David Delgado :: Feeds

20 free eBooks on social media

I haven't read all of the ebooks listed...but this is a useful listing of 20 free ebooks on social media. The list includes resources on podcasting, blogging, usability and related subjects. I'm not entirely convinced I like the term social media anymore. In the sense that all media (whether creation/production, transmission, reception...and even when media is treated as storage, it still aspires to be viewed) require a producer and consumer, doesn't the notion of media have an inherent social trait?

Yahoo Search Comes to the iPhone

Google has long been offering iPhone-optimized sites for most of its services, as well as a dedicated search application for the iPhone. Yahoo, however, had mostly been lagging behind with respect to dedicated iPhone offerings. Now, Yahoo has unveiled a dedicated iPhone version of its search service, which, among other things, integrates results from SearchMonkey modules and also does a good job at displaying Flickr photos or movie showtimes in the results.

One of the best features of the web application is Yahoo's Search Assist, which suggests completed search terms as you type. Also, if you are logged into Yahoo already and if you have activated any SearchMonkey extensions, those will also work in the iPhone web application.

Nothing Special

Overall, however, the Yahoo web application, while nice, can't compete with the native Google app (iTunes link) or Google's mobile sites for Safari. Just like the Yahoo web app, the native Google application also suggests search terms, but besides that, it can also display results from your contacts and it can display the actual search results as you type. The Google app also features dedicated searches for images, news, shopping, as well as a Wikipedia search, something that is missing from Yahoo's offering.

Yahoo's iPhone-optimized search does what it promises to do, but it is far from being an exciting service. If you are a dedicated Yahoo Search user, then this new site is for you, but overall, we don't think this will get any Google users to switch to Yahoo for their search.

Flickr Releases Handy Embeddable Slide Show

Yahoo's photosharing service Flickr is one of the more wonderful things on the web and today the company made a small release that a lot of people should enjoy quite a bit. There's never been a really easy way to embed a nice slide show of your photos off site, until now.

The new Flickr slide show (example below) is available for the photos on any page you're looking at, meaning you should be able to display your friends' photos, photos with a particular tag etc. We are happy. Thanks to the fabulous photographer Scott Beale for pointing to the new feature release.

The above are the latest from my personal account. I've tested it and privacy settings appear to be respected. A couple of changes that would be nice would be a link in the player to each photo's page on Flickr and the ability to turn on captions.

I've been posting to Flickr far, far more than ever before now that I've set up posting from my phone. To do that you go to the settings tab, find the post by email address, make that a contact on your phone and send it there by MMS. I've also been uploading a lot of screenshots using the wonderful Mac app Skitch. I've also got my Flickr account tied to my account at FriendFeed, which gives me more reason to post photos since I know more friends will see them.

Update: Ruby points out in comments that this service has long done a good job making Flickr's slide shows available in an iframe. That does look nice!

How about you? Tips on making good use of Flickr in general and the new embedded slideshow in particular would be great to share in comments.

12Seconds.tv Launches API, Partners With Tweetdeck, Phreadz, and Blippr

Last month we announced the launch of 12seconds.tv. 12seconds.tv is being described as the Twitter of videoblogging, where users can create a short video clip of anything for up to 12 seconds. We even challenged our readers and received some hilarious responses. The service is taking off nicely and has recently implemented a host of new features and partnered with a few great up-and-coming services and applications.

New on 12seconds.tv

Soon after their successful public launch, 12seconds.tv implemented a host of new goodies to make the service more appealing for its users. The most popular new feature is the daily challenge. The service asks users to respond to a particular challenge of the day. A new challenge appears everyday. While it's fun to participate in the challenges, users can also win rewards for their participation.

API Launch

Today the service is launching the first version of their API. To give users and developers a taste of what can be done, 12seconds.tv has partnered with a great Twitter client known as TweetDeck, another video-blogging service known as Phreadz, and micro-review site Blippr. Now you can keep up with your friend's 12seconds videos right from TweetDeck and leave your own micro video comment on Blippr reviews.

