Keynote – Steven Berlin Johnson
For those who don’t know who Steven Johnson is, here is a snippet of his bio from Leigh Bureau, the company that organizes speakers:

“Best-selling author of seven books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience. Social critic and technologist, with a fine track record for seeing emerging trends and explaining why they’re relevant to both personal life and business. Creator of three influential  websites. Author, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air and The Ghost Map. Founder/Creator, hyperlocal media site outside.in, acquired by AOL in 2011.” The rest of his bio can be read here.

Everyone that attended received a free copy of his latest book, “Where good Ideas Come From – The Natural history of Innovation”
~As an aside, the book so far is really pretty interesting. I may post on this once I’ve finished. So far, I’d definitely recommend.
The theme of Stevens book and speech are basically this:

The notion of ‘Eureka!’ moments is a myth. “Most” good ideas come as the result of circumstances that are much more complex than just “A Ha!”

Johnson used several historical innovations to illustrate the point that most ‘Good Ideas’ have at least one of seven key principles that lead to its coming to be. While Steven hit on several of the principles he identifies in his book, he didn’t cover them all during the keynote. Here are the ones that were covered and a brief explanation of what it is and how it can impact the birth of a good idea.

The Slow Hunch
Ideas are usually evolved over time.

John Snow is recognized as the father of epidemiology. As the story goes, Dr. John Snow was plotting cases of cholera on a map. Snow noticed that there was an unusually large cluster of cholera cases in SoHo near Broad Street. Dr. Snow quickly realized that the people that lived in this area all shared the same water supply and surmised that the cholera was spreading from there. He promptly presented his findings to the minister of health and had the pump handle removed and cholera was eradicated from England.
As it turns out though, there was nothing quick or prompt about the process. The first cholera outbreak occurred in England in 1831 and John Snow had been theorizing as early as 1849 that cholera was transmitted through water supplies (The Slow Hunch). Additionally, even after the Broad Street incident neither England’s minister of health, nor the scientific community at large seemed to actually believe Snow or his evidence.

Exaptation
An evolution or advance in one area has am impact in an unrelated area.

Johnson gave a simple and straightforward example of Exaptation with Johannes Gutenberg and how his printing press was specifically created only after seeing a wine press in action.

Liquid Networks
Creating & maintaining relationships with diverse professional backgrounds helps foster innovation.

Working, communicating or collaborating with individuals from other professions helps to understand related problems and alternative solutions.

The Adjacent Possible
There are only a finite number of possible options at any given time.

Basically, when & where an innovation occurs has as much to do with the innovation as does the individual(s) responsible for it. The example that Steven used here was of the NeoNurture Incubator project. Incubators and their benefits are things that most of the civilized world take for granted. When the thought of bringing incubators to underdeveloped parts of the world was discussed, one of they key issues aside from the upfront cost, would be the ability to maintain the incubators if something was to break. So the group looked at what other machines were in use in most of the rural areas that are able to be fixed. The answer was cars. Most of the rural world has cars and distribution chains in place to provide parts to these places.

The ‘Adjacent Possible’ for an incubator to exist and be sustainable in underdeveloped rural area of the world was to make an incubator out of car parts. More information on the NeoNurture Incubator can be found here:
http://designthatmatters.org/portfolio/projects/incubator/

The complete list of the seven principles:

• The Slow Hunch
• Exaptation
• Liquid Networks
• The Adjacent Possible
• Serendipity
• Error
• Platforms

For those that missed Steven’s Keynote, a shorter version of his talk from TED can be played below:

A nice whiteboard video illustrating all the concepts discussed above

Adobe Learning Summit 2011 -

Why I went:

• Get more info on deploying to mobile devices (tablets).
• See any new functionality for eLearning suite updates or next version.
• See what’s being done with Flash in Captivate via widgets/snippets/embedded SWF’s.

What I got:

• A great Keynote.
• Some glimmers of hope for mobile development.
• A few minor updates for Captivate.
• A few interesting takes on integrating Flash w/Captivate

Quick Links

Right off the bat I wanted to provide some links to the valuable information I received. Enjoy!

