These are fundamental, inspirational, prescient, important documents and presentations. All free on the web. Amazing! Seminal Video is at the bottom of this page. Please suggest what else should appear here.

Visual History of Corporate Education

Ever Tried to Hit a Moving Target at Twenty Paces with a Colt .45? by Charles Jennings. 2010. Don’t take a knife to a gunfight. The message here is that CLOs and their L&D teams need to get over trying to ‘prove’ their value, and focus instead on keeping their customers satisfied. The value of L&D will be determined by its stakeholders and customers, not by L&D itself. In any transaction or service the seller may set the price, but it’s always the customer who determined the value. L&D services are no exception to this rule.

The State of Learning in the Workplace Today by Jane Hart. 2010. Training/L&D departments have been struggling for some time to understand how informal learning  fits into their view of the world which revolves around creating and managing formal learning courses, and too how social media could be best used in this context   Consequently, many L&D departments are drifting into a 4th stage of workplace learning- one which is still primarily about delivering formal training – but now which tries to include – almost force-fit -  both informal  and social approaches within it.

State of the Internet Operating System by Tim O’Reilly. 2010. Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?

Where Social Learning Thrives. by Marcia Conner and Steve LeBlanc. 2010. Social learning is not just the technology of social media, although it makes use of it. It is not merely the ability to express yourself in a group of opt-in friends. Social learning combines social media tools with a shift in the corporate culture, a shift that encourages ongoing knowledge transfer and connects people in ways that make learning a joy. Social learning thrives in a culture of service and wonder. It is inspired by leaders, enabled by technology and ignited by opportunities that have only recently unfolded.

The Story-Centered Curriculum by Roger Schank. 2007. In high school, this state of affairs is even stranger. In the “subject-centered” curriculum model in place at most schools, students move from subject to subject, spending 45 minutes a day at each. The subjects they are taught were decided upon by a curriculum committee in 1892 who were certainly not interested in, nor capable of, imagining the world we live in today. The school experience they created in no way mirrors what student lives will be like after graduation, nor does it take into account any modern theory of how students learn best. The experience is passive, fragmented, unmotivated, and generally dull. And, not surprisingly, it usually does not work. Drop out rates in high school are astoundingly high.

New Technology: the Threat to our Corporate Information by Norman Lamont. 2010. Imaging the worst.

Classics

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. (Full text). Chris Locke, Doc Searles, David Weinberger, Rick Levine. The most important book written in the last half of the 20th century. “The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.” “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” Seth Godin: “If you don’t think you need this book to better understand your market, that’s your second mistake!”

Knowing Knowledge. George Siemens. A profound explanation of knowledge in a fast-paced, complex, ever-changing, networked world. This is essence. It’s a new ball game.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar Eric Raymond. Why and how open source works. Also see The Jargon File.

Deschooling Society. Ivan Illich. “Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value…. In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery.”

What is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly. “Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core.”

The Underground History of American Education. John Taylor Gatto.The Silent Spring of American education.

Out of Control, The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World . Kevin Kelly. “The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.”"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.”"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.” Also New Rules for the New Economy. “The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade.”"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment.”"To prosper, feed the web first.” Also, read We are the Web.

As We May Think. (1945) Vannevar Bush. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Seven Principles of Learning, Institute for Research on Learning. “We are all natural lifelong learners. All of us, no exceptions. Learning is a natural part of being human. We all learn what enables us to participate in the communities of practice of which we wish to be a part.”

Engines for Education. Roger Schank and Chip Clearly. Dated but feisty hyperbook by endearing bad-boy Roger back when Andersen Consulting was paying $ millions on him.

Learning in the Digital Age by John Seely Brown. “Learning is a remarkably social process. In truth, it occurs not as a response to teaching, but rather as a result of a social framework that fosters learning. To succeed in our struggle to build technology and new media to support learning, we must move far beyond the traditional view of teaching as delivery of information. Although information is a critical part of learning, it’s only one among many forces at work. It’s profoundly misleading and ineffective to separate information, theories, and principles from the activities and situations within which they are used. Knowledge is inextricably situated in the physical and social context of its acquisition and use.”

The Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. Scientific American, 2001. A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and “understand” the data that they merely display at present.

What is informal learning? by Jay Cross. 2006. People acquire the skills they use at work informally — talking, observing others, trial-and-error, and simply working with people in the know. Formal training and workshops account for only 10% to 20% of what people learn at work. Most corporations over-invest in formal training while leaving the more natural, simple ways we learn to chance.

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community by Calvin Andrus, CLO at the CIA, “The only way to meet the continuously unpredictable challenges ahead of us is to match them with continuously unpredictable changes of our own. We must transform the Intelligence Community into a community that dynamically reinvents itself by continuously learning and adapting as the national security environment changes.”

Storytelling: an old skill in a new context by Dave Snowden (1999). Why knowledge management should come from the bottom up.

Seeing Through the Net, I & II. Alan Watts explaining systems thinking to IBM in the early 70s.  Amazing audio.

How People Learn. John Bransford et alia. 16 bright people pin what’s known about learning in adults and children. Department of Education funding. Lucid, concise, the real deal. Caution: 1998.

Beyond the Command Line. Neal Stephenson.

Timeline of Learning Organization Concepts, Senge et alia

Web 2.0 Framework, Ross Dawson & eLearning 2.0, Stephen Downes

The State of Enterprise 2.0 Dion Hinchcliffe

The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On (2008), Stephen Downes

The Future of Online Learning (1998), Stephen Downes

Jane Hart’s Social Learning Handbook

Dialogue: A Proposal by David Bohm, Donald Factor, and Peter Garrett describes a method of inquiry where participants leave their egos at the door. This is subtle but powerful. Build on one another’s thinking. Deeply.

Local interest (I live in Berkeley, California)

A Simple Home (1906) Charles Keeler. “A movement toward a simpler, a truer, a more vital art expression, is now taking place in California. It is a movement which involves painters and poets, composers and sculptors, and only lacks coordination to give it a significant influence upon modern life. One of the first steps in this movement, it seems to me, should be to introduce more widely the thought of the simple home -to emphasize the gospel of the simple life, to scatter broadcast the faith in simple beauty, to make prevalent the conviction that we must live art before we can create it.” See also Bernard Maybeck: A Gothic Man in the Twentieth Century.

william carlos williams recites This is Just to Say

Videos

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