Thanks.

I’ve added events from AICC, ADL, Articulate, eLearning Guild, I/ITSEC, IMS Global, the Masie Center, Questionmark, SumTotal, Training Magazine, and more. I’ll add links for the Plateau and Saba conferences when details become available (they are usually in Fall).

I also moved the calendar to a separate page to make it easier to read and navigate. The link to the new page is in the header navigation of my site as Events, as well as the first link in the opening paragraph of this post.

Happy New Year 2009.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

Recently, Dan called out that I was posting video, so I figured I better get to it. I pinged Aaron Silvers about how he converted his Spring time “Bunko Breakfast” Chicago session videos. Armed with his tips, I then went off and learned a bit about Vimeo as a nice hosting alternative, with some constraints (500MB/week upload limit).

The full video came off my flip Ultra video camera as a single 1 hour, 1.44GB file. (By the way, the camera is cheap, fast, easy and wonderfully effective for things like this— much better than the $400 Cannon ZR850 video camera I deliberately left at home. One might compare the flip to manga, as the clips will illuminate.)

I’m learning as I go, but it seems that 5 minute chunks might be the best way to post this. Here is the first segment, where Dan provides some of the backstory on the genesis of the book.

Dan Pink: Johnny Bunko Breakfast in Seattle Clip 1 from Tom King on Vimeo.

Over the next few days, I’ll upload more segments of about 5 minutes. Once I have 2-3 more uploaded, I’ll post again with a link to the Vimeo site where I will have the videos with titles and bullet point highlights for each clip.

UPDATE:I uploaded another video, perhaps with the quality setting too high. Apologies if the high bitrate makes the video hiccup for you. I’ll fall-back to the tighter encoding for future clips.

Both of the current clips and the remaining clips will be posted to the Vimeo Channel “SeattleBunko” found at:  http://www.vimeo.com/seattlebunko

I think this is important, as we could be at the cusp of a make-or-break situation for evolution (or revolution) of learning and training infrastructure. Much of the current e-learning and LMS infrastructure is grounded in the learning and training approaches of the 1990s (’80s? ’70s??). By comparison, today’s technical and learning environment is much more “read-write”, collaborative, social and nomadic– all while being more personal and individualized.

Excuse me while I meander, ramble and eventually get to the point of why it is important.

Recently, I realized I have been unwittingly (and somewhat weakly) channelling the thoughts of Dr. David Wiley regarding the isolated “read-only” static nature of LMS-centric training, by mentioning this in conversation and scattered bullet-points in presentations over the last year. I discovered this thanks to Brian Lamb, who I have never met, but who I remotely and greatly appreciate via his blog abject learning.

Brian in a passing credit mentioned that David provided a lot of meat for many of his own presentations last year, and then lead me straight to Dr. Wiley’s 2007 presentation Openness, Localization and the Future of Learning Objects. If you can’t take the time to watch/listen to the whole presentation, I’d strongly encourage you to advance the slides and time marker to the following points:

• 30:37 Engineer invasion and the next slide, Technical standards soup (Tom adds, Mea Culpa– and I’m not even an engineer)
• 15:27 Education vs Everday (a more cogent expression of some ideas I discussed at AICC in Hamburg last month)
• 13:27 Innovative in 1995 and next slide, Education v Everyday (revisited)

If that doesn’t inspire you to respond to the call for papers, perhaps it might get the attention of Dr. Wiley or Brian Lamb.

E-learning isn’t completely broken, but current specifications and infrastructure don’t match how we live, learn and work.

Interoperability specifications can’t completely fix that, but maybe, maybe, the specification efforts can be oriented to enable and facilitate more effective and more congruent approaches. Too often they seem resistant and brittle towards innovation.

I’m certain that LETSI looks forward to learning from and sharing your white paper ideas.

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink cites a great quote from Ursula K. Le Guin:

The story—from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no great societies that did not tell stories.

Stories are powerful things. I love hearing, learning from and re-telling (sharing) stories. Last October, I met Dan Bliton of Booz Allen Hamilton at Learning 2007. We’d just seen Dan Pink’s presentation and Mr. Pink (there are 2 Dan’s in this story, but “Mr. Pink” sounds so Pulp Fiction) mentioned his upcoming book on manga. Manga had been on my radar for about a year and this seemed like an interesting area, and an area of shared interest with Dan Bliton.

One thing led to another, and now Dan Bliton is going to share a presentation he’s done on on Stories, Comics, and Manga – Oh My! Making Learning Stick For Your Audience! Dan’s presentation shares insights and lessons learned in several markets and from Booze Allen Hamilton’s award-winning learning organization. A take-away job aid and web site references summarize the approaches discussed and list additional resources

The live e-seminar will be this coming Thursday, March 13, 2008 10:00 A.M. PDT (yes, daylight savings time, the USA switches this weekend) and you can register for the e-seminar for free here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=472090

As always, I’m looking forward to the presentation. Dan (Bliton) has a lot on stories and will even have a web comic embed in the live presentation. We might even riff a bit on manga and comics as catalysts for elearning storyboarding and user-contributed content.

I’m quite interested in the read-write nature of manga in Japanese culture. In fact, I’m already going to pre-order Dan Pink’s manga book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need which is due out on April 1, 2008 (no Foolin).

