LearnTrends: The Immernet Singularity

These are my live blogged notes from Tony O’Driscoll’s LearnTrends session on The Immernet Singularity. My side comments are in italics. Update: The recording of this session (and the rest of LearnTrends) is now available.

Official description:

The Immernet Singularity: How the Immersive Internet Will Redefine Learning and Collaboration. Four technology arenas, 2D Synchronous Learning, Knowledge Sharing Spaces, Web 2.0 Tools and Virtual Worlds, are on a convergence trajectory towards an immersive web future that will redefine how we work, learn and play. This session will describe how this convergence will create a new platform upon which immediate, intuitive, interactive and immersive learning will take place.

Good attention getter–started by showing a rectangle on a dark screen & asked people what it was. Without context, we don’t really know. Then he showed the rest of the map so we could see that it was Wyoming–context matters

If content is king, context is the kingdom.

Socrates could walk into a university lecture and recognize it as a school.

Digital avatars watching digital presentations is a dumb use of virtual worlds

Crossing the chasm from knowing to doing

  • Formal –> informal
  • content –> context
  • topic –> task
  • ?? Sorry, wasn’t fast enough

Learning professionals can help others cross the chasm

Seven Scary Problems

  • Autonomous learner
  • Timing
  • Packaging
  • Performance
  • Routinization
  • Transfer
  • Value

Our packing for learning tends to be about topics, not tasks

Most performance issues in the enterprise have to do with poor processes and workflow, not lack of training/knowledge

Transfer: the problem isn’t knowledge transfer, it’s behavior. <10% transfers

0.44% of revenue is spent on learning. Increasing the efficiency of training isn’t going to be enough to give us a seat at the table

We say “we’re instructional designers, we don’t deal with autonomous learners” but they go out and use Google anyway. We focus on formal learning & productivity but ignore informal learning and performance.

  • Web 1.0 “Connect To”
  • Web 2.0 “Connect Through”
  • 3Di “Connect Within”

Web 2.0 is User Generated X–fill in the blank (content, filtering, organization, distribution, etc.)

Knowledge Management is an oxymoron–you can’t manage knowledge Very interesting seeing this perspective after Harold’s PKM presentation yesterday. Not sure I agree, but this may be a matter of terminology–he’s still talking about some of the same tasks, but with different terms. Maybe there is a better term than “manage” for riding the wave of information…

Fundamental shift from Stocks to Flows of information: you don’t stockpile information, it flows around you

School has confused us into thinking learning is about information dumps, not “tuning the network”

i-web = immernet = immersive internet

  1. 2D synchronous learning (WebEx, Elluminate, etc.)
  2. Knowledge Sharing Spaces (SharePoint, Blackboard, Yahoo Groups)
  3. Web 2.0 (knowledge discovery, blogs, wikis, tagging, RSS)
  4. Virtual Worlds

1+2 = People want networked virtual spaces that include 2D synch + knowledge sharing (1+2)

2+3 = Dynamic Knowledge Discovery

3+4 = 3D Social Networking

4+1 = 3D synchronous

1+2+3+4 = Immersive, immediate, intuitive, interactive = i-web

New value chain with information

Q&A

People still have content in their heads–how can people be the “flow” in the value chain?

Tony: yes, knowledge is in heads, but it’s about the interactions and flow and how people share the information

Q: 90-9-1 makes it tough to get Web 2.0 work started. Is it still that ratio of lurkers? How do you work around it?

A: Yes, it’s changing, but lurking was part of how Web 2.0 has evolved. When it started, it was clunky and hard. Twitter is easier than blogging. Easier tools allow more participation. Next gen doesn’t see web as passive

Learning professionals’ role is to help the enterprise & individuals deal with change

Q: How do we know what we don’t know? How do we get exposed to things we aren’t exposed to?

A: Doesn’t that question assume the current model allows us to do that? Social networks give us access to more negative info and more different opinions. Networks can give us more of that

Q: Data mining, federated search

A: “People don’t want to search; they want to find.” Given all these new tools, how do we help people make better decisions? You can still make the wrong decision based on raw info.

Q: What have you learned at Duke about bringing future managers up to speed?

A: Tries to practice what he preaches. Gets students to tag and share with cohort. Use a standardized process when working with people in different regions–cultural disconnects. They do interviews and produce videos about cultures, rated by their peers. Not traditional deliverables and vetting methods. They use virtual worlds & find it more meaningful for interaction.

Learning in 3D book–some description, but a bunch of case studies to show how learning outcomes are met

Virtual exoskeleton to travel around the world

3 thoughts on “LearnTrends: The Immernet Singularity

  1. Howard, I suspect you’re right. Tony seemed to be resisting a top-down organizational knowledge management, which isn’t what Harold is talking about at all. Harold’s PKM is the corporate version of what the education world usually calls a PLE. PKM may be an easier sell to executives, I suppose.

    Thanks for the insight!

  2. I think Harold’s PKM is very close to PLE: Personal Learning Environment, which might be even better termed CLE: collaborative learning environments. I would agree it’s mostly terminology.

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