certainly don’t know enough about societal learning. Via OLDaily

Censorship or Public Safety?

2004-07-19T15:53:00.000-03:00

During my last trip to Quebec City, a local radio station’s broadcasting license was cancelled by the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission). According to the CRTC, CHOI Radio X: “has been the subject of numerous complaints with respect to the conduct of the hosts and the spoken word content that is aired, including offensive comments, personal attacks and harassment”.

The decision is unprecedented in that it is the first time in Canada’s history that a radio station’s broadcasting license is cancelled because of the nature of comments made by its hosts. All other cancellations were caused by non-respect of language constraints in musical programs. As you can imagine, the story has sparked a passionate debate around censorship and freedom of speech in Canada.

My opinion is that a very effective censorship is to decide to tune in another station when we don’t like what we hear. We can think that if people were all well informed and able to make their own opinions, we would not need a regulation commission such as the CRTC to “protect us from bad influence”.

I have listened CHOI several times during the last years because they are playing music that I like. I have to admit that most of their hosts are either vulgar or stupid, which still doesn’t keep them from making insightful comments from time to time. So my opinion is that if people were able to make their own opinions, CHOI would in fact be creating some diversity. On the other hand, it would disappear if it were being too offensive. However, the reality is that CHOI is Quebec City’s most popular radio station and that a lot of people identify and believe to what is being said by Jeff Filion, André Arthur and the likes. That includes their occasional racist, sexist and offensive comments.

CRTC is indeed a censorship organization, and it is unfortunately still necessary for those who can’t make by themselves an opinion they can call their own.

I’m back!

2004-07-19T11:35:00.000-03:00

Sorry for this long period of inactivity. I had to go to Quebec City as my father was fighting for his life after a heart attack. I also took my vacations and decided to spend time with my wife and kids.

It was weird being out of the loop for such a long time. In the coming days I’ll try to catch up with the news and blog some thoughts I had while resting.

On Blogging With the Boss’s Blessing

2004-06-22T10:14:00.000-03:00

I think we can say that corporate blogging is on its way when large corporations such as Microsoft jump in the bandwagon. This article describes how corporate blogging can be used to “humanize” a company and represents a powerful “guerrilla marketing tool”. It also mentions some issues a corporation implementing corporate blogging might face. Control is at stake here.

The Humanized Business

2004-06-18T13:31:00.000-03:00

Dave Pollard has published an interesting article, which I would sum up as: bringing down business to its roots, i.e. individuals with a dream. With his 10 steps to entrepreneurship, Dave suggest you to forget about what is usually referred to as scientific management to focus on what you want to achieve and to give it some serious thoughts. Those damned MBA graduates would probably argue that scientific management has proven its success in bringing profitability to companies during the last decades. Even though this statement is being increasingly criticized, I tend to agree with it (I am an MBA graduate after all…). But the point here is that if you ask entrepreneurs the main reasons that brought them to start a new business, they almost never answer that they wanted to become rich. Their motivations are most often: liberty, having no boss, social recognition, make a living out of their passion. Money is usually mentioned after that. It’s only gravy.

Knowing that, it does not make sense to manage a business having only in mind the maximization of profitability. A good business is a business that brings an entrepreneur what she really wants. So yes Dave is right on many points, business is more than making money. It’s a human experience and managers who try to reduce it to debits and credits are missing the most important part.

However, not all is wrong about scientific management. After all, one needs to eat while having a great time with his business. Sound financial management is still necessary to make the dream last a lifetime.

On « Whither the Semantic Web »

2004-06-18T11:53:00.000-03:00

People who are working in R&D are usually seen as being innovative by definition, as really being “thinking outside the box”. My feeling is that it’s not often the case. Innovation comes from redefining a conceptual framework, not from pushing an existing one further. Such a redefinition usually results from simple questions such as: why, for whom, when, how. I have seen a number of large-scale R&D projects where people forgot what was the purpose of their work, what was giving them some value. The outcomes of those projects were most of the time debatable.

Stephen’s discussion of current “semantic web” work reflects that problem well. Semantic web tools are useless until they are used. I do not pretend to know much about semantic web but I suggest researchers to honestly try to answer the 4 fundamental questions mentioned above. If answers are inexistent, complex or unclear, then the purpose of the semantic web has been lost. There is no way for semantic web efforts to be useful without a clear purpose. Let’s just make sure that they fulfill a “real” need for the society. Very basic I know, but necessary.

