Not much happening, too little notice to encourage people to join Twinity online. LifeBytes is slowly winding down. More next week.

Also Twinity has been a bit wobbly today. You can now teleport direct to Humboldt University but it may not all be there.



Couple of short videos

more vanishing

finding Humboldt

This is the last weekend for LifeBytes, web resource in Exeter. There are places to eat that also have web access but it seems the era of the dedicated web retailer is coming to an end. Maybe it means that mobile devices are now good enough.

For me the downside includes probably not visiting Twinity for a while. At home my PC is full of junk and Twinity fails to install. Also the bandwidth is not that good. At LifeBytes they delete almost everything quite often and a new download of Twinity usually works ok.

So here are some stills with the essential point for the moment. I may have time to save some more in the next few days. If it was a video the plot outline would be to start with some tech vision in the Sony Centre



Then teleport to Brandenburger Tor, then follow Unter den Linden to the square near entrance to Humboldt. Discussion around the learning claims of the technology. Whatever energy survives spreads to cafes and apartments at the end of the day.







Basic structure of conversation much the same in other locations. The characters from Second Life are gradually getting spaces on Twinity.

Video from the spaces-

Kings Cross

Morecombe

Earl's Court

The various blogs could fit together better. I am trying to do another version of "Hello Spiders" and the "The Going of the Book" as if there is some sequence of events. The theory comes mostly from attempts to study at Lancaster. The problem is how to pass go. I still get the impression that "quality" is not part of the Management Learning scope. Maybe it is an HR thing as if operations are something else. Not sure at all. Maybe "critique" has to be part of the academic mix and quality is an easy target. They have to be polite about HR some of the time. Anyway I may be wrong in my memory and this impression could be tested again.

The current situation is that ePUB is doing well. I got into this looking at the print tradition and how it could morph. Today it is announced that the Google scan archive will be in ePUB format for the Sony Reader. When will Chris Argyris turn up? Some of his stuff was written a long time ago. Anyway back on topic, this is consumer electronics and the global cloud. Whether or not the ePUB design intention meets the criteria for conditions for dialogue, it exists and is widely available. It may be easier to look back on how learning has happened within a quality system. That is if you look at the history so far on e-books as a series of problems in production and customer objections. Starting out to ask academics who know about management learning to comment on a quality related design would have been more of a problem.

I still think ISO 9000 is a part of the quality scene and should be considered. In the UK the number of certificates continues to decline but on the planet, growth continues. So the explanation that people in the UK are now more sophisticated and do not need to bother may be only partial. It could be part of a decline in manufacturing or management.

So here are a couple of statements that could be checked out during study and also help to pass go.

1a ISO 9000 can be part of an effective quality system

1b Learning is part of what happens while people engage with ideas about quality

On the drupa2008 and IPEX2002 blogs I am obviously out of time sequence. Issues just keep repeating. The Job Definition Format is getting less attention over time. "Web-to-Print" turns up more often in Printweek. So JDF and XML is in the background. Meanwhile ePUB offers an XML friendly route from author to reader fairly quickly so XML will continue as a publishing topic. The discussion around PDF and portable job tickets is urgent or else an explanation of why the hard copy aspect of publishing may decline as a proportion. I still find Adobe confusing in their insistence of Flash as a direction but this could be because they do not have confidence in the classic Adobe products to offer much margin.

2. The project around Postscript and PDF has reached a stage when the technology is widely understood and available. Because of standardisation and a range of current suppliers, developers look at other areas for innovation opportunities.

Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine is moving on ahead. He seems to assume that print is on the way out, though I think it will continue for some time.

Then he links to Hacking Education. This is still a bit sketchy at the moment.

Adult Education

Over the weekend I realised that e-books are making progress. there is enough momentum for a definite culture around them. What I wrote in blogs for IPEX and drupa is still making sense so I am starting to think about the ways this could influence approaches to knowlwdge and content. The Kindle format is carefully controlled and Amazon will try to keep pricing close to print books as requested by publishers. The ePUB format is based on open standards and seems better suited to open content. Adobe can arrange Digital Rights Management but anything on the web could be moved to XHTML fairly readily and the method for creating ePUB is better understood over time. InfoGrid Pacific have a route from Open Office though the business model is a bit vague at the moment. They are open to offers as to how they could be paid.

