Yesterday I attended the Future of Media Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Host Ross Dawson walked us through his Future of Media Report: check out the Future of Media Lifecycle and the Seven Driving Forces Shaping Media.

Many of the panel sessions involved people in both Sydney and Mountain View. Several times, this led to existentialist moments: trying to get the people on the other side of the Pacific to get back on schedule.

Panelists discussing television were fighting a rear-guard action, claiming content is king, and never once mentioning interactivity. Personalization boiled down to letting people use their Tivos.

Robert Scoble turned up for the Future of Journalism panel, mixing it up with Phil Bronstein, Tom Abate, JD Lasica, and Brian Lott, a partner from Burson-Marsteller. Bronstein: The answer to every question is “I don’t know who is going to pay for this.” JD: Ten years ago, reporters for the Sacramento Bee were not allowed to mention the name of a website without management approval. Brian: Journalists have been taught they own the story. Tom Abate, quoting Mark Twain on the advent of the telegraph: A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Scoble: Old-style journalists are not keeping up; they dont’ know what’s going on. Great debate on reporter neutrality. Old reporters were not to reveal their political preferences; Scoble says right up front that he backs Obama. Which is more frank?

Scoble told me about the wonders of modern tech he’s experiencing. He was interviewing the head of Tesla, the controversial maker of the pricey all-electric sports car. They’re driving around, Scoble shooting live video with his iPhone. A viewer asked Scoble a question about the car’s brakes. Scoble relayed it on, and the driver answered it on the spot.

I pulled out my Flip videocam and asked Scoble about technology-assisted learning:

This is Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat Kasparov:

And this is a five-ton Charles Babbage Differential Engine for computing (and printing tables of) polynomials to 31-place accuracy. One of two made from the 1840s plans.

What Google practice can people in normal companies apply?  CEO Eric Schmidt suggests, via Andy McAfee:

They can learn to listen. Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.

Looking for a job, working too hard, and doing deals in the late ’40s.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Celebrating another year of getting wiser.

Here’s a copy of Emergence, Chapter 4 of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance.

Excerpts:

Many a knowledge worker will tell you, “I love to learn but I hate to be trained.” Learning is in keeping with the democratization of the workplace spawned by the network revolution. Decision-making is passing from the manager to the worker, and part of the deal is learning crowding out training.

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. As training converges with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and the empowerment of individuals, it morphs into emergent learning.

People who already know the lay of the land don’t want a curriculum. That’s someone else’s opinion of what they need to know. It undoubtedly contains lots of things they either already know or have no interest in finding out. They prefer to cherry-pick what they need in the easiest way available to them.

Courses are dead. Who’s got the time? Courses are almost always separate from work. That goes against the trend of integrating learning and work. Hence, learning from performance support fits better with today’s workplace.

Training program? This is the same as courses, except often more time robbed from work. Since most learning is social, wouldn’t it be more effective to put workers in touch with others, so they can learn from one another?

A busy person detests being told to make time for something to convenience someone else. Self-service learning is more convenient and more economical. I don’t go to the bank during banking hours much any more. It’s more convenient to bank in the evening. The ATM doesn’t mind what I’m wearing or whether I say hello.

Learning things in advance, “just in case,” is a losing game. Until the case arrives, the worker suspects the subject matter won’t be relevant. And when the case does come along, the knowledge acquired in advance is probably long gone. Knowledge, like muscle tissue, deteriorates when it’s not used. Learning something at the moment of need, however, couples learning and application and that has more lasting effects.

When you cannot predict the future, and emergence is unpredictable, you can’t build training programs in advance because you don’t know what you’ll need.  Formal learning takes place in classrooms; informal learning happens in learnscapes.

A learnscape is a learning ecology. As the environment of learning, a learnscape includes the workplace. In fact, a learnscape has no boundaries. No two learnscapes are alike. Your landscape may include being coached on giving effective presentations, calling the help desk for an explanation, and researching an industry on the net. My learnscape could include participating in a community of field technicians, looking things up on Google, and living in France for three months.

How would you build a learnscape for emergent learning?

Additional free chapters are here.

In January, Donald Clark, Nigel Paine, and I led discussions on informal learning and web 2.0 at Learning Technologies 2008 in London.

This is my first mash-up of conference presentations. I encourage you to steal the concept: life’s too short for  linear video. Boil it down to essence. It’s not that tough to do.

What do you think?

My hobby for the year is learning to create video as easily as taking a still photo. The concept is similar, but the editing is trickier, and the possibilities are enormous.

I’ve been carrying a Flip video recorder in my pocket for the past month. I just uploaded brief video interviews with Ross Dawson, Graham Attwell, Steve Wheeler, Nigel Paine, Mark Kramer, Rebecca Stromeyer, and Serge Ravet to YouTube. All were impromptu. In fact, I can’t call the segments by Ross and Nigel interviews; they were talking with participants at my workshops on web-enabled informal learning in Australia, and I simply pushed the red record button to capture them doing their thing.

I just bought the new Flip Video Mino off Amazon for $156.66. Not a bad price for a pocket cam that stores an hour of video. These are the product of the primitive first version Flip:

Related post: More Flip

Last night i began evaluating the results of the Learning Practices Survey. With 235 organizations taking part, the results are more a catalyst to thinking than a description of what’s really going on out there. I’ll toss out highlights here over the next few weeks, but if you want to see the whole enchilada, check out the discussion in the Internet Time Community.

While the access to the net and use of social media is way up, the overall picture is not rosy.

Overlook the seemingly positive ratio of agree:disagree. Instead, ask yourself what the 1/3 who don’t know how their work links to the organization’s goal are doing. How do you plan to delegate to them?

Mayday! Mayday! We are racing down the highway at 200 miles per hour. There’s a brick wall up ahead. This hasn’t improved in two years. More and more organizations are going haywire. Folks, isn’t it time to seek a new approach?

In 45 minutes, I’m going to walk over to the LearnX Conference here in Melbourne. I expect to hear the usual wisdom: “We need to think out of the box.”

I don’t agree. Out-of-the-box thinking is no longer sufficient. What I plan to emphasize in my closing keynote tomorrow, and go to work on in next week’s workshops, in Melbourne and Sydney is this:

It’s time for a whole new box.

Australia presentations & handouts

Last month I bought a Flip videocam. About the size of a pack of ultra-long cigarettes, this minimalist gizmo records half an hour of video to flash memory. A USB connector flips out from its side to download video to PC or Mac. In Salzburg last week, I recorded numerous interviews with the Flip.

I suspect one reason more people don’t have Flips is that it’s hard to believe such a cool device costs only a little more than a hundred dollars. The Flip is so easy to use, even a child can use it. In fact, in a Berlin restaurant yesterday, Rebecca Stromeyer’s young son interviewed us with my Flip.

This morning I read an announcement in Walt Mossberg’s column that a new, sexier Flip is coming to market. I can hardly wait to get one.

More than 200 of you have responded to our three-minute Informal and Web 2.0 Learning Practices Survey. A third of the responses are from Europe, another third from North America, a quarter from Australia, and a sixth from Asia.

We appear to be in the midst of a sea change. More than 90% report that most of their people have net access from the desktop. Two-thirds can view YouTube. A majority report that customers can learn about their services online. However, only a quarter agree that their people are growing and learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of the business.

We will unveil the overall results at LearnX in Melbourne this coming Friday.

We will explore the implications at my one-day workshops in Sydney and Melbourne the following week.

You can take part in the survey (and therefore receive the results) if you act now. I plan to close the door when I arrive in Melbourne on Wednesday June 11 in order to tabulate responses.