I think learning is part of normal life, not always too hard to follow.

Couple of links for this. Informal Learning is covered in a recent publication -

Formal vs. Informal Learning
Educators—whether in K12, higher education, or corporate spaces—tend to focus on formal learning that involves such things as content delivery, practice, feedback, assessment, and evaluation. However, learning is a natural human cognitive process that is constantly occurring whether someone is in a formal learning setting or not. A simple example of this is how toddlers learn to speak their native tongue. They may be “coached” by parents and family members but barring physical deficits there are no formal classes necessary to learn to speak. This type of learning has been defined as informal learning.

Make, Share, Find: Web 2.0 and Informal Learning
Phil Antonelli

2009 CU Online, University of Colorado Denver
e-book version, available at http://cuonline.ucdenver.edu/handbook/

also there has been nocomment on my post from awhile ago on the Orkut group about Quality Management-

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.

So I think learning can be considered as part of quality practice. I have been looking at previous writing and a lot of it is on how to pass go where the connection is accepted. Still a lot could follow if the learning organisation and quality were considered together more often.

More later on recording music, jazz as experiment. Examples during Experimentality included Miles Davis My Funny Valentine. Not sure what to make of it but kept thinking of this-

Still thinking about the Experimentality events. Not sure how to relate this to plan-do-etc. There was reference to the "dark side of mode 2" so this is something to work with. Have found this link to a Gryzedale blog. Apparently the forest is quite hard to find so online may work better.

Tipping a wink and a nod to Derrida's book 'Spectres of Marx' (in my hazy left-wing mind his finest work), Mr Gere asserts that Big JR haunts us still, like a spectre of the undead, reminding us that ethics is at the heart of any re-assessment of what art actually is and can do.

Posted by John Byrne on 09/11/09 at 06:25

One interesting aspect is the evidence that video interview is possible in apparently normalspace for academics. Not sure if there was special lighting. I did a lot of videoduring the two days somore on this later.

Found through Cloudworks, this Prezi makes a lot of sense. Trying out embed code



Good to find that academics behave as residents nowadays. Frankly I used to think that some of them had a brief to study the web but were not all that engaged with it.

This post could become a story for OhmyNews about the recent LCC Futures conference and the e-book. Last year there were reservations about the e-book but it was seen as inevitable. This year the e-book has definitely arrived. James Fraser spoke about book design, mostly for print, but pointed out that e-books are widely used in publishing for storing the text of several titles at once. Chris Linford claimed it was the illustrations and graphic aspects of books that gives them value and encourages sharing. Ian Lacey suggested that new e-book readers should have a screen for the cover graphic so that people knew what was being read.

There will be more about the conference in the story for Ohmynews. I am working through a video record and hope to put something on YouTube before the story is publshed. Critques of the e-book included that it when web connected it allowed too many chances to link to something else so lacked the structure of a printed book but also that the early devices are like the early web, without the social networking and the associated potential for learning.

Most of this post is about some theory that seems to relate, found through following Cloudworks and Grainne Conole on Twitter. I am beginning to understand why Cloudworks is effective and how it has been designed. Extract slightly edited from

Conole, G., & Culver, J. The design of Cloudworks: Applying social networking practice to foster the exchange of learning and teaching ideas and designs. Computers & Education (2009),

Cloudworks has been developed building on two theoretical perspectives: the notion of social objects and the concept of ‘design for sociality’. There is not space in this paper to go into detail, Conole and Culver (in press) provide a more detailed description on the theoretical underpinnings for the Cloudworks site; key aspects of this are summarised here. Engeström (2005, 2007), drawing on the work of Knorr-Cetina (see for example Knorr-Cetina in Schatzki, 2001), argues for the need to adopt an approach to social networking based on ‘object orientated sociality’ and defines the notion of social objects : The term ’social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. . .

He contends that the definition of a social network as ‘a map of the relationships between people’ is inadequate.
The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected
by a shared object.
He argues that this distinction can be used as a basis for understanding why some social networks are successful whilst others fail. Successful social networking sites built around social objects include Flickr (photos), del.icio.us (bookmarks/urls), YouTube (video clips) and Slideshare (presentations). He puts forward object-orientated sociality as a mechanism for helping us to identify new objects that might be used as the basis for developing new social networking services. He argues that in education the primary social object is content and that
the educational value is not in the content itself but the social interaction that occurs around the content.

Knorr-Cetina, K. (2001). Objectual practice. In T. Schatzki (Ed.), The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge.

Something similar could happen with books or documents through sites such a Scribd or Mendeley. Books are not as advanced as music or video but this idea of "object orientated sociality" is helpful in thinking about how books can develop online. some of the problems from the LCC conference may seem to have been addressed in a year or so.

