Dave Wilkins : Social Learner

Notes from Day 2 of the Dev Learn show

I Twittered two sessions today: one by Paul Saffo (the keynote) and one by a first-time presenter.  Interesting contrast.  I had never heard of Paul prior to this, but this is one smart dude.  Plus he presents well.  I will be tracking him going forward.

Second presenter was good, but generally unprepared for the sorts of questions we had.  Not sure if it was the disconnect between her "assigned task" and expectations from a set of seasoned professionals, but my general take away is that she was very tactically focused and missed some critical elements regarding business impact.

Here are my Tweats, mostly unaltered.  I reversed the order so that they would read from top to bottom; I removed my identifiers in front; I also removed time stamp since a) it was annoying to read and b) these were basically all done moment by moment.  I also bolded anything that I really liked at the time or upon a re-read.  I think it might help bring attention to the wheat amid the chaff.  Other than these minor edits, it's the raw steam including typos.  Have a good read:

Paul Saffo Key Note

• Paul Saffo -- uncertainty is fuel for elearning; we had an arms race; now we're having a brains race  
• shift from information to media  
• mass media to personal media  
• technology becomes media over time  
• tv =broadcast  
• time-sharing = email  
• client-server = world wide web  
• peer-to-peer = napster (him), maybe bitorrent (me)  
• cell phone is a media device; cell phone ringtones is 16% of global music business  
• The Spartan Life -- talk show in Halo  
• funny -- sometimes interviewees get shot in the middle of the interview lol  
• mass media vs personal media  
• tv vs the web  
• living room vs everywhere  
• mass media is about watching and consuming  
• personal media is about participation and creation  
• depth and degree of participation is about to increase by at least a magnitude  
• how do you achieve balance; rethinking balance of various channels  
• few and large vs many and small; ie ABC, NBC etcc vs Oxygen and even further, blogs, and YouTube (me)  
• Product and Service vs Subscription (and more)  
• pay attention to interesting failures; they point to the inflection point (sometimes)  
• Everquest -- you couldn't sell your asset; owned by Sony  
• now you can -- SecondLife; it's a speculative market where you own it  
• social networks are about who they exclude as much as who they include  
• look for reversal of "field and ground" in business models  
• give stuff away you used to charge for; charge for stuff that was free  
• late 80's -- CDROM + hypertext is the FUTURE! ubiqitous hypertext was seen as too utopian and far future  
• one of the best sellers on the web? books, which were supposed to be replaced by the web -- lesson? can't predict actual impact of tech  
• Another technology vs media: sensors vs "smarteffects"  
• RFID's etc.... sensors like heart monitors etc..., temperature -- Nike iShoe; tracks your rate and talks to your iPod; iPod music adapts  
• if you run slower, iShoe talks to iPhone / iPod, which then adapts and changes songs  
• industrial economy to consumer economy; power shifted to consumer  
• now we're shifting again: producers are consumers; consumers are producers  
• real and best example of this -- Google  
• "...you think you are consuming on Google, but you are actually creating..."  
• profound changes in elearning space  
• danger is "standing on a whale fishing for minnows"  

• twittering the next session -- Teaching a SME to Fish -- Training the SME's to create content  
• captivate / breeze as 'disrputors' of the status quo related to ILT? hmm, if true, it means trainers are not well adapted to change  
• goal was to get more content on-line; wanted users to be able to create their own content -- UMASS Medical School  
• goals: who needed stuff right away (tactical) and set up user communities to start them thinking about themselves as a special class  
• talking about how they reached out to communities of practice who may have used Captivate and Connect in the past  
• found some resistance around SME's wanting specific and personal training for them; not repurposed  
• content she is showing that SME's built is god awful  
• but at same time, she is advocating that you let SME's loose to fail and grow  
• I think that's a good message, but seems like there is a middle ground to coach SME's more at the beginning  
• still struck by how bad the SME content is  
• example after example is like "wow!" but in a bad way  
• it makes me wonder what this means for quality in the Web 2.0 world  
• does the overall increase in information and learning resources outweigh the decrease in quality?  
• put more simply: does quantity trump quality? is this what we need to live with in a Web 2.0 world?  
• no measurement; no assessment; no idea about impact on business  
• I'm just simply floored that a large organization, let alone a UNIVERSITY, would be creating content with zero awareness of impact -- ZERO  
• "we won't track usage or do assessments until sometime next year..." just wow. Imagine if this is not working; waste of time/effort = $$$$  
• she thinks ratings are not necessary and perhaps counter to the needs of the users  
• she sees herself as advisor; essentially divorced fom accountability around privacy, data misuse, etc... not their deal basically  
• interesting model -- basically a YouTube approach to internal content creation, but with Breeze and Captivate instead of video 
  

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