Previously I thought about knowledge as "official" and "grassroots" as in "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger. So the collective view from people on the web is one sort of knowledge, the book suggested by a librarian is another. There are modes of knowledge production described by Gibbons and others. Some conferences distinguish academics and practitioners. I don't fully understand the "critique" theory, but part of the reason Chris Grey is "Against Learning" seems to be the positioning of official education.

There may be a new meaning for "adult education" around knowledge available through Amazon and/or as ePUB. Not sure how this will work out. The academic journals are now mostly digital but this has made public access more difficult. Texts appear online as drafts or leaks for humanities and social science but this is still in flux, like much else.

Sorting out photos from Learning Technologies. Story for OhmyNews should be ready over the weekend.

Found this link from Google blogsearch. Seems that "informal learning" is part of the main conference.

This is a draft for a story around Learning Technologies for OhmyNews.
Comment welcome

--------------------

Adobe presents a case study in e-learning
"We always had confidence in the leadership" says researcher


draft story for OhmyNews around Learning Technologies -28/9 Jan


Next Generation Learning @ Work - driving business benefits

probably this will cover leadership, change managements, organisations.

Adobe have a stand. Last year the word Acrobat was visible but the messages were all about Flash, almost nothing on PDF or Postscript.

So a possible story could look at Adobe as an example of an organisation. How has it learnt over time? What is going on at the moment?

My guess is that the "towards maturity" research will not show top management as a major pressure for e-learning. Mostly it seems to be something that slips in through HR or somewhere over time and eventually is accepted. To be checked in conversation on the day.

Adobe is different. They are interested in software. Started in Xerox Parc a long time ago. Warnock and Geschke still seem to share being Chair. What is the influence of this?

Geschke to Knowledge at Wharton-

[running a company] can feel pretty lonely. Who do you talk to? That's one thing John and I have always tried to do for Bruce and Shantanu. We don't keep an office at Adobe. I don't want to be perceived as looking over their shoulders. [But] we make ourselves available anytime that they want to sit down. We usually have breakfast once a month with Shantanu to chat and see how things are going. If he wants to call, we'll be there immediately.

Around the time of buying Macromedia there seems to have been a shift in Adobe as if the entire Postscript / PDF project had been traded in. How would Warnock or Geschke think about this?

from same interview-

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think is the biggest challenge Adobe is facing going forward?

Geschke: Inventing the future. We'll never succeed unless we continue to open up new vistas.

I honestly believe that our technology and what's happening in the market -- where essentially all visual communication is going to the web -- is the sweetheart point in our whole envelope of products and technologies. Shame on us if we can't figure out a way to take advantage of that shift in the way the world is moving with the distribution of information.

A lot of what are there today -- the limitations of browsers and of the web imaging standards -- are things that we think we have a solution for. As they become the primary delivery mechanism, that value is going to differentiate.


So "all visual communication is moving to the web". Is print just part of visual communication?

YouTube link to Warnock on newspapers in 2007

The Chief Technology Officer is now Kevin Lynch. I cannot find through Google that he ever mentions PDF.

So there could be a major shift here. I am still interested in print and PDF and find it quite hard to communicate with Adobe. The description "paranoid" sometimes makes sense but in a formal technical sense as described by Andrew S. Grove in his book - Only the Paranoid Survive

Look out for the inflection points. Move out of declining products fast.

Adobe may be right about this but I find it hard to keep up. Academic journals for example. What will happen? There is still a lot of text there but maybe future students will just not be very interested.

Am I making this up? Recent Adobe blog entry

many of you may have heard about Acrobat.com and simply dismissed it as some kind of PDF-Mecca

so being interested in PDF as such is not very cool.

I think about the change as Adobe Classic and Adobe(FLSH). Thsi Adobe(FLSH) comes from a blog after Max that I can no longer find.

Another sign is the lack of promotion for MARS or PDFXML. No blog updates since September and there is no other promotion.

Back to organisation theory.

At BETT I found a stand for the LSIS hidden away on a balcony. They merge quality and learning, though this ssems a slow process. I have worked on quality systems but find it hard to get people who study learning to be much interested. Maybe the academic theory relating to NSIS will be written down later once the practice is sorted out. There is a model here that includes leadership but I still have doubts about how many case studies it would fit.

