Future of learning

For the next couple of weeks,  I will be “on the road”. I’m off to Taiwan to participate in an Asia Pacific Knowledge Management study meeting.  I’ll be speaking on Intellectual Capital – more when I come back.  See – I actually still do stuff in KM

This is good news for you dear reader as it means I won’t have any time for long, ranting posts.

But next week, I’ll be offering a lucky reader a 3 month free subscription to Choice magazine! Stay tuned for competition details.

Meanwhile, I have a backlog of interesting stuff to share with you. Look what I’ve found!  I’m excited by this even if you’re not. I spend a fair bit of time teaching uni students. This semester, I’ve taken a break from face-to-face teaching but in 2010 I’ll be getting back into it. For over 6 years, I’ve been teaching in a virtual environment via an online facilitation system. This of course means that I spend a fair bit of thinking time on education – how to engage students; how to design interactive stuff; how to encourage students to engage in intellectual discourse and so on.

So I was doing some research about educational trends and I found this cool site on the future of learning. I often wonder if F2F teaching will become a quaint relic of the past and whether students and lecturers will be engaging in a virtual environment like Second Life. I wonder how gamers will influence learning; or how Gen Y will bring a whole new perspective to education.

The 2020 forecast has some great insights and examines the forces that will impact on education over the next few years.  Here’s a quick summary:

• we are shifting towards a “culture of creation” and this means individuals can grasp the opportunity to create new selves, organisations, systems, societies, economies and knowledge;
• “educitizens” define their rights as learners. Participatory media will lead to a re-articulation of identity and community in a global society;
• resilience (which is a concept I spend a lot of time thinking about in relation to KM) – schools and educators will need to equip students with skills that facilitate resilience eg networking power; using social media to engage with the wider community; applying collective intelligence;
• new tools for visualising data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns – I actually think this will be a huge area for educators as software applications that help people to visually think and problem solve become smarter;
• local values will reawaken. Economies of group connectivity—combined with fears of globalism and concern over dominance of big business—will create a revival of localism. New civic processes will emerge and educators and learners will need to engage with this;
• youth media and Gen Y will dominate – smart networkers will push the organisational edge for employers and community leaders. Gen Y’s experience with interactive games and virtual worlds will result in community learning that stresses cooperative strategies, experimentation and parallel development.

There’s sooooooooo much on this site and explored in the trend map but I’m short on time as I have to prepare stuff on intellectual capital. So I’m going to leave it to you to check out the interactive map - pretty cool the way you can navigate the map and drill deeper. At the very least, it will trigger thoughts about the way educators and learners will need to change course over the next few years and how a “learning ecosystem” will be the future of learning.

Make sure you check out the section on Altered Bodies and A New Civic Discourse. For KM people, there’s also some great resources on scenario planning.

The library as conversation

Are you going to get a Kindle? Have one already? I don’t get it because I prefer to hold the book in my hands. So what’s the future of libraries, stuffed full of wonderfully musty smelling tomes? Does the library have a future at all? Will it be full of Kindles that can be loaned out? If they eventually come in hot pink, I might be tempted

I came across this fantastic presentation and audio from R. David Lankes, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, which provides insights into the future of libraries and librarianship. He starts off with a fairly confronting statement:

“(Librarians) have become so busy and adept at keeping the library efficient and well-managed that we have lacked the space to step back and observe it from a high level”.

And then goes on to say that: “The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities“.  So it’s not about books and collections. I remember when I first started my career in knowledge management there was a lot of angst over whether librarians were information managers whilst knowledge managers were some sort of more evolved species dealing with knowledge (and some dudes even call themselves “wisdom architects”, which if you believe the twaffle of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid, is the most evolved of all species).

But now I think we’ve reached the point in the debate where we can say that we are all doing the same thing, albeit concentrating on different aspects. So records managers, information managers, knowledge managers – we’re all attempting to facilitate knowledge creation, transfer and continuity. The fact that records managers concentrate on retention and compliance whilst knowledge managers may focus on collaboration and decision-making are simply different lenses looking at the same thing. In fact, my KM colleague, Baoman, has a well-crafted reflection piece on his blog in which he ponders this very subject, inspired by gentleman and scholar, Patrick Lambe.