I think the Experimentality year is launched about now but nothing yet on Twitter for #experimentality . Maybe there is another tag.

Google blogsearch finds my own querying and a blog from Sweden -
Pernilla Severson's Blog (Just another WordPress.com weblog)

I have tried a rough Google translation of another post

Now we have concerns about moving pictures in digital media
August 21, 2009 by pernillaseverson

Moving image and digital media = true in Malmo and the surrounding area. Media Meeting Malmö has long stimulated the development. Moving Media Southern Sweden is a powerful weapon in the cluster shape and Moving Media City is a future center for media development.

In the middle of all this was created MEDEA

http://www.mah.se/Forskning/varforskning/Program/MEDEA-Collaborative-Media-Initiative/

with a base at Malmo University, targeting new media and co-production - and - user-driven innovation.

I will be over two and a half years grub around in this context by exploring the knowledge of university-industry relations. A highly interesting question to trim about what happens when the manufacture innovation meets user innovation in the Moving Image in Digital Media

see http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

How do the various actors in the user-driven innovation? Crash or synergy? If users can develop a better product than the corporate product developer, where do we do? And what do the academics in the game for? Users can operate without the relationship with one than others? And how do we view the phenomenon as the weekend's Canada Social Web Camp?

http://www.swedensocialwebcamp.com/index.php/Main_Page

This is the interaction that I will not just ask or read about, but also staging and testing. See you.

If this is so #experimentality should find something else soon.

I have done a Scribd version of the reference list on Mendeley

learn9 references from Mendeley October 2009

Not sure who is using Scribd. The Mendeley audience has more academics I guess. But the Scribd approach has more access to PDF.

Getting more involved in Cloudworks



more on this later. The video explains what a cloud is so I am thinking more about the Deming cycle as something to offer.

The Book is Going , now part of the learn9 blog.

I am losing track of how often I am repeating myself. Could be confusion, may be some integration between the different blogs I write on. Mostly on the blogs for drupa and IPEX I have speculated that Adobe Classic is coming to an end and that Adobe(FLSH) is the best way to think about where they are heading. This week is even more so, so much so that I think I should have concluded something a while ago.

Adobe MAX is just in California, with web links. They have reduced most real space appearances outside the USA. I don't think they were at Print09 in Chicago, not with much of a spend anyway. The announcements so far are about using the same version of Flash on a desktop or mobile device, improved video streaming and adding more Flash to Livecycle as well as PDF. No announcements at all about PDF or EPUB and e-books. So I think the classic Adobe products around Postscript and PDF are no longer considered to be worth promoting. Hard copy books are not that interesting but a Portfolio in Acrobat now uses Flash to add video and animation to PDF.

Meanwhile I have been following the online discussion on the Networked Learning Conference website. This is the first time i have had the sense of real content being exchanged. Previous online discussion has been quite limited. There will be a series of "hot seats", weeks in which someone will undertake to respond to most questions. Last week Caroline Haythornthwaite covered "Learning in Social Networks and Networked Learning" to start things off. Chris Jones raised a question about resources such as books and how they should be shown as part of a network. They do not have the interactive features of individuals in a group. I realised this is a way to explain the changes in publishing methods through use of sites such as Scribd and Mendeley. More on this later. I need to find out more about the theory of networks. Most of the people on this site assume some prior knowledge so I am not crashing in as much as I might. I do try to push the use of graphics and YouTube links. There is now a sandpit to try this out. So far I think the site is designed mostly for text and mostly the academics are quite happy with this.

So plenty of disruption to come if Adobe have any sense at all in where they concentrate promotion. I do not think the book will vanish, just be part of a wider form of communication that is mostly based online. Later in October there will be a Futures Conference at the London College of Communication. More on this later.

By the way, if the PDF scene is not worth promoting it could mean that the margins will start to drop. There has not yet been an Elements take on Acrobat similar to the Photoshop and Premiere. Why not forget about the Flash elements and just do an affordable software for working with PDF. There are various alternatives but an Adobe approach to this could be interesting.

"Organizational Learning" is doing well as a topic on Mendeley. Hope this continues. "Learning Organizations" turned out to be quite rare and hard to evidence.

Click for slightly larger version.

The public listing looks a lot better now. I had got confused between online and desktop. moving between folders seems easier on desktop.

So the URL is

http://www.mendeley.com/collections/39798/learn9/

Future paper to combine my previous ones and other finds.

Testing out Mendeley. I have found that logging on takes me to the recent papers that other people look at.



Reasonable overlap with my interests in learning / quality. Also leads to some content, enough to think about.

Nonaka paper is linked to a file on Drive D wherever that is. Book widely available though I can't get past the section on western knowledge. Eisenhardt no link but presumably connects with paractice. "Organizational learning" from Jstor has a first page online and it seems Exeter College is connected to Jstor so I will check this out. may need to sign on for a course. Exeter UK that is. Knowledge of the Firm has a fair bit of text. Could be economics I think. Theory of the firm as I remember. Deming book is called the New Economics but this is rarely explained.