Adapt or Die to the Colliding Exponentials

2004-06-15T13:39:00.000-03:00

A good interview with Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI. It introduces, to me at least, the concept of Colliding Exponentials:

“Well, at SRI, we look for what we call "colliding exponentials," where, for example, computing runs into communications and creates the Internet. So we focus on the real important problems that result when that type of intersection happens, because usually, when it does happen, it changes the ecosystem. It breaks things apart and creates lots of new opportunities, both for technology and also for licensing and venture deals and basic research.”

Just to keep pushing the physics particles metaphor a bit, we can think that the collision of ideas and concepts acts as a chain reaction heating up our business ecosystem. It’s like heating up a gas. The speed of change can only increase as collisions become more frequent. Via Evelyn Rodriguez.

A Prescription For 'Work Effectiveness Improvement'

2004-06-15T09:03:00.000-03:00

Dave Pollard's review of Bill Jensen's Simplicity raises some important issues in today's business world.

As Dave notes, Jensen states that "...poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness...". In my opinion, poor decision-making is more of a symptom. The real problem is that large organizations are not effective at managing uncertainty and change. Their static structure doesn't adapt easily to new business environments. Therefore, there's always a gap between the structure of the market and the structure of the organization. This is this gap that creates unnecessary complexity and poor decision-making.

Dave suggests that "Today's organization is more like a jazz combo than an army, and needs a very different kind of team facilitation and 'leadership'." Today's organization is actually like a jazz combo that needs to play classic, jazz, rock, R&B, rap and new age music during a one-night concert. The show would be better off if a number of musicians were called on stage for one or a few songs that they're good at playing and would then leaving. The large organization structure is just no longer the best model.

Being an advocate of professional training, I agree that individual workers need to become more independent and self-sufficient thinkers through training. However, I don't see how it would dramatically impact organizations in today's paradigm. KM is failing for exactly the same reason.

Employee Socializing

2004-06-14T11:06:00.000-03:00

This is an interesting article about the place of communication in KM. It introduces the notion of cost of collaboration:

“…collaboration has a cost, in the form of ever-more meetings and e-mails that serve to bog down employees rather than unleash them.”

“Instead of indiscriminately pursuing greater communication, managers would do well to figure out how to optimize the flow of information among their employees…”

Cross and Parker are renowned for their network analysis approach of collaboration. The main idea is that it’s not enough to encourage communication and collaboration. We need to understand how information (and knowledge) flows within and throughout an organization in order to influence it wisely.

CIO.com, Encourage Employee Socializing
Rob Cross and Andrew Parker

The Power and Responsibility of Individual Corporations

2004-06-07T11:32:00.000-03:00

Sometimes I really hope that I’m wrong, that corporations are here to stay, that individuals will keep working and thinking in the coziness of the traditional employer-employee relationship. That would comfort me a bit. I wouldn’t have to worry about all those people who will not be able to adapt to the fact that they, as workers, need to become internationally competitive in order to survive. I wouldn’t either have to worry that the new self-empowerment of individuals will likely create two social classes: the valued ones and the non-valued ones, those who adapted to the knowledge economy and those who didn’t. Unfortunately, I am convinced that traditional corporations will soon be history…

So yes I believe that the end of corporations as we know them is coming. On the long run, it might well be a good thing by allowing people to think and create more by themselves through strong links with their community. The empowerment of the individual through his/her community will allow people that have a lot to contribute to get paid according to their direct influence on the society. It corresponds to the distribution of profit in a vertical production chain composed of infinitesimal production units, individual contributions. To put it simply, if you contribute something valuable to the society, you get paid. Otherwise you don’t. The responsibility of an individual’s income is then totally attributed to him/her. Is everyone presently a contributor of “real” added value to the society? I suggest that you look around yourself in your workplace and make your own opinion. That is why I am worried.

I don’t think that we should be arguing about going there or not. If it’s meant to arise out of today’s world, then there’s not much we can do to stop it. According to me the most relevant question at this point is to determine how we can ready our society. Education is obviously part of the answer (probably in a renewed form). But other than making sure that people have the tools, how can we make sure that they have the mindset? I have no idea.

Life After Large Corporations

2004-05-31T16:02:00.000-03:00

One of my recent posts “The End of Corporations” has generated some traffic and apparently a fair interest among readers. People seem to agree that the large corporation model does not suit well with the knowledge economy. Now what? Should we help making it happen faster? How can people get ready for that?

My opinion is that large corporations are facing their extinction because they can’t adapt fast enough to their new environment. Darwinian? Yes. That’s usually a good approach in economics. Corporate dinosaurs will get their ice age (or asteroid if you prefer) and tinier creatures may be a better fit for the new knowledge environment.