So I very much liked Lankes’ vision for the mission of librarians (not libraries note) and that knowledge and learning is created through conversation and conversation theory. Conversation theory consisting of:

• language
• memory
• conversants – exchanging language
• agreements – between conversants (even if it’s agreeing not to agree)

So he’s suggesting that librarians are in the conversation business and need to be facilitators of conversations. Lankes uses the term “participatory librarianship” and says that participatory librarians “seek to enrich, capture, store and disseminate the conversations of their communities”. Further, he queries the rigidity of catalogues when users are now familiar with tagging and folksonomies and asks – how do we build systems that all users can use and he looks at social networking sites (where users build the system around themselves and their own language). Users now construct an open discovery space.

Lankes also emphasises that skills change eg cataloguing skills and that library education should equip a librarian for change. And this means librarians as activists, lobbying for change, innovating and proactively serving the community. He believes the best days of librarianship are ahead of us not behind us. To get maximum benefit out of the presentation, listen to the audio. Almost makes me want to go back into librarianship.

Also, check out Lankes’ website, which basically provides you with a Participatory Librarianship Starter Kit (articles, presentations and webcasts). Great stuff!

Will you have the right stuff?

I often wonder what sorts of skills will be required of future workers. One can only imagine what whiz bang technology will be available that will require a whole different skillset; what new industries will be created; and what current jobs and industries will bite the dust.

So I found this article on 10 Workplace Skills of the Future very interesting. The Institute for the Future has identified the skills you and I need to develop to face the future. Some of the names of the skills are a tad odd but here they are:

• Ping Quotient (what the?) – The Institute says this is about responsiveness and reach. Your ability to engage with other people and to work within a network and with others in the network.
• Longbroading The ability of see the big picture, systems thinking, understanding how a network nests within wider networks.
• Open Authorship We’re certainly seeing this skill on the increase – creating content for public modification; the ability to work with multiple contributors.
• Cooperation Radar Seems this skill is almost an intuitive ability to sense who the best workers would be to have on a particular project or task.
• Multi-Capitalism I couldn’t agree with this one more. Because of the global financial hissy fit, I think we will see different economic models being put forward as complements to capitalism and also different notions of what constitutes “capital” will need to be understood. So this skill will require fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals eg natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual.
• Mobbability Again, I think we have seen this skill on the increase.  It’s your ability work with and simultaneously coordinate large groups.
• Protovation This skill focuses on rapid innovation in iterative cycles and increasing the speed of failure. And not being afraid of failure. 
• Influency I think this skill is one knowledge managers are already well-versed in, particularly when it comes to storytelling. Influency will require us to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (with each space requiring a different persuasive strategy and technique).
• Signal/Noise Management Pattern-recognition, filtering out noise, filtering meaningful information from all the stuff that we get hit with on a daily basis.
• Emergensight This is not a typo. Emergensight is the ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales.

What do you think of these skills? Would you add to them?

Leif: please blog!

Well, dear reader, back from my sojourn in Hong Kong. A wonderful time: speaking at a KM conference with the glittering gems of the KM universe, Dave Snowden and Patrick Lambe; running tutorials for students at Hong Kong PolyU; and delivering a full-day public workshop on knowledge sharing techniques, followed by an evening public lecture. Phew!!  You can read all about the conference proceedings on Dave Snowden’s blog. And speaking of Dave: aside from his truly wonderful conference session, I did think I’d come back home to find myself well and truly roasted by Dave for a slight mistake I made on the topic of his birthday. But since he hasn’t raised it, it’s a secret!

So onto the subject of today’s post – Leif Edvinsson. Unless you’ve been hiding on some remote island, you’d know that Leif was the director of Intellectual Capital at Skandia in Sweden; he’s a former Brain of the Year; he is a Professor of Intellectual Capital at the University of Lund, Sweden.  And of course, author of this great book on Intellectual Capital. I was aware of Leif’s work for years but did not have the pleasure of meeting him until last year when I spoke at the 2008 KM Conference, held by the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society. Leif said he was inspired by my conference talk (seriously kind man!) and I went on to set up a blog for him because I believe he has some very important things to say.