It's a Micro-world Today Folks!

The latest additions to 12seconds.tv's offerings should be well received by users and fans of the service. Quite frankly, I'm more than excited to be able to use 12seconds.tv from TweetDeck. Let us know what you think about the latest API offerings from 12seconds.tv in our comments section.

LinkedIn: A New Must-Have App For iPhone

The iPhone has been making headway in its battle to become a business-ready tool. Obviously, the addition of Microsoft Exchange support was a big step towards being considered a viable alternative to the traditional smartphones used at work, like Blackberry and Windows Mobile. However, beyond simply supporting enterprise email, the iPhone platform has a lot of potential to cater to the needs of its business users, too.

Today, we're introduced to what hopefully will continue the trend of more "serious" apps for iPhone: LinkedIn.

The new LinkedIn app for iPhone launched today in the iPhone store. The app itself is simple, but VentureBeat thinks simple is perfect. We have to agree. Business apps don't need to overly complex or feature-rich necessarily - they just need to provide you with quick and easy access to information and data.

The LinkedIn App

The app features four different sections: the main page, connections, search, and status:

• The main page of the iPhone app displays a news feed that shows updates from your LinkedIn contacts - things like whether they've updated their profile, changed positions, asked a question, added a new contact, etc.

• The "Connections" section displays your LinkedIn contacts in a way that's very much like the iPhone's built-in contact list.

• From the "Search" section, you can search for contacts by name, keyword, title, or company.

• The "Status" section allows you to update your LinkedIn status, which many people use to announce what they're working on. Others have this hooked up via Ping.fm or a similar app so it's updated with their latest tweet.

However, one of the app's best features is its ability to copy LinkedIn contacts over to the contact list on your phone itself. You can download the app from the iPhone store here.

Business Apps Rock, Too

Although a lot of the focus in the blogosphere has been on "fun" apps, like Twitter clients, games, and social networking apps from Facebook and MySpace, the iPhone is offers a lot of apps for business users, too. In the business section of the app store, there are three pages of apps that include everything from virtual rolodexes to time trackers to expense recorders and various calculators. There are even IT-focused apps like VNC clients and command prompt tools. Yet, there could be so many more apps available here.

When you think of the types of businesses there are today, you realize that there's potential for that business category to explode with apps. It could be subdivided into numerous sections focusing on the different types of business users: sales, marketing, retail, accounting, executives, HR, IT, real estate....the list could go on and on. The LinkedIn app holds universal appeal for anyone anyone who works for a living, but more importantly, we hope that, through its adoption, developers will see the potential for building iPhone apps for business as well.

Canadians Protest Harper's Draconian Copyright Bill

OK, now I never agree with Charles Moore, arguing as he does from the far right of the political spectrum (he appears in our local paper as well as the Telegraph-Journal). Yet here he is, penning something with which I am in total agreement. As he says, "Heavy-handed 'cures' like Bill C-61 enacted at the behest of industry interests almost certainly will be worse than the alleged disease in terms of stifling culture-building and technological innovation." I'll get back to vehemently disagreeing with him tomorrow. For now - welcome to the cause, Charles. Charles W. Moore, Saint John Telegraph Journal, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Canada] [Link] [Comment]

Iterasi Launches Mac Version, Scheduler

Iterasi, the dynamic bookmarking tool we told you about earlier this year, has just announced a new release that finally brings their service to the Mac. Previously, Iterasi was available on Windows machines (IE & Firefox), but Iterasi will now also work on Macs via a Firefox plugin. In addition, the much-anticipated scheduling service has also been released.

What's New

What makes Iterasi unique is that, unlike other bookmarking tools that just save a link, Iterasi captures a web page at a particular moment in time. This makes Iterasi ideal for saving pages that change over time or pages that disappear after you navigate away (like a receipt for an online purchase).