I am still trying to organize my ideas about whether we should be promoting the death of corporations and about how we can help people prepare for what is coming. My first impression is that the new paradigm is coming fast enough and I’m not sure people will have enough time to get ready.

Anyhow it’s going to be the subject of my next post.

The Near Future Economy

2004-05-31T15:45:00.000-03:00

When we try to anticipate, it is always a good idea to take a look at where we are coming from. It gives us a direction on which to extrapolate. At the venerable age of 95, Peter F. Drucker does have an impressive background on which he can base his extrapolations.

In “The Next Society: A Survey of the Near Future”, Peter Drucker describes how he thinks the society will evolve as a result of the “knowledge economy”.

I agree with most of his predictions even though I think he was sometimes too conservative. As an example, he believes that corporations will be challenged to the extreme during the coming years. Personally, I believe they will become irrelevant. Nonetheless, that is the kind of article I would have loved to write if I were a legendary business scholar such as Peter Drucker.

Thanks to Harold for mentioning his work after he read “The End of Corporations”.

The end of corporations

2004-05-21T14:11:00.000-03:00

I hope this title is big and provocative enough to create a good discussion. My instinct is telling me that large corporations will face their end in the coming decades. I know I know, the current trends are globalization, acquisitions, and mergers. They tell us that the larger the corporations, the larger the profits. And in business, profits equal longevity. Anyhow, I’m throwing in this post what I feel is coming (please fell free to demolish the idea if it’s what it deserves).

Let me try to list some of the thoughts that led me to this intuition.
1. People of the coming generation no longer accept to conform to rules that don’t fit their own values. They don’t like to wait and like to be in total control of their lives.
2. Knowledge networks allow people to work across traditional boundaries such as departments and organizations.
3. Knowledge belongs to people and not corporations
4. Knowledge is equivalent to profit in a knowledge economy
5. The principle of continuity (fundamental in business) states that businesses are intended to last forever. Businesses as entity are then seeking to be stable over time even though their internal structures are changing. The problem is that they are too slow to adapt to change. Business structures that seek to improve flexibility (such as the matrix) are in fact a deconstruction of traditional business structures.

Following that, my rationale is quite simple:
1. Traditional corporations are not the best knowledge production structures in a changing world.
2. They are not able to capture or possess knowledge since knowledge belongs to people.
3. Since they will become always less competitive in creating knowledge, which is the profit generator in a knowledge-based economy, they will disappear.

What will replace corporations then? People. People working in networks, creating added-value by creating knowledge, getting paid according to their direct contribution to the society. This is a vision of empowered people that have their destiny in their hands, but also the responsability of its success or failure...

Our own personal realities

2004-05-21T10:41:00.000-03:00

Since, as human beings, all our interactions with the world transit through senses, we can say that reality is a subjective experience. Then reality is not universal but a personal interpretation based on the information our brain has received so far. It’s a pretty old concept for which Decartes became famous with his “Discours de la méthode” and the related quote “Je pense donc je suis” (I think therefore I am). Even if criticized by many modern philosophers, Decartes’ contribution was critical in establishing reality as a personal experience.

Since we are on our own in our personal universes, we feel isolated and we try to gather with like-minded people. It’s reassuring. We are linking personal realities together. What we perceive as a sense of community is still a personal experience.

The point that I want to make today is that one’s reality is of added value to the collectivity only if it contributes something unique. Communities of practice in general are, according to me, putting to much emphasis on building a common understanding. They would be far more productive if they tried to explore more often their boundaries, where uniqueness resides. We are valuable in how we think differently. It’s the only way to contribute to the expansion of humanity’s collective reality.

2004-05-19T11:17:00.000-03:00

Knowledge Networks and Organizational Network Analysis

Valdis Krebs’ network analysis approach to organizational knowledge flows is quite impressive. Have a look at his InFlow software. The purpose of such a software:

“Sometimes its people or groups that want to look at their own networks, look at their own community, so they start gathering data, and start to see what's going on in the community.

Once you draw one of these maps, you can measure that map... You can measure the picture. It allows you to find whose the key player. Who's in a position of power. Who's in a position to bridge one community or one group together. Who has the most connections. Who has too many? Where are there gaps? In a corporation, you might look at a map and ask yourself, "Why aren't there connections between marketing and sales?" In an urban community, it might be, "Why aren't there connections between this street and that in the neighborhood?"

Once you get some measures, you have a baseline, and you can act on that to improve the community. And then track it over time with these metrics. The relations are improving, because we have metrics showing this, etc.”