But….Leif is a busy man, whizzing around the globe and alas has had no time to blog. So when I caught up with him again at last week’s conference, I put the pressure on him. His conference session started off with ginger essence being sprayed around the room and he went on to talk about some amazing stuff he’s been involved with and some great illustrative photos:

• in the Skandia Future Centre – old technology (typewriter) is displayed as a conversation piece;
• a globe of space triggers discussion around what is the shape of space (I could literally spend hours thinking about this!)
• clocks showing different time zones (suggesting that you and your organisation may not be in synch).
• a large chair with a computer integrated within it so it’s like a cocoon allowing for personal reflection and isolation from disruptive noise.
  

He asked some great questions along the way:

• how do we reshape spaces for the flow of our thoughts?
• how do you shape space to add energy?
• how do we create healthy spaces that add oxygen?
• how do we create spaces that are about mind satisfaction and not mind control?

A question I keep asking myself (and Leif and I had a quick chat about this) – how can you take the concept of poché and carve space that facilitates knowledge flow? In architectural terms, poché refers to solid, dense structures that can be shaped into meaningful space. And even more interesting, is the concepts of positive/negative space (positive being solid structures and negative meaning areas around and behind the positive spaces) – how can they be combined and what is the result?

Leif’s session was so jam packed with goodies that I found it hard to take notes and not just drool over the photos he was showing or the seriously interesting questions he was asking. He talked about the Ice Hotel in Sweden (I find this fascinating) – it melts every summer and so has to be rebuilt. It is recycled into different shapes and rooms but lots of knowledge tools are embedded within this concept.

So…I found myself telling Leif “you must get your blog going” and I promised him it is a painless procedure. He doesn’t need to churn out long essays like I do. He can do a quick blog post of a few hundred words, once a week. As conversation starters, to whet the appetite, to disrupt normal patterns of thinking, to simply show how Leif thinks and asks such stunning questions.

And so here are the top posts I would like to see Leif blog on – I promised I’d send them to him but better yet, why not blog on it here on ThinkingShift and REALLY put the pressure on! So here Leif are the themes to kick-start your blog, in no particular order, but they are concepts or questions I think people will find truly intriguing:

• the concept of the knowledge cafe, the Vienna cafes and origins in the Muslim world
• trust as the bridge on which knowledge travels in between people
• the concept of “knowledge cities” – an overview
• Nordic Leadership program
• a number of posts about the shaping of space, for example, the design of a chair (without arm rests) and its impact on knowledge exchange; the colour green and its roots going back to 1490.
• specific examples of psycho-social landscapes – Dialogue House, Mind Lab, floating centre in Denmark
• a blog post about why the Swedes are so creative (your answer to that was about knowledge importation, which was extremely interesting)
• how do we nourish smell and sound?
• the notion of “contactivity”
• the health space terrace concept
• mind zone – how do we shape from an architectural perspective?
• the Ice Hotel and knowledge tools
• Japan and next generation of knowledge workers
• Intelligent regions

This will give Leif 14 posts to kick off with – once a week. And I’m sure you’d find what he has to say as fascinating as I do. Once he gets going, I’ll post a link to his blog. So Leif: please blog!

CoPs 101

Once again, I find myself in need of explaining CoPs (communities of practice) to people I’m working with. I’ve been working with CoPs since 2002 in the same organisation. There’s been the usual ups and downs – a couple of CoPs bit the dust (really because they’d reached the limits of their purpose); senior management have tried to get their claws into the CoPs or grilled me over ROI on the CoPs; and the CoPs have survived a recent restructure.

In fact, I now have an explosion of CoPs on my hands due to a recent announcement by our top dog that CoPs are an important part of our KM initiative. All good. I’m still surviving! But I’ve run across a whole heap of people new to the organisation or in another related area (like L&D or IT) who don’t really understand this CoPs business. So I have a mix of people on my hands: some old warriors who have been in a particular CoP for 5 or 6 years and some new people who are excited by the whole concept but haven’t had the “CoP experience” so don’t quite know what’s up.

It’s actually getting quite interesting now – finally, I have an L&D crew who want to (gasp!) work with me (KM) and we are approaching credentialling via learning pathways (formal and informal curriculum, with CoPs being the informal part). Anyway, I trawled through YouTube to see what I could find in the way of organisations and CoPs or people explaining CoPs.

The first one is CoPs 101 (I’ll be using it!) – Communities of Practice Explained – within the context of the UK Government.

