MakingBetter

Strategy. Ecosystems. Meaning.

Aaron

This Week in MakingBetter (27 January, 2014)

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Things to Think About

Your Moment of Zen

Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America with Steve Brown, a yo-yo master credited with inventing freehand yo-yo play, and Fred Kahl, Creative Director at Funny Garbage all exchanging notes on different yo-yo tricks in a passing conversation in the eclectic un-conference known as ORDcamp this last weekend
Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America with Steve Brown, a yo-yo master credited with inventing freehand yo-yo play, and Fred Kahl, Creative Director at Funny Garbage all exchanging notes on different yo-yo tricks in a passing conversation in the eclectic un-conference known as ORDcamp this last weekend, at which I learned how to solder electronics thanks to some ad hoc apprenticeship to the wise Mitch Altman

Links

  • There is an incredibly fun and cheeky chart… of movie quotes… as charts. http://bit.ly/1aBwCbW

  • Jono Bacon, author of the O’Reilly-published bible to community management “The Art of Community” (which is as open-source as the Ubuntu community he manages) had a brilliant and spot-on blog post this week about being accountable for the things we blog about — and how people skirt that accountability when they post stuff and delete it and/or delete comments that are frustrating (but valid). “I have a simple suggestion for those of you who run blogs: either switch your comments off entirely or always leave them on, but don’t turn them off when you don’t like the reaction from your readers. Polite and respectful debate helps us grow as human beings, helps us evolve our ideas and perspectives, and makes us better people. Let history be our record, not our edited version of history.”  http://bit.ly/1brAOWf

  • Thomas Frank of Salon had a scathing criticism of TED talks among other forms in the “media of creativity.” In this article, Frank asserts that you are not creative until the establishment says you are, which only reinforces a circular conservatism of the “creative class.” There’s a lot here and shots are fired at Steven B. Johnson, Richard Florida and even Csikszentmihalyi. Some good lines in this piece, but this stands out as something Megan and I come to terms with on every project we’ve taken: “for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices.” As I’ve said often, “Actually doing something will often get your hand slapped. It’s best to wear padded gloves.” http://bit.ly/1n4Hi5J

Liquid Swords

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The news in short: I’m officially chairing the very brand new IEEE xAPI Study Group, which is the first step towards the standardization of Experience API™ (aka “Tin Can”).

Liquid Swords: Chessboxin'
Anybody messing with the forward progression with Experience API (aka “Tin Can”) may as well enter the 36 Chambers.

Awwwww yeah. In just two short weeks, Megan & I have launched MakingBetter, an open source enterprise-ready Learning Record Store and now… moving the API from a spec into a standard. Simply, Megan and I “drop megaton bombs more faster than you blink” (Yes, I’m quoting GZA and Genius from “Liquid Swords”).

Learning Locker

Last week, Ben Betts announced that Megan and I are helping lead the community effort for the forthcoming release of Learning Locker, the open source enterprise-ready Learning Record Store. It’s our intention to expand and accelerate adoption of Experience API (“Tin Can”) in a way that we can only do by being independent. This is huge news. Ben, Megan and I are in Las Vegas this week and we are really quite excited to talk about this with anyone and everyone. We even have a meetup planned Wednesday evening, 5pm, at Cleopatra’s Barge in Caesar’s Palace. We hope you’ll join us.

As big as the news of an open source learning record store can possibly be… well, this post is about something even bigger. In the weeks and months before I left ADL, I had helped to broker conversations between ADL and standards bodies about the options available for standardization. As it turns out, anyone can take the specification as it exists and move it directly into standardization, and that is just what I’ve been asked to do by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE for short.

A New Hope

I am very proud and, at the same time, a little humbled, to be leading the IEEE xAPI Study Group. Over the next four-to-six months, this group will explore a number of questions that ultimately inform a report that answers the following question: “Is the Experience API ready for standardization?” If that answer is yes, the members of IEEE’s Learning Technology Standards Committee will vote, and if that passes… well, we kick off the official standardization effort.

This is the beginning of how Experience API moves out of ADL and the US Department of Defense and into international, industry-driven stewardship. This is how Experience API becomes a standard. It never quite happened for SCORM®, but having studied the many challenges multiple organizations had in attempting to move SCORM out of the, it was always part of the design of both the specification and the design of the strategy to make sure that one day it could find stewardship outside of ADL.