2004-05-14T16:25:00.000-03:00

Very Large Group Thinking

I have learned through Kmworld about the existence of BlogPulse. The site lists the most cited people names, keywords and phrases in the blogosphere for a given day. I like to think of it as mass brainstorming. It will be worth looking how the service will improve and how effectively it will predict new trends and innovative ideas.

2004-05-10T15:05:00.000-03:00

Knowledge Network

Rob Cross’ work on people networks in large organizations illustrates quite well how we could foster collaboration by better understanding communication channels within and across organizations. I’ll have to expand my knowledge networks concept with these new perspectives.

Thanks to Harold for the reference.

2004-05-07T14:57:00.000-03:00

Réalité manquante

On ne manque jamais autant le soleil qu’en le contemplant par la fenêtre.
Vivre la vie des autres et ne pas avoir mal.
N’avoir rien risqué, n’avoir rien à craindre.

Pourtant rêver, espérer, s’émouvoir.
Plus oublier jusqu’à demain, le temps d’une autre réalité par procuration.

2004-05-04T15:06:00.000-03:00

Weblogs and Competitive Intelligence

My current work requires that I gather competitive information about IT, business and e-learning in community colleges. Obviously, I am an avid Google user and weblog reader. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sell very well to senior management to propose strategic directions based on texts of uncertain reliability. So I have to rely on more “academic” publications to justify my recommendations. The problem is that I almost never discover new trends or ideas by reading scholarly publications. By the time they get published they are often outdated and, more importantly, authors who want to publish have to be way too careful in expressing their ideas. Academic texts are expensive, lengthy and… boring.

Tired of this nonsense, I have started to aggregate weblogs related to my employer’s field. And I am getting some interesting results:

1. My searches are more effective because weblogs help me identify interesting ideas that I can refine afterwards using Google and academic publications.
2. By being more spontaneous, weblogs are more provocative. However, this spontaneity comes at the price of exaggeration and inaccuracy.

Bloggers often write about weblogs and generally think it’s THE solution to the knowledge bottleneck. My opinion is that it is an interesting new tool that can help us make a better use of more traditional resources. I will try in a near future to “sell” some recommendations justified with weblog reviews. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Personal opinions are not a noise to evacuate. Since reality is only perceived, opinions are its very essence.

2004-04-22T10:37:00.000-03:00

Knowledge and communication channeling

Seb’s topic sharing infrastructure has many common points with my knowledge networks concept for knowledge management. Interested by the subject? Why don’t you join Seb’s new wiki about Self-organizing directory development?

2004-04-22T10:15:00.000-03:00

Quote: "The skill of writing is to provide a context in which other people can think"

From Edwin Schlossberg via Tim O'Reilly

2004-04-20T10:15:00.000-03:00

Human flow

This morning I gave a look at a little river that flows nearby my home. I couldn’t help but to think about analogies between this river and human networking. Water behaves chaotically (especially during spring in Canada). Its particles actually go in every possible direction. Nonetheless, the global direction of water, its stream, is very well oriented. According to me, efforts undertaken under the names e-learning, knowledge management and blogging seek to allow humans to act as independent water particles in a human stream.

This analogy may seem a bit simplistic but it helps me structure my thoughts on the motivation that lead us to try to communicate and learn collaboratively. I wouldn’t want to become too esoteric but it seems to me that we are trying to build the early structure of a concrete collective soul. George Pór would probably like it. Stephen’s statement in Stephen's web (at the very bottom) seems to go in that direction too.

What’s great with wild rivers is that even though they follow their beds, they also participate in its shaping by erosion. They even sometimes completely change direction and are in that respect a model of adaptability. Individual empowerment, adaptability, collective coherence… It’s worth giving some more thoughts.

2004-04-14T09:29:00.000-03:00

The more you play the more you lose

A completely different subject today...

It always amazed me to see how many people are fascinated by casinos and gambling. I went to a casino only once in my life, for a big 5 minutes… I felt sick. People were stressed and aggressive, the place was noisy and cheesy. A nice wrap-up of what gambling is all about http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/WinnipegSun/News/2004/04/14/420252.html

Gambling business models are based on a very simple rule: the average profit probability is negative. That means that if you bet 1$ the average return will be less than that. Knowing that, your best chance to make money is in your first bet. After that it constantly decreases.

An example: If you play a game where you get 0.25$ back for every 1$ played, you have, on average, 1 chance out of 4 to recover your money. Simple enough. If you play 1$ twice, you get 1 chance out of 16 ((1/4)EXP2) to recover. So when you keep playing, your chances to recover all the money invested decrease constantly following an exponential function. Even with a game with a better probability like ¾, the more you play the more you lose.