And this led me to the following website – Communities of Practice for Local Government. I found tons of CoPs, including a valuable Facilitator’s Community for facilitators to share tips about online facilitation.

Then I came across this video about Caterpillar’s sharing culture and their 4,000 CoPs.

There were a couple of things in the video I don’t agree with but hey, I’m in a good mood so I’ll lay off!

Network citizens

Demos has recently published a very interesting paper entitled Network Citizens: Power & Responsibility at Work. You can download it here. It focuses on social networks and takes the interesting slant that networks can use organisations for their own ends.

Six organisations are showcased and the paper looks at the key fault-lines that people and organisations will have to address in the future world of work. I was particularly intrigued by this statement:

“Networks have a darker side that can make power, influence and dynamics less visible. They lead to difficult questions of influence, innovation, meritocracy and, fundamentally, loyalty, and the relationship between individuals and organisations.”

Blog fog

Not sure about other bloggers but occasionally there is so much I want to talk about – I end up a tad paralysed and in a blog fog!  That’s happening to me now, so today, I thought I’d answer some of the personal questions a few of you have asked me via email.

(1) From Sherry B, the question to me is: are you intending to live off-the-grid and how will you be going about this?

Sherry: I really don’t like what I’m seeing in the world these days. Global warming, destruction of forests and animal habitats, the selfishness of people and so on. I do believe that the future will be one of water shortages, food scarcity, urban distress as people increasingly move into cities looking for water and food, increasing conflict between different ethnic groups. And I think ultimately this will lead to human extinction. There is no reason to believe that humans are exempt from extinction, especially if the world population numbers continue to explode.

So I am fully intending to withdraw from mainstream society. We are currently looking for land in Europe. Anywhere on this stressed out planet is likely to suffer from global warming but the indications are grim for Australia. Prof Ross Garnaut just released a new paper on carbon pricing and emissions as part of his Climate Change Review. You can read it here.  Indications are that parts of Europe won’t be so badly hit by climate change, so we’re looking for land that has its own water source, where we can grow vegetables, generate our own power and live a quieter life.

(2) From PaisleyDays comes the question: Are you paranoid about everything or just biometrics?

PaisleyDays: Love your name! I’m sure some people might answer, yep she’s paranoid about everything. But actually I’m reasonably laid back. I don’t fret about being attacked by strangers. I never really worried about the Communists invading during the Cold War. I don’t believe that the CIA, FBI or ASIO is tracking me or listening in to my phone calls (and dudes, if you are – you would have found out by now that I’m a pretty boring person who leads a relatively quite life!). So no, I’m not totally paranoid.

I do subscribe to the odd conspiracy theory now and then. I reckon that Lee Harvey Oswald was set up and that dark forces probably knocked off Prez Kennedy (dark forces being US Government types). I’m 50/50 on whether an alien was ever autopsied.

Biometrics and the erosion of our civil liberties though is a conspiracy for sure. The State/Government is attempting to control us and we are submissive sheep going along for the ride bleating the mantra “if you have nothing to hide, then why worry about having your fingerprints, irises and face scanned”. That mantra is a cop out if you ask me. The essence of the State/Government is that it is to serve you. But particularly since 9/11, we have seen an expansion of executive power in Western democracies, a detachment from the rule of law and a full-frontal attack on civil safeguards. Our relationship with the very Governments that are supposed to serve us has altered – and not in our favour.

(3) From ConstantCravings comes the question: why don’t you talk about KM more?

ConstantCravings: true to say my “day job” involves me in Knowledge Management. I’ve been in this field/discipline/profession (depends on your view as to which it is!) for about 12 years now. Do I ever get tired of it? Absolutely!  It’s a tough field to be in because organisations still don’t “get it”. Some places I’ve worked in have equated KM with IT. Others are very hierarchical and bureaucratic, so it’s still about “who you are and what you know”. Some organisations I’ve been in say they are innovative/adaptive/flexible but when it comes to trying to implement something fresh like a particular KM strategy, suddenly they’ve lost that  desire to be innovative.

So I guess like most KM practitioners, I go through phases. Some days, I think it’s a great job to be in and I’m making some headway or contributing to change; other days, I wonder why I’m bothering!