1) In today's release, Mac users can start to use Iterasi by installing the provided Firefox plugin. The plugin supports both Firefox 2 and 3 and works on OS 10.5 and up.

2) However, all Iterasi users will be excited about the new scheduler service. Like the name implies, the scheduler allows you to have Iterasi notarize a page on whatever scheduled basis you configure - either daily, weekly, or monthly. There are so many different ways to use the scheduler. The Iterasi team suggest you could use to capture retail sites with daily specials, for example. You could also use it in an investigative way to track a site that you think might be changing its messaging over time. You could even use it to track the changes on a site that doesn't offer a news feed for you to subscribe to. We're sure you can think of million ways to use the scheduler - those are just a few to get you started.

3) Another new feature launched today are "public pages." Each Iterasi user has a Public Webpage created for them called "My Public Pages" in the Iterasi viewer. As you save pages, you can mark them as private to keep them from being added to the Public Page. Anything else is saved to the Public Page where you can share it with friends who can then subscribe to it via an RSS reader or by using the provided widget.

4) One last feature made available just for Twitter users is the introduction of a short URL service. Using the domain http://sqrl.it (short for Squirrel It - since you "squirrel" away web pages with Iterasi), you can now tweet links to your Iterasi pages.

You can check out the new service in action in the video below:

What's Next 2008: Ten Predictions for the Future of Public Education

These predictions probably reflect an agenda more than they do an inference to a future state. That said, some of them might come to pass. For example, we might see the school as a services hub, providing access to a therapist, nurse, job counselor, nutritionist, and family advocate. But first we would have to accept the idea that the community provides these things. Others - such as the character development and the online manners training - reflect the authors' aspirations rather than any actual (viable) trend. And that's the problem with this list in general: it is basically a statement of what they think would be good rather than a statement of what we'll actually get. Just as well - what they think of as good frightens me a little. Jennifer Foote Sweeney, et.al., Edutopia, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Schools, Online Learning] [Link] [Comment]

LearnNB President calls for Humility

I’ve been involved in some way with LearnNB since its inception in 2003. For the most part, it’s been very much a maintenance of the status quo kind of professional/industrial association. There have been some interesting conferences but the association has produced few tangible results.

I worked as a paid contractor for LearnNB this Spring, after a long arm’s-length relationship (some of which I explained in Rx for NB Learning). The main reason I took on this contract was because of the integrity of Kathy Watt, President of LearnNB. In her latest message, Kathy addresses some real issues facing those of us in the workplace.

Think about this: professional management was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change. You may be familiar with the names of a couple of fathers of modern management theory, Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. “Oh, not us,” you may say. “Just last year the whole senior management team spent two brain-numbing days tearing apart the strategic plan with the sole purpose of renewing leadership and thus, heightening innovation within our organization.” Dr. Phil’s now well-worn question is still appropriate, “So, how’s that workin’ for ya?’

Her advice includes this - “... we need to experience some personal and professional humility, and admit that we don’t really know how to solve some of the complex challenges that we are facing.”

This is a very refreshing perspective and I hope that others take up the conversation and see what we can do when we discuss our issues openly and candidly.

Workbooks in Simulation Deployment: Friend or Foe?

I think the value of workbooks (or paper product in general) varies depending on the user. For me, the paper joins the rest of my paper in an unsorted pile next to my keyboard, afterwhich it is periodically moved to the filing cabinet, from which it is extracted once a year or so to be placed into a box. But read? Never. If it's on paper, it's lost. Clark Aldrich, Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations, August 21, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Iterasi: Is the URL Always Enough?