So far this is working well. From a science base to management science there is plenty of scope to relate to learning. I have added these papers to my own library but am not sure how to put them in the learn9 list.

OhmyNews has my unedited story on Mendeley. Something else may work just as well but the trend is there for references and some content to be shared online in a similar way to what is happening with music.

Assuming Mendeley continues to do well there could be interesting discussion at Online Information in December. I will try for another story in November. Academics will have to think about something that effects them so directly. Previously from journal articles there appears not to be so much disruption.

focus on the absence of demonstrable disruptive effects tends to obscure the fact that more or less unobtrusive changes occurring over time do add up to an effect that eventually may well lead beyond simple augmentation of conventional practices.

However there was atwo year gap between the conference and the publication.

Victor Keegan is writing in the Guardian (17 Sept, Opinion on page 4 of the Technology section) and adding sound interviews on AudioBoo. So the question is also what happens with journalism? not just academic research.



So far I have found it quite hard to add data that can be shared. My test so far

---

Citations collected using Mendeley

Experimentality and "study/check"

This post is to explain my interest in the Experimentality Research Programmes at Lancaster IAS so relates back to previously. Preparing for the Protection Science conference last year I realised that most of the references I found for Plan - Do - Check - Act came from Ishikawa. Available online is this from Cambridge Department of Engineering.

PDCA relates to experimentality and also to learning. Deming promoted "study" rather than "check". This may be a translation issue or because Shewart used "check" earlier.

The current ISO management standards all use PDCA. I think there is some resistance from UK management. Not sure about this. Deming ideas seem better implemented in Asia than in USA or UK. Quality Circles have continued in Asia though regarded as a passing fad in UK. There could be a cultural environment that allows PDCA to function. I could try to write more about this but mostly this is a question for the next few months. Link suggestions welcome.

I am still trying to find out more about the project. The website used to have a paragraph on "command and control" management. Can't find this in the new version but I have found a page from CSEC. This asks " whether a kind of continuous experimentality is coming to characterise the logic of late, 'reflexive', or 'knowing' modernity " and suggests "the experiment" is a trope that contains within itself "the ambiguous ethico-political promise - of both control and creativity - of both Weber's iron cage and Nietzsche's 'galaxies of joy'."

My concern is that the project may end up with the conclusion that there are some issues with Weber's iron cage and "experimentality" is another example of this. In the Protection Science discussion I tried to suggest that there are real problems with information security. There is some sales talk as well, but not just neo-liberal rhetoric. I mention this as a bit of time countering critique may be needed to create space. One limited aim is to understand PDCA better so it can be more useful.

Couple of links found already

Yahoo Answers on modernity

Wikipedia on Max Weber

On the IPEX 2002 blog I have listed some dates and draft stories, mostly technical, up to IPEX in 2010. Most topics can be tested in chicago next week. My guess is that digital communication will be well established and discussed during IPEX. The EPUB format for e-books could be part of pre-media workflows. XML will be a focus for Online Information / IMS in December. Printing will need the Job Definition Format (also XML) to compete on speed and integration.

Thinking about previous Online information occasions I came across David Weinberger on Youtube. His keynote "Everything is Miscellaneous" became a book though not reviewed in the UK. He is continuing to talk about the lost authority of print though video keynotes are an alternative. He welcomes online debate as if nothing much is ever final.

I am thinking of doing a paper for an academic conference. Lancaster IAS are looking at "experimentality". This is my way reintroduce ideas about quality and learning. The IAS is not restricted by disciplines. Somehow "learning" is associated with HR and quality with systems. So a fit withing the Management school is problematic.

At previous IAS conferences there have been some supporters of a critique take on quality, seeing it as neo-liberal rhetoric, an attack on academic liberty etc. etc. but this can be a creative tension.

One experiment could be to drop the attempt to find ways of working with quality theory and concentrate on using it for explanation. Introducing 'Making Quality Critical', Wilkinson and Wilmott describe the quality literature as "distinguished by a normative thrust". It is true that most books about quality are written for a management audience. But quality theory can explain why organisations fail, cease to exist. Printing and publishing could offer examples to observe over the next year. The Guardian is concerned that online income will not grow quickly enoughto replace lost sales of print. there is also an editorial problem of how to benefit from user contributions while the professional journalists continue knocking copy on the "bilious blogs". Haymarket are dealing with related issues as some magazine titles move online. Printweek will continue in print presumably, but balanced by the website. A recent story about Twitter was followed by extended online comments.