In my story for OhmyNews about BETT I did not go into much detail about Adobe or Microsoft. I think both are looking too far into the future. Silverlight may serve a purpose later, but currently there is still interest in text and flat graphics. I did get some email response to earlier drafts so this may be included in a story about Learning Technologies. See below.

I think the ePUB format is interesting. There may be signs of devices at the show. However Adobe are not doing much to promote the Digital Editions Reader. Can't remember any sign of it last year. It turns everything into Flash.

Story will be based on what is actually displayed on the Adobe stand. The implication could be stark for how comprehensive an organisational change can be.

Questions

Will the price of Postscript and PDF products be reduced? Acrobat Elements any time soon?

Is there a business plan for Adobe Cloud?


Below, from replies to previous draft ahead of BETT

---------------------------------

while EPUB is fast on its way to becoming the standard for reflow-centric eBooks, I think it's a bit mixing apples and oranges (ok, chalk and cheese to you) to compare with PDFXML (Mars) or XML Paper. EPUB is designed to represent in a single file the structure of a publication, but not a particular final-form paginated appearance. Speaking only for myself, I think the reason that these other formats are not taking off (in the case of Mars, I will add "yet") is that PDF has ably occupied the fixed-format document standard, and now is a fully open ISO-level standard, which does not leave a compelling reason for another format standard to be broadly adopted to do the same job. While there's some advantages to XML-friendiness over the binary PDF format, and a more modular approach to packaging (ZIP vs. COS), on the flip side there's 1000s of software programs and libraries that grok today's PDF. EPUB is not a competitor since it is at a different level of abstraction (with with the addition of page-templates over time there will be EPUB publications with a reasonably polished preferred presentation, the intention is that different devices may still render quite differently, and I doubt that print/prepress workflows will ever work with EPUB, otherr than as an input format a la MS Word, RTF, etc.).

Our Digital Publishing team has a blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions, and there's an Adobe DevNet digital publishing technology center that focused on EPUB best practices etc. at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/ . My own rather non-technical blog is at http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy.

Cheers,

--Bill

Bill McCoy
General Manager, Digital Publishing Business
Adobe Systems Incorporated
bmccoy@adobe.com

-------------------------------

Will: I do not think that Adobe views the business of communicating information broken into two distinct camps as you have portrayed. I think we view it as a spectrum with "old" printing at one end and "new" rich internet applications at the other.

Most of our Creative Suite (CS) component products are used throughout the information communication industry. We estimate that 85% of all web pages have had some of the content processed in Photoshop. And Photoshop, well even the complete CS, is the primary tool for traditional publishing/printing.

Although in enterprise there was a split at first between the web team and the traditional print marketing materials team, nearly all companies have realized that there is so much in common that they have brought those teams back into one management structure. Companies are interested in getting their message out using whatever means is the most effective. And the most effective way for them to do that is to have people responsible for the objective and free to use whatever technology and tools work the best. Adobe serves that more general audience.

Just my thoughts,
Jim King
PDF Platform Architect

OhmyNews have now published my story on BETT.

More on this later.

I have sent in a story about BETT for OhmyNews. Not edited yet.

BETT has changed shape I think. The Grand Hall Entrance is still the main way in but the immediate space has lost a lot of buzz without the BBC or Apple. BBC is still there on the Pearson stand but nothing like the scale of previously. Jam was cancelled after pressure from competition. Maybe this is the reason for the absence. Apple have cut back on shows as the mobile devices are aimed at a consumer level. They are more likley to open another shop than turn up at Olympia. A group of Apple dealers are in the smaller National Hall so the Mac fans head there.

The Netbook or whatever you want to call it is getting a lot of interest but some of the new companies cannot book into the smae area as Dell and Microsoft so some are right at the back behind the cafe- Asus, Acer, Sony and Intel.

So the overall effect is that most of the sp[acehas the same sort of attention. Open Source is hidden away though on the balconies - Moodle N2 near the Leadership Lounge and the Open Source Precinct SW104 in the software area.

The UK print journalists still have enough influence to prevent BBC projects such as local video and educational resources. It remains to be seen what happens next. Long ago Greg Dyke spoke of an open archive of video for the public. What happened?

Another item on open source. If Portugal, why not UK?