From Adobe Learning Summit 2011

• Steven Berlin Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From:
  http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2010/06/where-good-ideas-come-from.html
• Adobe Labs – Wallaby Flash to HTML5:
  http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/
• Adobe ‘Tour DeFLEX’:
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex.html
• Fonts for publishing eLearning to Android
  http://www.droidfonts.com/

From Pre-Conference Session with Mark Oehlert

• SlideRocket:
  http://www.sliderocket.com
• Department of Defense is Social!
  http://www.defense.gov/registeredsites/socialmediasites.aspx
• Defense Acquisition University:
  http://www.dau.mil/default.aspx
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – In ‘Fast Company’ on Social Media!:
  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/145/joint-venture.html
• IBM Social Media Policy:
  http://ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
• Kathy Sierra – Death by Risk Aversion:
  http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/death_by_riskav.html
• SocialText Enterprise Social Collaboration Platform:
  http://www.socialtext.com
• Jive Social Business Software:
  http://www.jivesoftware.com/
• Confluence by Atlassian – Enterprise Collaboration/Wiki:
  http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
• Traction Software – Social Media meets Project Management?!:
  http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/
• 37 Signals:
  http://37signals.com/
• oneforty – customizable social media ‘toolkits’:
  http://oneforty.com/
• Kongregate Online Gaming Site:
  http://www.kongregate.com
• TED – Technology Entertainment Design:
  http://www.ted.com/

Believe it or not, more links to come!

So it looks like I’ll be making a brief stop at the Adobe Learning Summit & a pre-con certification course for Learning Solutions 2011 in Orlando next week. Looking forward to catching up with some of the folks I tweet with and talk to from time to time. While I’m a little bummed I won’t be going to the conference proper, some learning is better than no learning right?
If you’re going to be down there drop me a note and we can grab a beer and talk shop.

~Rich

BTW, the Post Title is all names. Tony Orlando, Orlando Bloom & Orlando Pace.

It was April 1st 2009, that we as an organization went live with our new LMS.

Expectations ran high: new functionality, new features, centralization of training & education records etc. etc., all the things an organization should be able to expect from a new enterprise application.

Since that time our expectations have been pushed into the negative. Technical issues abound, both with integration and foremost with the application itself. While, at this point it would probably be somewhat cathartic to divulge the vendors name, I will exercise restraint.

The implementation process started in June of 2008. I PM’d the thing and for the most part was confident in the team from the vendors side of things. Then we went live…

As the technical issues continued to rise, and an apparent lack of respect for the criticality & expediency  of our issues became obvious, I became stuck in a quagmire of technical support. I had customers to answer to so my job had essentially become one of putting out fires. Extraordinarily long hours and tremendous effort from at first myself, and then others, did little or nothing to help head off what has now become nothing less than a disaster.

As it turns out, the application itself was not installed correctly. So regardless of how hard I worked or how well I tried to address any of the technical issues, I was never going to be able to fix the root cause of our technical support whirlwind. Vindication in a way, but only really for me.

So as my organization continues to suffer through the implications of a non-functioning LMS, the vendor will need to re-install the application, and we need to decide if the disrespect and incompetence dictate that a new vendor and therefore, new LMS be considered.

While I welcome the change from “help desk hell”. I have to acknowledge the effort that is going to go into shopping for and eventually implementing a new LMS.

The other option, obviously, is to stay with our current vendor and “hope” that if our current application can be re-installed and actually function in a manner that is productive to our organization. Is it worthwhile, considering what got us here in the first place?

Regardless, there have been some valuable lessons learned and experience gained. The future is uncertain. For now, that uncertainty is a challenge that I’m thankful for considering the only certainty I had up until now is that of spending my days trying to fix the unfixable.

Anyway, I saw this discussion as an opportunity to progress something that I have been thinking about for quite awhile now. And since I’m a selfish, misanthropic narcissist, I need to figure out what this means to me and my job. Paradoxically, I’m hoping to get some input from other e-learning professionals on the topic.From reading the comments it seems there are many of us e-learning professionals out there that “wear many hats” (hate that phrase). It also seems that these hats belong to areas in the organization that are waaay outside of ID.

When I started at my current position 5 years ago, there wasn’t much of an e-learning infrastructure established here. We had one of those “bad” Intranets (Thanks to Andrew McAfee for letting the group at DevLearn let me know I wasn’t alone in this), a handful of computer/web based training modules, and a lot of links to static content.

It has been my job to bring this health care organization of 30K+ into e-learning generally and better technology and practices specifically. ID has certainly been a part of what I do. But seriously, I do graphic design, web development and design, database development (bleh, SQL queries), application development, enterprise system implementations, marketing and communications, instructor-led training, and, oh yeah, I design and develop e-learning and administer the LMS.