This is a very good idea and will be standard in browsers of the future. "Iterasi enables you to build an online archive of web pages, with each page saved - 'notarized' in Iterasi's terminology - as an exact working copy of the original:' ...text, links, images, live forms, transactions, receipts, confirmations and, of course, all of your personalized content.'" John Connell, Weblog, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Personalization] [Link] [Comment]

Edtechtalk 82

Geirge Siemens and I had another talk about our Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) slated for this fall. This time we talked about the actual mechanics of delivering the course. Stephen Downes, et.al., Ed Tech Talk, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Traditional and Online Courses, Connectivism] [Link] [Comment]

Understanding The Difference Between Price And Value; Product And Benefit

This is an important point that is routinely glossed over in the news. The price of an object is independent of its value. Rather, price reflects what people are willing to pay. This, in turn, is impacted by supply and demand. That's why (contra mainstream news reports) companies cannot simply 'pass on to the consumers' increases in their costs. Additionally, lowering costs (by, say, lowering business taxes) are not passed on to the consumer for the same reason. And it's also why you can't make the link between how much work was put into a product, or how important it is to society, and what it costs on the marketplace. This disassociation between price and value is the reason why the distribution of important goods cannot be left to purely market forces. Michael Masnick, TechDirt, August 21, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Social Media Classroom

George Siemens describes the social media classroom developed by Howard Rheingold and being used by him in a course this fall. "The software - SMC - pulls together wikis, blogs, tagging, media sharing, and other tools familiar to the read/write web crowd." George Siemens, elearnspace, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Connectivism, Push versus Pull, Web Logs] [Link] [Comment]

Creepy Treehouse Effect: Twitter & Facebook Suck When They're Required by Your Professor

As usual, it seems to me, the essential issue here is ownership. "A research exercise ... has just revealed, amazingly, that students want to be left alone. Their message to the trendy academics is: 'Get out of MySpace!'" So, what to do? "A better approach to education is the idea of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) - which [students] can invite the professor into when they feel comfortable doing so." Lila Hanft, LilaTovCocktail, August 21, 2008 [Tags: Twitter, Books, Personal Learning Environment, Research, Academia] [Link] [Comment]

11 Things Startups Should Know About Enterprise 2.0

Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very "nature of the firm". This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.