A shame I won’t have this in time to chime in with and ask for comments on Johnny Bunko from the other Dan. That said, the session will still be really good, and is always better with the discussion with the live audience.

The interaction, the audience and the re-telling (or the desire to re-tell) is part of what makes an event a story, and what makes the word transcend the page. With fond memories of reading The Left Hand of Darkness in my high school sci-fi literature class, I’ll close with another Le Guin quote.

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

Updates and additions include CLO Spring Symposium, Learning Systems 2008, WATS, Training Leadership Summit, and Learning Impact Summit, as well as events in the early Fall.

CEA’s take on CES Gizmodo prank: Banned!

This results from the earlier presentation-fouling pranks, Gizmodo CES horseplay reported all over the web.

Lesson learned for presenters & trainers, prepare for the juvenile– turn off IR ports/devices/remotes you don’t need or tape them over, or make sure they provide some basic security. Require pairing for BlueTooth devices, turn off the “Discoverable” setting, and so forth. Mac users should pair their infrared remote or even disable it if not used. Wired connections are preferred.

I’m almost surprised there haven’t been widely-publicized incidents with wireless mics at conferences, yet. I guess we’ll all need secured ultra-wide band wireless microphones soon.

I think we’ve all had other challenges and bad experiences with your product in the past. For me this relationship has got to end unless you can change. I ‘ll no longer budget 10 extra minutes to get into a WebEx meeting, and then be distracted for the first 15 minutes of my co-workers actual meeting as I install, cancel, uninstall, reinstall, check and change browser settings, get Java versions, then download WebEx Meeting Manager, deal with WebEx support and eventually give up on the WebEx meeting.

The recurring Java and ActiveX hassles I had with the WebEx Windows versions a few years were a recurring mild annoyance. The fact that it is 2007 and WebEx still offers only a 2003 “PowerPC“ version for Mac was the last straw. You’ve known about this for quite awhile. It’s embarrassing. You are no longer the only one scaleable and available. Have a little respect for yourself and your victims/users. You are Cisco now for heavens sake. It is not me, it is you. Yeah, sure, maybe we can still be friends.

PS: WebEx competitors, no need to get all smug and happy yet. I’m still looking for something that will exceed WebEx features and works reliably and well on Mac and Windows and Linux, with at least 2 browsers on each platform.

PPS: Besides geeks like me, a couple hundred thousand kids will get OLPC Linux machines. They’re selling USD $2 million worth of those things each day for the last few weeks with Give One, Get One. Look into getting those kids and their governments a solution. Might even be good for your business. Even Microsoft is starting to think that way about OLPC.

PPPS: The world has a couple billion mobile phones. Pretty much enough for each of us who can use one, to have two. We use them. A lot. Please figure out how to easily, centrally (?automatically) mute the call from the guy walking past the leaf blower or breathing like Darth Vader. When you’ve got that licked, see about getting at least a slide show or still shot screen sharing on 3-4 types of Smartphones– a couple million of us will be happier.
</rant>

While we’re all in a thankful and charitable mood, how about helping to stop malaria for $10?

In many developing areas a simple mosquito net can help save children’s lives by protecting them from nocturnal mosquito bites (ok, technically mosquitoes are crepusclar instead of nocturnal, but who knew that). Insecticide-resistant mosquitoes are emerging and a cheap $10 net can be quite effective at protecting vulnerable young children when they are most likely to be bitten. Malaria No More is a non-profit that helps procure and distribute such nets. I was lucky enough to be able to donate at Learning 2007 and have gone back and donated again since then.

Malaria No More – Education and Donation Information

After several years of development, MIT’s One Laptop Per Child initiative to put computers in the hands of children in developing countries has started to become a reality. And now that manufacturing has started, there’s just one week left to give an OLPC laptop to a child in a developing country, and get a matching one for yourself (or for your favorite kid). For $399, the two-for-one deal also includes a huge sweetener: a full year of T-Mobile Hotspot Wi-Fi service, a $360 value in itself (normally $29.99 per month with a 1-year contract). If you already subscribe to T-Mobile, why not take advantage of the special deal, then cancel your current plan? Throw in the $200 tax deduction for the donated laptop, and you may even come out ahead of the game. Not to mention you’ll have a great gift for a lucky kid, and do a good deed. Note that is will also be the ONLY chance that US buyers have to purchase an OLPC laptop directly.

Just remember to sign up by Monday, November 26 at LaptopGiving.org. While you’re considering it, check out Laptop Magazine’s review of the OLPC hardware, especially the 8-year-old’s viewpoint!

See the blog sidebar for sample HTML to embed the calendar, or click the link button below to view the calendar as a full page in a new tab or window.

• Adobe Panel Webinar on Solutions for Authorware Users › Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11:00AM – 1:00PM US/Pacific
• Preliminary Authorware Survey Results [PDF available at that link]

As I understand it, the panel discussion will be recorded. I will post a link to the recording area when or if it becomes available to me. The PDF with the AICC survey information has data from about 40 responses. Since last Thursday there have been about a dozen additional responses. The AICC post indicates that the survey will be open for data collection until November 16, 2007 and provides a link to access the survey.