I therefore, pose this existential question: Who or What am I? or better yet, What are you?

So, for all of you that commented on Cammy’s blog about the various things you do; or for any of you out there that wear those different hats, what would you call yourself? What would your job title and job description look like? Are you an ID? E-learning professional? CLO? Learning Technology Manager? TwitterMaster?

Leave a comment and let me know! I’m really not that narcissistic just a little bashful

Yeah that’s everyone else collectively, not singularly.

Although, while in the company of Andrew McAfee, Eric Zimmerman, Michael Allen, Neil Lasher, & Joe Ganci…it very well could have been singularly.

My biggest takeaway from DevLearn09 was that it’s in everyone’s best interest to start tapping into the collective of the masses. Of course these masses are usually your somewhat pre-defined masses of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Yammer etc. But still, understanding that these networks give all of us as ID’s or E-Learning professionals, a vast wealth of untapped knowledge and experience is the first step in harnessing some of the problem-solving and insightful capability of our friends, our peers, our “followers”  & in some cases our mentors.

Themes Relevant to me:

• Informal Learning increasing; Formal Learning Decreasing
• Social Media contributes to Informal Learning
• Many Social Media tools help facilitate informal learning
• The intelligence and wisdom of the collective is better than that of a single “expert”
• Organizational fears of time-wasting and security are predominantly unfounded.
• Tapping into users existing social networks has inherent value.
• ADDIE has become, how can I say this nicely, a bit dated. RE: #LRNCHAT

The People

I wanted to dedicate a post to those people that made DevLearn an enlightening, encouraging and sometimes very entertaining event.

Mark Oehlert @moehlert – Social Media guru and fellow Jelly of the Month Club Member

Brent Schlenker @bschlenker – E-Learning Guild’s Premier Event Coordinator

Tim Martin – @tim_m_martin – He’s “Really” from Chicago, whereas I am just from the ‘burbs

Korleen Olbrish @koreenolbrish – Gave Mark a break one day and brought him lunch. Gave great insight into Social Media and popularly quoted with the idea of using Social Media to “personalize” an individual adding greater context to their posts/tweets.

Clark Quinn @quinnovator & Jay Cross @jaycross both gave a very unique presentation on becoming the Chief Meta Learning Officer for your organization and actually provided some necessary pre-text for a lot of what I encountered throughout the conference.

Aaron Silver @mrch0mp3rs – Met briefly during one of the Social Bootcamp sessions as he and Koreen helped out Mark. Provided some insight into practical Social Media uses and is also a Chicago guy.

RJ Jacquez @rjacquez  Adobe Technical Communications/Captivate Evangelist. Still getting great info about captivate and the e-learning suite from him and his tweets and blog.

Neil Lasher @neillasher Trainer 1 – Neil’s reputation preceded him, in a good way. If you’ve been doing this for while and don’t at least know Neil’s name, you’re doing it wrong!

Mark Chrisman @badsquare Met Mark briefly at a room party @ DevLearn and knew he, like me worked in health care in Seattle I think….I don’t work in Seattle, I work in health care..I digress… Have enjoyed his tweets since DevLearn though as they have been chock full of good info.

There’s more, but I have a real Job to do now.

I’ve been doing E-Learning for a little while now. I have my set of idiosyncrasies; that for better or worse, allow me to be seen as an asset to the organizations that I work for. My primary job function consists of a lot of a little…or maybe that’s a little of a lot.

• I administrate the LMS
• I work with SME’s to develop online learning
• I do web development for project teams and Organizational Development specifically
• I do some database work although I mostly muddle my way through that
• I do Flash Development to enhance all of the above.
• I am a creative at heart and developer by necessity so I’m always looking for ways to make things more aesthetically pleasing as well.

I do have some background in IA so I try to apply those principles when I can. I occasionally teach a class the “old-fashioned” way by getting my ass in front of a group of people and utilizing whatever techniques I have learned and/or can steal to engage my folks in the content that I am teaching as well.

As the saying goes:

“Jack of all trades master of none.”

I like to think of myself as more of a “renaissance man” but then again, I’ve been known to have narcissistic tendencies so there ya go…

Anyway, I’m gonna really give this the ‘ol college try this time.