As the chair of this study group, my intention is to grow xAPI into a standard that is useful well beyond the boundaries of the learning technology industry — certainly way beyond L&D. We’ll have a kickoff webinar for this study group on February 12th, details to come shortly. If you’re interested in being part of the webinar or even to just be kept up to date with what happens over the next few months, please sign up with this form or reach out to me directly at aaron.e.silvers@ieee.org (the form goes there, too).

[contact-form to=’aaron.e.silvers@ieee.org’ subject=’From MakingBetter | LiquidSwords’][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

To be clear about how serious we are about changing the way standards work, and who they help. This should be easier than it ever was with SCORM® and, by the Gods, it will be. This should help a lot more people than who’s been served (or not served) over the last decade and more with SCORM, and you can bet your ass we will do just that.

We want to invite all hard working technologists, engineers, instructional designers, training executives, software vendors, skeptics and cynics and evangelists and fans alike to get involved with the both the Learning Locker OpenLRS effort, and/or the IEEE xAPI Study Group. We want people who care (assholes can keep to themselves). Megan and I are clearing the road for this community to grow and this standard to grow with it. We’re in a position to really do some good, and we can handle saying things that vested interests may not love. We might also say stuff that they do love. Point is, we’ll do whatever the hell we need to do with the spec, and that’s what we want for everyone.

My wish is, as it’s been, to see a world that helps people live and work more freely. Megan and I have committed our careers to such an idea and we are now, all together, able to challenge the status quo in a way that was simply not possible a year ago, let alone a decade ago. I’m stoked. Megan’s stoked. Call me if you’re not stoked.

If you’re at ASTD TechKnowledge in Las Vegas tonight, join us at the Chandelier Bar at 8pm in the Cosmopolitan, where we have a lot to celebrate and talk about. Look for the old guy with the mohawk… and Megan. We’ll be representing “from midnight to high noon” (Yes, more “Liquid Swords”). 😉

The Things People Call "Community"

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I want to distinguish the kind of communities Megan and I champion from the things people call “community.”

Community is Realizing a Shared Vision

We describe community as how people gather around a shared vision and how they collectively act to realize that vision. Others swap the word community in for “things” that may have communities around them, but I want us to be very careful to avoid confusing community with “stuff.”

Community is Not Social Media

I was among the early facilitators of #lrnchat, the brainchild Marcia Conner. Now almost seven years running, it is still on Thursdays at 8:30pm Eastern on Twitter. We had a fantastic crew and many career-long friendships were forged through the exchanges bound together by that hashtag.

#lrnchat isn’t a community. The experience itself was and is a weekly chat. Twitter as a medium provides an excellent forum for questions and answers, but the community is bigger than any answer offered through the media.

Community is Not a Cohort

Several years ago, I attended online classes from Ithaca College for their certification program in Performance Management. I was in a cohort of thirty others, all of us online; all of us communicating through a web forum. There were a great discussions in that first class. In particular we found the reading assignments and our instructor’s facilitating via the message boards particularly engaging.

We were a cohort, going through the same courses together, exposed to the same materials but, ultimately, the same canned answers to our questions. The cohort experience is not a community because courses are full of canned answers; community invites and internalizes new answers and more new questions.

Community is Not an Event

I’m a regular speaker and attendee at many conferences. I’ve done a lot of networking, built many relationships over several years filled with trade events, large and small. Megan and I have organized a few events of our own. Some events I attend (or speak at) overschedule people. Some events are structured to let participants drive.

Up to All of Us community learning visual thinking skills from Dave Gray on the hotel balcony.
Community surfaces from collaborations that sustain themselves through events

Events are important for communities, BUT EVENTS ARE NOT COMMUNITIES. 1,000+ attendee trade shows are not communities, neither are the 300-person conferences, and neither are the small, unconferences for which Megan and I are known. Community happens in the space between events. Community surfaces from the relationships and collaborations that sustain themselves through events. It can be nurtured and teased out, but it can’t be programmed.

Community is Not a Company

We all work for and/or with somebody. Many of us sign up to belong to one or more trade organizations to help us advance ourselves professionally and personally. We may know each other through meetings for any given organization, or through our employment with a given organization.