2004-04-07T14:25:00.000-03:00

When do we « know » someone?

I got out of my office 15 minutes ago and instead of hurrying where I wanted to go as I usually do, I stopped and looked around me. Most people were facing their computer screens working on something (or pretending to do so?). Today’s white collars spend almost all of their time in front of a computer. Of course, people do talk to each other from time to time, sometimes for work but often for personal conversations.

Humans are social creatures. We need to belong to something bigger than ourselves, a community. The most cited critic about distance work is that people miss this community feeling, this acquaintance.

When someone asks me if I know someone else, my answer will never be “yes” if I haven’t met the person face to face. Why is that? Do I need to recognize one’s face? I don’t think. I interact with a lot of people that I’ve seen only on pictures but that I never met and I don’t pretend to know them. Is it smell? Touch? Maybe it has nothing to do with the 5 senses.

Do I know my work colleagues? Yes? Not really. Do I know my wife and kids? I hope. My opinion: Knowing someone is about building a community with this person, about sharing interests and beliefs, and most of all about recognizing ourselves in the other. I just don't know why it seems it can't be done online as effectively as meeting someone face to face. Even videoconferencing doesn't seem to be a good substitute.

2004-04-05T11:17:00.000-03:00

Is IT a mean or an end?

Business Process Reengineering theories tell us to consider technology as a tool that enables an organizational change and not as a goal to reach. The rationale behind this is quite simple: if technology is your goal, your focus stays on technology. If, on the other hand, your goal is to better business processes, your focus stays on business processes. In IT projects, people often forget what are the real goals, which are not related to technology most of the time. That leads many projects to failure.

IT projects are however very effective at identifying what are the non-technical issues to address because they force us to look at the way we do things. Humans have that unique capability to stop thinking about how they operate when they get good enough at it. IT projects disrupt this “comfort zone” and force us to start thinking again, sometimes painfully.

Ismael Peña, quoting Mónica G. Luque, illustrates this phenomenon in education. E-learning is forcing us to think about fundamentals such as: How do we learn? Why? What is knowledge? Who owns it? Should we try to capture it?

In my opinion, this process is very healthy even if cumbersome. We are presently defining the foundation of a new paradigm in education. It is easy to get lost in concepts, words and acronyms these days. That is exactly why we need to keep our “focus” on one fundamental:

We are spending time and money in education in order to help people better their lives through the use and creation of knowledge.

Then, the thinking about improving education has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with people. Technology will however greatly help us realizing the new vision that will be built.

2004-03-31T10:03:00.000-04:00

What Are Learning Objects For?

During the last 2 days I was attending the Learning Objects Summit in Fredericton, NB. Among attendees, both physically and online, were many recognized learning objects experts. Some very interesting topics were discussed such as: DRM (Digital Rights Management), philosophical roots of learning objects, collaboration, search mechanisms and social filtering. As you can imagine, it is very easy to get lost dealing with such complex questions as the future of education and the creation of knowledge. As usual, many questions were raised, but not many satisfactory answers were brought.

My opinion is that people have invested so much time and energy in pushing the concept forward that they have lost sight of the fundamental needs that learning objects are supposed to fulfill. Let my illustrate this with an over-simplification:

Time 1: People realized that learning content is made of learning “pieces” that could probably be reused.

Time 2: Realizing how cool this vision was, people started to determine if learning objects could actually be reused and, if so, what were the tools that we needed to develop.

Time 3: Large R&D projects, such as eduSource Canada, were launched with the goal of giving us the tools that would make the learning object concept work.

Time 4: Projects on learning objects came to an end and suites of tools were indeed made available. Unfortunately, organizations are not really interested in using them because they don’t see the savings as being concrete enough.

Most people are familiar with problem resolution mechanisms. Here is just a reminder of what are the steps used most of the time:
Step 1: Determine what is the problem
Step 2: Establish success criteria
Step 3: Propose a number of possible solutions
Step 4: Select the solution that fits the best with the success criteria
Step 5: Implement the solution

You know what? With learning objects we started at step 5. Millions of dollars later I think it’s about time that we try to go through steps 1-4. Learning objects are an answer looking for a problem. A good indication of this is that during the Learning Object Summit people discussed more about education and collaboration than about learning object technology. We were simply trying to fill the gap left by not doing steps 1 to 4.