1. Subscriptions are the best revenue you can get. Subscription revenue is more recession proof than advertising and more predictable than traditional enterprise software licensing. As long as you don't mess up, you will have a low churn rate. Then your new subscriptions drive your revenue growth
2. It is much easier to get subscriptions from a business than from consumers. Sure we all love the idea of consumer subscriptions, the potential is enormous. But do this reality check. How many subscriptions do you pay for? How many current subscription costs would you love to eliminate or drastically reduce? What would your really (no, really) agree to pay for every month? We are in a serious consumer recession in the developed markets that may last a while. What was always hard, just got an awful lot harder. Selling to business is much easier, if you focus hard on the next rule.
3. The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just "keep the lights on". Only 20% goes to new stuff. I learned this in the technology nuclear winter in 2002, when a 20% cut in IT budgets meant that no (zero, nada) new projects were approved. If you can show how to reduce that 80%, you get a better shot at the 20%. That 80% market is a replacement market. You need to know what cost you are replacing. The incumbents are looking at the 20% budget as well and they have the inside track. You have to attack the 80% to make it big.
4. "Parallel replacement" is new. The old enterprise replacement market was based on capital expenditure write offs. If the client bought a $1m license fee over 5 years ago, you had a shot at selling another license fee for something "better, faster, cheaper". In the new enterprise world of SAAS and open source, upfront license fees are the exception rather than the rule. Buyers prefer to hold onto the old stuff a bit longer until they can see either an open source or SAAS alternative. Replacement is always very risky, leaving incumbents in control and startups banging outside the door in frustration. So you need to show that you can run in parallel with the existing solution for a period until you are established enough to be a viable, safe replacement. Step 1 is run in parallel, step 2 is replace. This is what Google Apps and Zoho are doing to Microsoft office (I use both Google Apps and MS Office. Even though I use Office less frequently I own a license, so why delete it? When I get a new laptop I will decide whether I need to buy Office). To play this new parallel replacement game you need to a) offer a free entry point (the Freemium strategy) so you get traction with a low cost of sale and b) you need to show one very clear new value proposition that will tap into that 20% budget for new stuff.
5. Have one simple new "blue ocean" value proposition that any business user can understand. You need this to access the 20% of budget going to new stuff. Being "cloudy" is not a value proposition, it is simple]y a way to deliver your value proposition. The incumbent can always launch their SAAS equivalent. Your free entry level just gets you through the door so that you get a chance to upsell to your subscription; free is not a value proposition. You have to show how you will do something really basic such as either a) increase revenue with a low cost of sale or, b) reduce cost on an existing process or c) create strategic sustainable advantage in measurable ways. Most likely you will do this by enabling better collaboration/communication, both within the enterprise but also, more critically, outside the firewall to the "extended enterprise". For a startup, this has to be "blue ocean", a market that has not yet been defined by the incumbents. By its very nature, this means the market size will be very hard to define and there will almost certainly not be recognized external authority that has defined the market size. Smart VC understand that Blue Ocean strategy and precise market size estimates seldom go together.
6. SaaS ++ means that Open Source is no longer a problem. Open Source has been great for buyers but it has also taken the entry level market away in most segments and that trend shows no sign of letting up. That is bad news for a startup looking to sell traditional software with a "better, faster, cheaper plus we try harder" replacement pitch. You cannot undersell Open Source. That has forced many ventures with great software and strong teams into the dead-pool. With a "SAAS ++" offering, you can use Open Source as the base, add a bit of new code and bundle it all up with hardware and service in a monthly fee. Unless buyers really want to do all that in-house, using their dwindling internal IT staff, you have a shot at it. SAAS alone however is not a barrier to entry. Anybody can replicate it. Which means (smart) VC will/should pass. You need the "++" bit as well. That is likely to be something to do with viral, communications and network effects that create a growing user base and proprietary data coming from that base. That is the "magic sauce".
7. You need to become a very good financial and data modeler. You will need some old-fashioned face to face relationship selling to get large enterprises to understand your solution, so that the "powers that be" encourage adoption and do not seek to block it. But the business will grow one subscriber at a time and users convert to subscribers one click at a time. Modeling becomes a core competency. Modeling the costs of all the SaaS components (R&D, hardware, infrastructure software, software maintenance, system and data maintenance). Modeling the cost of subscriber acquisition using SEO, SEM, social networking, conversion from free to paid and inside telephone sales in a highly efficient funnel process that delivers the right $ per subscriber. Modeling the revenue growth with multiple what if variable assumptions. Modeling the ROI for your clients at various levels of adoption.
8. Most external market size projections do not help your business plan. Forrester Research reports that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. That is not nearly granular enough for a real business plan. You are not really in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Saying "we will get 1% of the $4.6 billion Enterprise 2.0" market is totally meaningless and will simply get you shown the door in the VC office. You are in the market of solving a specific business problem, for a specific type of customer, competing against specific incumbents and startups. That is how you need to build a market size, from the bottom up. This is particularly true for "blue ocean" strategies where the market has not been defined by an incumbent. Building the real world, bottom up market size takes real hard work and detailed market knowledge. Look for a small enough market where you can get 20% and take that to 50% share and then leverage that market to get 10% in another market. Rinse and repeat. It is an old formula, but it works.
9. You need VC, they need you but there is a disconnect. Since 2000, most VC have sent any business plan with the word "enterprise" straight to the trash. With good reason. During the nuclear winter, the enterprise IT market was dead as a dodo. Then the big incumbents got into the consolidation game and it looked like you would count enterprise IT vendors on the fingers of one hand. The cost of entry was high, needing expensive sales teams upfront and the revenue was lumpy and unpredictable. Yech. Better to back a few inexpensive developers building a free service that some big vendor would buy and figure out how to monetize. That was a great game for a while. Most VC now view it as in its final innings at best. There is a shortage of buyers, no IPO market, we are in a cyclical downturn for advertising and in a major funk figuring out how social media can be funded by advertising. So VC need Enterprise 2.0. But they have missed the early winners. Very few of the current Enterprise 2.0 startups are venture backed. This is a disconnect. The early players always find it easier to bootstrap than later vendors. Today you need capital to fund the ramp-up and to build distance from competitors as the Enterprise 2.0 market moves from "below the radar" to "early hype" phase, thus dragging more entrants into every category.
10. Vertical is not the same as Horizontal. Classic Web 2.0 services such as Delicious, YouTube and Skype are geared at mass markets. Anything that is more niche has tended to be called "vertical". That is confusing. Vertical means a specific industry such as banking, healthcare or manufacturing and sub-sets of those industries. Horizontal (applying to any industry) should mean a set of common and linked features used by a specific type of person in the company (e.g. accounts payable by Finance, CRM by Sales and so on). The general rule of thumb has been for vertical ventures to be bootstrapped and eventually rolled up into larger entities. VC tend to view vertical as too limited. Horizontal on the other hand is big enough.
11. Know how to deal with secrecy, structure and control needs. Social Media is about being open, loose, unstructured, informal and fun; no ties allowed. Enterprises are about secrecy, structure and control. Ties show that you are serious and fun is for after work. The ties and fun bit is just style. But secrecy, structure and control is real. If you threaten those, many forces within the enterprise will shut you out. It will be like the red blood cells attacking the foreign virus. On the other hand, if you go along with all the secrecy, structure and control rules of the enterprise you will lose the social media benefits of extended enterprise collaboration and innovation. Many people within enterprises understand this and some of them are in a policy-making position of authority. In general, the trend is towards loose, unstructured, "emergent business networks". So "make the trend your friend", but beware of the very strong forces of opposition and deal positively with their legitimate needs.