I could blog a lot more about KM sure but there are some sharp minds out there doing this already – Dave Snowden and Patrick Lambe to name two. And frankly, what keeps me energised and engaged is ranting and talking about all the stuff that ThinkingShift is about – from aliens, to LOLCats, to privacy, to the environment and climate change. When you’ve got the planet to fret about and bizarre things happening in this world of ours, why worry about KM!

Thx for your questions!

Social network stuff

I’ve been sniffing around social networks because I’m thinking of setting up one (no, not a privacy network!). And in the course of my nosing around, I’ve found some interesting networks and visualisers. I came across Social Action, which is an SNA tool. Social Action was used to analyse the social networks of steroid users in major league baseball in the US. And here’s what that network looks like:

There’s examples on the Social Action site of the global Jihad terrorist network and voting patterns of US Senators.

And then I stumbled onto Visual Complexity, which is a fabulous resource for those of us interested in the visualisation of complex networks. There are visualisations of networks ranging over areas such as biology, pattern recognition, knowledge networks, transportation networks and so on. Here’s a fascinating visualisation of the movements of pedestrians in a public space:

I spent several hours on the Visual Complexity site! Check it out, there’s some cool stuff. Enjoy!

SNA map of the steroids network in major league baseball from Visual Complexity.

KM Method cards

I don’t decorate ThinkingShift with a lot of annoying ads or pimp products but when something fabulous and worthwhile comes along, I’m happy to blog away. ThinkingShift good friend, gentleman and scholar, Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge, was breezing through Sydney last week and we caught up for a quick coffee.

And he gave me a present – the KM Method Cards that Straits Knowledge have just launched. Basically, they’re beautifully illustrated cards that summarise 80 KM approaches, methods or tools. They’re colour-coded too for ease of reference so red cards talk about approaches; green cards take a look at methods; and yellow cards focus on tools. I can see these cards being really handy for KM brainstorming or strategy sessions and for educational purposes or as quick reference guides. I plan to use them to just visualise KM nirvana – cluster them around themes and talk about how to get there.

As usual, Patrick and his team have come up with something smart, useful and playful. I’ve shamelessly ganked the images below from Patrick’s site. The first image shows examples of KM Method cards:

This image is the Guide to Contents:

And you can buy the KM Method Cards here at Straits Knowledge online shop – a steal at US$50.00 (one day I expect Patrick to open up an Amazon-style online store stuffed full of taxonomy products and scholarly works!).

Patrick also tells me that he’s planning to write his next book later this year – he has a habit of squirreling himself away in Ireland or Australia and writing like a mad thing for a couple of months. I’ll let him tell you what that book might be about but can’t wait to see it published because Patrick is one of the sharper minds around.

Now….if I could just think how to produce Privacy Cards – all the methods used to invade our privacy – I might hit the jackpot. And I could set up an online store that absolutely no-one would be able to access because I’d be paranoid about privacy!!!

People lending

This is just great. The Living Library. You borrow people not books. Yep, really. It’s an idea out of Scandinavia. Instead of borrowing a book, you can borrow a person for a 30 minute chat. An east London library has 26 “human books” available. The aim is to confront and breakdown stereotypes. You can “borrow” a Muslim; a police officer; a person suffering mental health issues; a gay guy; or a young person expelled from school.

So the stereotypes might be religious fanatic; corrupt; unstable; promiscuous; rebellious and so on. It’s about having frank and rich conversations with people and learning about different cultures or ways of living. It’s about the “borrower” offering up what misgivings or fears they might have of a stereotype and the “human book” responding.

Violence, hatred and racial issues often occur when there is misunderstanding, ignorance and cultural insensitivity. Listening to the narrative of another person who is entirely different from you is a powerful experience. The Living Library challenges preconceptions through promoting dialogue.

The Living Library was started by a Danish anti-violence campaigner, Ronni Abergel, who has taken the concept to 12 countries, including Australia where the Richmond-Tweed library seems to have embraced it with the slogan “Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover”.

I wonder how the “human books” feel. I’d be worried I’d be left on the shelf with no-one interested in speaking to me!

If you’re interested in learning more about this concept, check out the Living Library Organizer’s Guide on Amazon.

Source: TimesOnline. Photo credit: The Christian Science Monitor.