2004-03-26T16:08:00.000-04:00

Generation Y Pop Culture: Personal Rules Rule

Yesterday I was attending a very inspiring presentation made by Irshad Manji at the Entrepreneurship Skills Development event in Fredericton, NB, Canada. Irshad’s view emphasizes one thing: young adults no longer accept to conform to rules; they like to create their own personal rules according to what they expect from life.

GenY is web-savvy, embraces diversity and has compassion. Young adults no longer want to wait until the society thinks that they are ready before taking an active role in it. They have strong opinions and beliefs and are more than willing to share it with the world. Irshad was mentioning that GenY individuals are not interested in sacrificing their time and energy on jobs that don’t fit with their views about life. So employers, get ready. If the positions you offer are boring and debilitating, you will have a hard time filling them even if you pay well. The question here is not to know if this new attitude is a good thing or a bad thing, but how to adapt to it.

In order to become a teacher, it’s always been assumed that you had to learn for a significant period of time (decades) before becoming sufficiently “competent” to deserve the right to teach. GenY is tired of waiting. They want to teach now. It’s then not surprising to see how tools such as webblogs are getting increasingly popular. Webblogs allow people to express themselves, or to teach in some way, at the same time that they learn.

As I was listening to Irshad depicting the coming generation, one word came to my mind that seems to describe quite well what young adults are actually looking for: empowerment. We are at a point in history where people reclaim the use of their full potential. Let our society become a living creature adapting itself as world changes. A creature made of a collection of small, but powerful and influential cells.

2004-03-25T15:35:00.000-04:00

Towards a knowledge network economy
Here is a reflection about knowledge management on which I am currently working. Comments are welcome!

Towards a knowledge network economy

Introduction
It has become obvious for business people that today’s environment is in constant evolution. That explains in part the increasing interest of businesses for technological tools such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) and Knowledge Management (KM). By helping organizations get in touch with their environment and by building new communication structures, these tools promise to better align and adapt the business strategies of a changing world. CRM and ERP became popular at the end of the 1990s and KM followed a few years later. All these new technologies were supposed to improve competitiveness and profitability, but all have since become the central point of many harsh critics. Knowledge Management, as the newest trend, should have benefited from what was discovered with CRM and ERP. Unfortunately, it was not the case.

This paper offers a point of view on mitigated success of Knowledge Management and proposes a new approach where people play the main role and where technology is used as an enabling tool, like it should be. First of all, we will demonstrate that the common interpretation of KM is flawed because software companies have misguided it and because a review of business processes has not been integrated in the concept. Then, a new framework of knowledge networks for knowledge creation and dissemination will be proposed. Finally, the consequences that this model might impose on organizations will be considered.

The Knowledge Management Illusion
A lot has been said about the pitfalls of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The major mistake made by companies that suffered failures from BPR is that they put too much emphasis on technology and not enough on people . BPR has to be considered an organizational project enabled by IT, not an IT project enabled by the organization. A change always has systemic consequences, especially when it modifies the way people work. We do not hear much about BPR these days. Has it died? No. It has been renamed. The purpose of CRM is to align business processes with external clients and to make them the focal point of the organization . The purpose of ERP, on the other hand, is to align business processes with internal clients . They basically constitute the same exercise, but they have different focuses. The term strategic planning, widely used in today’s business environment, is so close to what BPR meant at the time of its creation that they could be considered synonyms. Strategic planning certainly encompasses both CRM and ERP.

With such a strong relationship between the concepts, one would have thought that organizations would have avoided BPR’s pitfalls in their CRM and ERP initiatives. Unfortunately, it has not been the case. Companies are still buying CRM and ERP “software solutions” and they ask their Chief Information Officer to implement it. Where do the employees fit in all that? It’s not very clear. They are considered at best a facilitator and at worst, a change resistance generator. Managers are well aware of the problem but they still avoid it. Do not get fooled, most managers do have good intentions. The problem is that dealing with people is costly and risky because we never get a complete picture and we never know how individuals will react to change. In the best case scenario, we can try to anticipate. Higher costs and risks don’t fit well in a Return On Investment analysis and are therefore often omitted in order to make sure higher management accepts a particular project.

Knowledge Management is very close to CRM and ERP. It’s still Business Process Reengineering but in this case the focus is not put on clients, but on knowledge. That is a significant difference because people do not know much about their knowledge, especially at the organizational level. While people are used to cliché formulas such as “think client” or “the client is the most important person in this building” they are not used to consider the knowledge that they own as being of critical importance.

Where does the need to manage knowledge come from? Knowledge is seen as the key to adaptability and innovation, which are considered critical success factors in today’s business environment. There is an important obstacle to face. It is very hard to get to a common understanding of what knowledge is and how it should be “managed”.