I'm at the easyInternetcafe on Kensingtom High Street, checking Google News ahead of BETT. Top link is about netbooks. I think that is still the right word.

Eugene Hsu is the director of the education ecosystem enabling team at Intel. So far I did not realise Intel was there.

It seems to me that Linux has a chance for this kind of situation. Yesterday the Guardian had an insert from Dell with one offer with Ubuntu. The price was only just a bit more than a Sony Reader. Sony is at BETT but no news yeton the Reader being displayed. If book publishing is goind digital there could be more evidence in school books.

Generation Zed approaches autonomy
Educational institutions respond to learner choice


draft notes for a possible take on BETT

depends on finding enough quotes and evidence to convince OhmyNews editors that there is a genuine story here

Z comes after X and Y, at least that bit is ok with the fact checkers

from the Wikipedia

Net Generation

In his book Growing Up Digital, business strategist and psychologist Don Tapscott coined the term "Net Generation" for the group, pointing at the significance of being the first to grow up immersed in a digital--and Internet--driven world. Accordingly, some say the final year of Gen Y is between 1993 and 2000 because they would be the youngest people to appreciate the changes of the Digital Revolution

(citation needed, adds the Wikipedia)

So if z starts in 1993, some of these people could be aged 15.
Sometimes students make choices about the courses they sign up for. This gets attention from the people who plan budgets. So some of the interest at BETT ( and in how universities are presented to potential students) follows the views of generations y,z.


-------------

"autonomy" was a central concept in research by Taylor Nelson for the IT Economic Development Council in 1987. They predicted that the "Inner Directed Group" could reach 55% of the UK population by 2010. So what happened?

----------------


Learning Zone, Alexanderplatz, Lancaster

---------------------------------

Theory on Networked Learning. Has it changed since 2002? Can it be related to practice? Has it been explained in language that is easy to understand? Where could anyone find out more about it?

Some of these ideas are from the 1960s or earlier. May still relate to conversation at BETT.

BETT background

Long ago there used to be general purpose computer shows. In the UK these were often at Olympia. Part of the attraction of BETT is to recover some memories of Olympia at capacity with computer conversation. My friend Gary may remember the names of the previous events so more on this later, after Thursday or Friday, possible days to meet up.

In the USA the show was called COMDEX but is now about Consumer Electronics or else only one survived. From the UK we only get the search results anyway but it seems that consumer electronics set the pace.

Slightly off topic- Last time I was at Lancaster University I had hoped to check out Waterstones and ask about the Sony Reader, implications for literary culture, resource planning for teaching and learning etc. But it turned out that the Sony Reader was only in stock at the Waterstones in central Lancaster. The traditional university has deep links with the print industry so it is slightly surprising that the latest publishing technology is not launched from campus. But maybe the reasoning around this will become clearer.

Heading back on topic but cannot find the blog from around the time of Adobe MAX when there was discussion about Adobe changing their stock symbol to "FLSH" in the same way Sun changed to "JAVA". I like this idea as it clarifies a change and leaves Adobe Classic as a way to describe what I am more familiar with. Relevant to BETT Adobe(FLSH) covers video on mobiles, animated websites and other stuff that students use at home or when moving about while Adobe Classic covers books, academic journals, basic word processing as most schools require.

I don't mind watching video but it is the Adobe Classic area where I think there could be some immediate progress. As Adobe have lost interest in this sort of thing there may be lower prices for software quite soon. Open source alternatives are pretty good for document creation. Open Office has the features most people use. Also I think the people who write open source code are as likley as anyone to make the connections between open document formats, XML, and ePUB or other formats for e-books and mobile devices. Vista is still not established despite the large Microsoft stand at BETT. So the XML paper spec is not really doing that well. Adobe do almost nothing to promote PDFXML so my impression is that the current PDF format is likely to continue. It turns out that the PDFXML Inspector works just as well with ePUB so ePUB has potential as a way to publish from XML-friendly sources.

The ePUB format has some wide support. The Sony Reader and the Digital Editions Reader from Adobe. However it is not that easy to create. Should be possible from InDesign but it is hard to find much about this. Will Microsoft offer "export as ePUB" in Word? More likely they are worried about Silverlight and video. A couple of years ago they announced Grava and the news link is still from 2007. Probably they will concentrate in this area, not just text.