Conclusion

What is your position in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Do you work in IT in a large Enterprise? Do you work for a large incumbent Enterprise IT vendor? Do you work for a startup that is going to change the Enterprise world? Are you writing about this rapidly emerging market? Do you have unique insights or research to share? We would love to hear from you in the comments and maybe as a Guest Author. Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

Higher Ed Growing Into BI, Data Warehousing

I wish this article had focused more on the mechanics of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing in higher education, but if you read between the lines a bit you can get the general idea, and the information about trends and process is worth looking at. It shows that the world of educational technology stretches well beyond using software to support learning. Linda L Briggs, Campus Technology, August 21, 2008 [Tags: none] [Link] [Comment]

Best Friends

With the opportunities of a SOA the business side and the IT side will become best friends.

Download whiff-of-sarcasm.comicdoc

Flow of information

Unless you enjoy being inundated, you’ve got to pull what you want from the web rather than take everything the web pushes at you. That’s what RSS is for: it enables you to subscribe to content that interests you. Google Reader is excellent for managing your subscriptions with RSS. Google Reader makes it easy to subscribe [...]

ShiftSpace

Shiftspace s an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web.

Take a look at the video:

ShiftSpace

September Big Question - Where to Work?

This question was sent to me a few weeks ago and I think it's great. The basic question is what are the best places to work. I'm sure we've all thought a bit about the different trade-offs with internal vs. external, different size/shape companies, types of industries, etc. And, I'm sure you'd love to know what other people think about this. So, this month's big questions is...

So, this month, The Big Question is...

Points to Consider:

• What should be considered such as innovative work, interesting projects, real impact, pay, life style, etc.?
  
• What types of companies make sense in different situations?
• What resources exist to help make sense of this?
• How does this differ for different roles such as Manager, Instructional Designer, Trainer and Authors?
• Does this apply in the US, UK, India, etc. equally?
• If you aren't at a "best place to work", how might you make a transition?

Alternatively, feel free to tell us what's good and bad about your current job and what you are considering and why. I'm sure that everyone will be interested in these varied perspectives.