First attempt: knowledge capture
Management does not like costs and risks. It likes to possess, control and exploit. KM software companies are well aware of that. By offering turn key KM software products, they give management the assurance that costs will be controlled and that the risks will not be higher than they are for any other software project. That is very appealing for organizations and it has convinced many of them to undertake KM software implementation. The main function of such software is to organize knowledge in a database and to allow people to contribute and retrieve information when it is required. Later versions include collaborative functions such as chats, forums and access to experts in a number of fields. Unfortunately, this model is not working very well because people do not like to contribute their knowledge.
Gareth rightly points out that people’s power in their work environment is related to what makes them valuable in terms of knowledge. For instance, one’s ability to apply a given procedure correctly without having to refer to the 100-page manual makes him a very valuable employee within his department. Employees are respected and recognized for their unique knowledge. And this is exactly the kind of knowledge that KM initiatives try to capture. Would this employee be willing to share his knowledge with the rest of his organization? Not likely since sharing his knowledge would mean giving away his organizational power. A major downfall of KM is that it is fighting against this power distribution problem all the time. People do not like to give away their power of influence. Hence, even if they did, we would still need to represent and index knowledge in a meaningful way for heterogeneous categories of users. Downes argues that indexing an object is highly related to the use we want to make of it. It then changes according to the context in which it is used. This illustrates how complex and demanding knowledge representation can be.

The knowledge capture approach is rather problematic because of the human factor and the representation difficulty. Therefore, organizations need to invest more money than they first thought was needed in order to maintain a KM initiative over time, when using such an approach. They should constantly motivate their employees to keep an acceptable level of use. What is often worse is that the costly knowledge base that is produced is static. It has to be manually updated, with a delay most of the time, while the purpose of Knowledge Management is to help organizations become more flexible in a dynamic environment. This approach definitely seems to miss the point.

Second attempt: knowledge capture with communication tools
Knowledge Management experts, recognizing that people needed to be included in the loop, have added communication tools to their software (chat, discussion boards, weblogs…). In addition to e-mail and the telephone, these tools can improve the quality of communication between people. In best case scenarios, individuals will share more knowledge because it really corresponds to the way people learn: by interaction. It’s a move towards the right direction but it’s not enough. The knowledge capture model is still the central point here and leads us to two fundamental questions: Does knowledge exist by itself if it is not linked to someone? And how can an organization benefit from KM if people are not fully integrated in its process?

It is not the goal of this paper to discuss the definition of knowledge. Nonetheless, we can state that economically speaking, a piece of information that is not used by someone is useless. Therefore, knowledge gets its value from the use that is made of it. Knowledge is produced by and for people. Not to include people in KM process is nonsense. The next section proposes a model where knowledge itself is not managed, but where the way by which it gets created and disseminated is indeed managed.

Managing knowledge through people
People are the natural owners of knowledge. They create it, share it, filter it and make it evolve. In order to store knowledge and help communicate it, they create artifacts. A theory like emergence states that knowledge results from the interaction between people . No matter if one agrees with it or not, a fact remains:

Knowledge is a human construct (and most of the time a social one).

Such a statement is of extreme importance, because if we agree with it, we should abandon the idea of capturing knowledge, which is the main idea behind most current KM projects. KM would then have to focus on a different idea: enable knowledge creation by people. Technology would also have a different role to play in that context, but still a critical one. It has to become the communication infrastructure that allows social networks to create knowledge.

As mentioned earlier, organizations like to control and possess knowledge, which they consider to be an asset, in order to better manage risk. In a people-based approach, they wouldn’t need such control over knowledge because they could access information through a powerful and intelligent medium, a person or a group of people. Let’s have a look at what such a corporate social network would look like.

(image1)

In this model, black dots represent people and coloured squares represent different networks of knowledge. The coloured connections therefore link people together by fields of knowledge, or by fields of interest if you prefer.

Within a network people are aware of each other and are communicating through a suite of tools that could be made of discussion boards, e-mails, chats, weblogs… In order to identify other people within a network, it will be necessary to represent their profiles in some way. But the true personification of people in a field would occur through their contribution to the network. Participants in a network could then produce artifacts when they find it relevant.

The true strength of this model resides in internetworking. Individuals would participate in a number of networks, which would be reflected in their profiles. By representing how people belong to different knowledge networks, we would be able to draw the knowledge map of an organization. This map would be an extremely powerful tool allowing the identification of key individuals to select according to their profiles, for example to achieve a new highly complex project.