I have discovered the eCub EPUB creator by doing some searches between paragraphs. See the blog from Julian Smart. Not tested yet. On the TeleRead blog David Rothman has invited the open source community to develop an ePubWriter as part of Open Office. At the moment I am not sure how this will work out but open source and XML have grown together so far.

XML is also the basis for JDF, a way to describe print requirements. the printing industry has yet to find a way of promoting this to print buyers. But it may be that a combination of PDF and JDF is the only way for print media to respond to e-books for speed and cost.

BETT is not advertised as a show about publishing and e-books. But the issues will turn up somewhere.

Open source promotion at BETT will be in the gallery. Moodle for knowledge management or document storage or whatever term fits best is at N2 with Synergy Learning. Open Forum Europe is at SW104 with links to most open source software.

I will be at Online Information this week.

Posts mostly to the Exetreme blog as this is on my card.

Cards by Moo by the way. Last year this is mostly what I was asked about.

The ISO Survey for 2007 shows decline in the USA and UK for ISO 9000 certificates. I have done a story on this for OhmyNews.

My impression is that quality theory is moving with manufacturing outside where the business schools have been. There will be another story for OhmyNews next year but meanwhile there is plenty of scope for speculation and anecdotes. The survey is based on info from a year ago so things may be different already.

Financial Times at Online Information

So far as I can tell the Financial Times will not be at Online Information as they were last year.

All will become clear at the real event but meanwhile please add a comment if I have looked in the wrong place or they will appear with another name.

My impression is that the Web is getting more viable but particular information offers may not be. No other newspaper appears at Online Information. Would they gain much in cover price sales? Is advertising the main prospect for newsprint?

Last year I had a discussion about the Chinese version of the FT, almost entirely a Web operation. Limited print but mostly to promote the Web. Hope to find out more about this.

ePUB at Online Information

At the publishing panel on Thursday I hope to find out more about the ePUB format. There is more interest in e-books this year with a conference at the start. The ePUB format is supported in both the Adobe Digital Editions Reader and the Sony Reader. there could be more announcements from publishers with new titles.

So far there has not been much publicity for the open source aspect. There could be more public domain or creative commons content. Creating an ePUB file is not impossible but could be easier. Maybe the bookselling industry is unlikley to promote the fact that there is so much free stuff available but the cost of a Sony Reader is a bit of a block for many people so the whole cost structure needs to be explained.

Adobe seem to prefer ePUB to PDF for reflow on small screens. Also Stanza have a reader for the iPhone. Some numbers suggest that the downloads of Stanza compare with sales for e-reader hardware. So do people read texts on an iPhone for any length of time?

Feedbooks can create ePUB from a blog or RSS feed. So is this a book?

There will be probably be more on this in a story for OhmyNews after Online Information. Any text, links etc. welcome.

Thinking about things cloud. The Microsoft move gives it some momentum. Strated to look for cloud managemnt but can only find this blog.

I added a commentInformation show I will try to find out other ways to assess how much knowledge is available for management practitioners outside of paid journals.

I have been checking out some social networking sites. Started with Linked In as I am getting more messages there recently. Found the Deming Forum India though it has moved to Multiply as far as I can tell or at least has more content there.

Then I found a link to Orkut where the QUALITY MANAGEMENT group has a large number of members. There is a Deming group as well. The discussion seems to me to be based in practice.

I have started a topic as I have recently started to think that the connection between learning and quality is obvious. Still not sure how to present this to academics however. Text as below. Comment welcome here or on Orkut.

Learning with quality systems, is this obvious?

I have just found this group so the topic may have come up previously.

Is it obvious that learning is a large part of what happens through people in a quality system?

I have tried to get interest in quality theory from people who study management learning. In the UK the people who know about learning tend to have a critical opinion about quality. Perhaps their experience in UK universities has not been pleasant. See "Making Quality Critical" by Wilkinson and Wilmott for example.

So far there has not been much UK academic interest in relating quality theory to researching learning organisations. Peter Senge recognises the connections, see his mentions for Dr Deming in the update for The Fifth Discipline.

My guess is that for most practitioners the links between learning and quality are obvious. Maybe academics just have to be organised in disciplines. Maybe it is just an issue in the UK.