We may be employed to work together, but the level to which we with the person in the next cubicle is likely a very different thing from the work you might do with someone who shares the same pains as you in that next desk, elsewhere in the company… or completely outside of it.

By the same token, just because you signed up to participate in a forum or a mailing list, or because you subscribed to a newsletter or you paid some membership fees to belong to a professional organization or a health club… this doesn’t mean you’re participating in a community. Such affiliations are not the same thing as working with others to do something meaningful for both yourselves and for a bigger, common purpose.

“How Do I Help Communities Develop?”

If you want to really know how communities work — if you want to help people have the space and freedom to work intrinsically towards bigger shared goals (especially the goals your company might have) — and you’re coming to ASTD TechKnowledge 2014 — then you are in luck. Together, we’ll be talking about Building Communities that Make Things Better on Friday, January 24 from 9:45 – 10:45am.

I am so pumped to share what’s worked based on real experiences and case studies and, mostly, to learn from you about what’s working and what we can help make better, together.

This Week in MakingBetter (13 January, 2014)

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Things to think about…


Bam.

Every week, we plan to share what we’re up to (if there’s anything interesting), what we’re reading and learning. We may also share things that make us particularly sparkly, like this image of rocker (and significant contributor to the Experience API community) Brian Rogers playing lead guitar in a sold-out concert for the band sELF.

sELF at the Gramercy Theater in NYC, 10 January 2014
That’s Brian on the left, crushing it.

Next week, both Megan & I will be speaking at ASTD TechKnowledge 2014 (Megan’s on the conference planning committee — ooh and ahh at will). This week, we’ll be posting some background information (and, to be honest, teasers) for our presentations.

Links

…in order from easy-breezy to brain-freezy:

  • Geena Davis (actress in The Fly, olympic archer, Mensan) authored a fantastic straightforward article in The Hollywood Reporter, basically saying that if you want to make Hollywood less sexist 1) change a bunch of characters’ first names to women’s names; and 2) when you have a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” Key quote: “There are woefully few women CEOs in the world, but there can be lots of them in films. We haven’t had a woman president yet, but we have on TV… How can we fix the problem of corporate boards being so unequal without quotas? Well, they can be half women instantly, onscreen. How do we encourage a lot more girls to pursue science, technology and engineering careers? By casting droves of women in STEM jobs today in movies and on TV…If they can see it, they can be it.” http://bit.ly/1e5Ya81
  • Craig Wiggins rightly pointed out that with an array of devices and media that engages people into particular activities, the notion that someone sitting in enterprise is going to make a difference in people’s behavior with poorly designed (and highly passive) auto-advancing powerpoint slides is… well, it’s laughable. http://bit.ly/1atR78h
  • Phil Liban (CEO, Evernote) responded candidly to some very public and viral criticism of their software, committing to making the product more stable on the inside vs. adding more and more new features. Key quote: “there comes a time in a booming startup’s life when it’s important to pause for a bit and look in rather than up. When it’s more important to improve existing features than to add new ones…. Startups breathe growth and intentionally slowing down to focus on details and quality doesn’t come naturally to many of us. Despite this, the best product companies in the world have figured out how to make constant quality improvements part of their essential DNA… So will we.” Amen. http://bit.ly/1c9ghFp
  • Speaking of reworking infrastructure, Evgeny Morozov had a pretty intriguing argument about the hacker ethos, arguing that re-intstitutionalization might achieve better and more sustainable reforms than the de-institutionalization championed (but not always practiced) by the Maker Movement (and how “hacking” has a double-meaning which counters its own aims). http://nyr.kr/1eyAxD3
  • That Megan and I might support the advancement of the learning technology community while advocating killing off the technologies and practices around those technologies that have come before may seem contradictory. A primer on dialectical thought might be in order. This one may make your brain itch. http://bit.ly/1adudBD

Books We’re Reading

Megan is reading “The World Until Yesterday” by Jared Diamond. I’m reading “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

What Keeps Us Awake

Few people we know realize that coffee beans are actually the pits of certain type of cherry. The fruit of the coffee bean is pretty caffeinated, also, and makes for a lovely tea known as Cascara. In between the copious amounts of coffee we’re drinking, this Cascara from Halfwit makes for a more mild afternoon buzz