A knowledge network model acts precisely where KM is failing, it gives people power instead of stealing it away from them. People are the nodes of the knowledge networks and therefore their foundation. It is true that knowledge is not necessarily explicitly captured, but it becomes accessible, alive and dynamic. Maps of such knowledge networks are constantly evolving as people get in and get out of networks, as they make contributions, as networks appear and disappear. This dynamic knowledge mapping of organizations is not possible at the present time but would be feasible with the knowledge network model.

A Network of Knowledge Networks
We have seen how knowledge networks can empower people in organizations with knowledge creation and dissemination. The thing that was not mentioned though is that there are no reasons why the networks of an organization could not be comprised of external networks as well. Today’s business often requires to access external knowledge when dealing with complex issues. Through its internal and external knowledge networks, an organization would be able to increase its own knowledge pool by allowing its employees to interact with people outside its boundaries. This sounds a lot like the true spirit of the knowledge economy…

(image2)

The Individual as an independent knowledge worker
An organization is at its core a group of people working together on common objectives. As products and services are increasingly being built with knowledge, access to this resource becomes as critical as getting access to metal for an automaker. The difference is that flexible organizations need very diverse kinds of knowledge in their activities. Employing such a diverse workforce on a permanent basis is costly and inflexible. That might explain in part why outsourcing is getting increasingly popular. The knowledge worker, whose main task is to participate in the knowledge creation process, can therefore be considered as an independent production unit that is employed on demand by organizations. An organization that has strong enough knowledge networks could then outsource most of its activities to individual knowledge workers employed in real-time according to a matrix structure fluctuating according to needs. This may seem a little farfetched, but this extremely flexible structure is attainable for organizations that understand their knowledge flows.

One may argue that such a structure would destroy the traditional employer-employee link and that the concept of employment security would disappear. The employer-employee link would be very different indeed and be more of a “client-employee” link. The vertical production chain would be made of a very large number of small value-creation units (individuals) oriented towards the needs of the client. The employment security concept would also evolve and it would be defined by an individual’s ability to contribute knowledge within this vertical production chain.

Conclusion
Moving from the industrial era to the knowledge era has big implications for organizations. They need to shift from a production-based paradigm to a knowledge-based one. Present organizations who undertake KM software projects often do not realize how deep the changes to implement are in order to truly become knowledge organizations. Knowledge cannot be managed in an organization if its business processes are not adapted and its people are not established as the foundation of its knowledge architecture. The new framework of knowledge networks could very well be the missing element that allows organizations to really become knowledge-based. Good news, it could be done now.

Reference
Brynjolfsson & al. (1997). The Matrix of Change: A Tool for Business Process Reengineering. MIT Sloan School of Management.

Davenport (1996). The Fad That Forgot People. The Fast Company

Editors of the CRM Magazine (2002), Destination CRM. What is CRM?. Retrieved from the web on February 19, 2004:
http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=1747

Koch (2002), The ABCs of ERP. CIO.com. Retrieved from the web on February 19, 2004:
http://www.cio.com/research/erp/edit/erpbasics.html#erp_abc

Gareth (1998), Images of Organizations, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Downes, S. (2003). Resource Profiles. Retrieved from the web on Novwember 30, 2004 : http://www.downes.ca/files/resource_profiles.htm

Kakihara & Sorensen (2002), Exploring Knowledge Emergence: From Chaos to Organizational Knowledge. Journal for Global Information Technology Management, Vol 5, 2002

2004-03-25T15:24:00.000-04:00

Previous work

Here is a report I wrote on the marketing potential of learning objects, just to give you some info about my past work in the eduSource Canada project.

2004-03-25T15:09:00.000-04:00

Here we go!

My first lines.

People who know me might say it was about time that I start blogging being such an active blog reader myself. Many things kept me from finally deciding to take a plunge into blogging:

1. Having a job and a young family, time is obviously a scarce resource for me. I wouldn't want to become less present for my wife and kids because I blog. The coming weeks will tell me if I can achieve that and still be a productive blogger.

2. I'm not sure that my thoughts can be interesting for people other than myself. Am I shy? Yes.

What decided me in the end is exactly what keeps me from blogging for many months. I've finally decided to blog because I believe that my kids deserve a world where free expression and individual empowerment are not only ideals but the very foundation of social interaction. I might be fooling myself but I believe that I can make a significant contribution to this cause through this webblog. I'm still time-constrained and shy, but I no longer care.

My initial goal is to discuss subjects such as education, technology, social interaction and business. After all, I make a living as a consultant in those fields. So if people pay me for my reflection on these subjects, maybe I can make the easy assumption that my ideas are of value for some people.