Participating Blogs:

Once you’ve posted your answer on your blog, please report your post using the form below. Your post will be added to the list within the next 24 hours (hopefully sooner) that will appear below the entry form.

NOTE: If the forms do not appear below, please hit your browser’s refresh button. If the forms still do not appear, please use the Dear Blogmeister form which can be linked to from the top of the sidebar.

This list can also be viewed by clicking here.

We have created a del.icio.us tag for The Big Question. Please feel free to bookmark your participating post, your comment rss for your post, other web-based resources you feel relate to the June 2007 Big Question to del.icio.us using the tag

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Predictions for Learning in 2008

Happy New Year! As promised ...

My conversation with academics

Phd: I heard you think you have a great program.

Me: I do. I have this great program to develop people.

PhD: Why is it so good?

Me: Because it makes people more productive in the workplace.

PhD: So it's vocational? That's not really my thing.

Me: No, it's around leadership.

PhD.: If it is about doing anything work-related, it is by definition vocational.

Me: Well, you could use it to lead in a non-profit organization. Or a lab. Or run a university.

PhD: Well, I guess THAT wouldn't be vocational. What theories of leadership and education are you using?

Me: I can dig some up, but more importantly, I have stacks of results.

PhD: I like theories a lot more. Besides, why should I trust your results? You are a vendor.

Me: Because all of the research was done by third parties.

PhD: Sure, but the research was done by someone.

Me: Ah, yes.

PhD: And that person was no doubt proud of their results.

Me: I guess.

PhD: Well, those people were all bias towards success. Research invalid. QED.

Me: Ah, okay.

PhD: You are thinking about this all wrong. What you need is a firm foundation of theory. Either use an existing theory, or pose a question, and then find the evidence to support it or refute it.

Me: Why?

PhD: That will increase your chances of success.

Me: But I already have success!

PhD: But not repeatable success. Your type of success requires people who care about the results. Your programs require ownership.

Me: I guess...

Phd: But if you build an academic case, then the results just happen, even if no one cares. It's like physcis.

Me: Do your projects work?

PhD: Hardly ever. But that's the best part. First, it's not my fault, it's the theories'. Second, obviously, we feedback that knowledge of failure into the process, and refine our knowledge base. We end up with better theories, not just one off successes.

Me: Hmmm.

PhD: You just don't get it, do you? Where's another PhD? They get it.

Capability-Based Content

Stephen Lahanas recently started a new topic on the Learning Circuits Blog Discussion Wiki. His topic is Capability-Based Content which he describes as:

Capability based content is developed specifically with capability assimilation as its primary expectation outcome. This directly contradicts the majority of learning content developed today using traditional assessment-based outcome paradigms. Capability-based content represents both a pedagogy as well as methodology for content development.

Not only would Stephen like to discuss this topic with others on the LCB Discussion Wiki, he's looking to get some help in building out a model and examples which can be operationalized to drive the development of capability-based content.
If you're curious and/or would like to help Stephen with this project, check out the capability-based content page on the LCB Discussion Wiki.
Remember, the LCB Discussion Wiki is available to any member of the LCB community who wishes to us it to raise a topic for discussion with the community. Just create a page, add your topic and you're off and running. Please also drop me a note using the form on the FAQ page so I can help you make sure your page is formatted correctly and a notice, like this one, gets posted to LCB to let everyone know your page exists.

What groups of employees are the no-brainers to train?

I was doing some benchmarking the other day between a few different organizations. One question that was asked was, what are the "no-brainer" groups of employees to train? (And there may be a second question, what are the no-brainer topics to train, like leadership, ethics, sexual harassment, etc).

To me, the obvious groups are:

• new employees;
• high potential people;
• call center employees;
• sales people; and
• anyone who has to have certification or compliance;
• anyone who has to demonstrate a mastery level (like a pilot, although this differs from organization to organization).

What are other obvious classes of people that should be part of a formal learning program?