Also of interest are websites such as the Networked Learning conference and the webiste for Critical Management. Both sometimes mention Web2 but have less commenting etc. than the Printweek site for example. My impression is that the conference paper and eventual journal publication is still a priority. Other sites have a lot more draft content or versions for revison. Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine sometimes posts what looks like a book proposal. The versions of blog posts that are published in the print Guardian show the gain from comments and editing.

The description of the Experimentality project now includes a move away from "command and control" in organisations. I think this relates to Deming ideas and Plan-Do-Check/Study Act. (scroll to bottom of ISO page for a diagram). "Check2 as used by Ishikawa changed to "study2 for the USA. More detail on how words are used could emerge over the next year. Also to study, the cultural background. As if this can be easily understood.

David Hutchins repeats a quote in the September 2009 Quality World from an Ishikawa package in the '70s.

We regard each individual as the expert in his or her own job and our system is based on the idea of using collective thinking power and job knowledge of all our people to work towards making the best of our business.

Hutchins comments on this as a contrast with UK industrial relations.

More recently the ISO Survey shows Japanese support for ISO 27001, a standard on information security featuring the PDCA cycle. Some people at the IAS conference on protection regarded talk about information security as another example of neo-liberal rhetoric. But the new Learning Zone on alexanderplatz has a full section on information security. It will be interesting to see how the Learning Zone is regarded. Chris Grey has written "Against Learning", regarding the word as part of a trend with negative consequences, including changes for the position of universities. Still the Learning Zone exists and connects so some views may change.

Checking out Management Learningg I find there is an offer of free access till the end of September. Connections with practice will be reported in future posts.

IPEX blog updated with draft stories for OhmyNews. check with Print 09 in Chicago soon. similar stories in Ohmynews over the previous three years or so. Round about now the digital developments in communication will be fairly clear. So the "learning organisation" aspect covers how the changes are implemented.

The Deming SIG meets this week and also early December when I will be at the Online Information event. Maybe there can be an online connection.

The IAS in Lancaster is starting a project on Experimentality. No dates known as yet for workshops etc but I will try to link to this.

So as a diary this is not too well defined. Could be more online than the IPEX aspect.

Here is a current flier for the MA course at Lancaster on Management Learning and Leadership

MA Management Learning and Leadership leaflet

One interesting thing is that Network Learning can include Online Communication. Previously i thought Network Learning was mostly about Online Communication but maybe "blended learning" ideas are now associated with more emphasis on other forms of network.

Next course starts in October.

Twitter still seems the way to go. will789gb by the way. The main learn9.net site has been dormant for a while as i have done more blogging, got lost on Facebook etc. But the summer drift is fading away and a redesign is in order. The site changes through the Swicki in response to searches, at least the size of the words can alter over time. Recent screen shot-



This blog is still about quality but clearly ISO 27000 is a topic of interest. "Enterprise Social Software" may sound more legitimate than checking out Twitter. "Learning Organisations" still in there, quite strong if you include both spellings.

No response I can find from Lancaster Management of marketing theory or moving beyond brochureware. Maybe there are limits to Twitter. Some questions cannot be asked, but if stored away somewhere the next development may connect. My current question would be how the critique thread links in with social software. I cannot find much about this from recently. The research end of the universities has a concern with dialogue and there was a sort of design aim for where online learning could go. But the current activity online is not connected somehow. Maybe i am just missing it. I will keep checking Twitter to see what turns up.

Already I notice that trade shows have a Twitter presence so the actual dates cease to matter so much. Total Print Expo has been canceled anyway but there is a point in time mid October when I think some damage checks should happen. The Frankfurt Book Fair is about the same time and the e-book technology is relevant for print and learning. In Lancaster there is a project around experiments about to start. I hope to do something around check/study as a phase in plan - do - something - act. It may be a translation problem. In Japan, check may include study. In Exeter there are classes in conversation so I may find out more before next July. The Deming group of the CQI continues with a project on a model of sustainability. Another meeting next week. There is still a view that content has to be solid before publication. Just putting up something and waiting for suggestions is not the current style. My efforts to combine bits of blog through Twitter messages may or may not be convincing.

Some Twitter checks. BETT2010 not posting too often. Links to stuff from last year. @atwossybookclub invited to a new Graphic Novel pavilion. Sounds interesting. This feed will continue through Frankfurt presumably. Tools of Change have a Facebook page for fans. Online Information / IMS has links to downloads from previously.

Meanwhile the Critical Management website seems to be mostly about real time events. I cannot find much content or discussion online. The MEHEM event is invitation only, can't find any published stuff so far. Yes there is pressure on universities around issues of relevance. Is this really so surprising? Online Information is just a trade show but similar issues may come up. The content in journals has got less easy to access not more connected as it moves away from paper to password protected academic sites. So the discussion around learning organisations or whatever you want to call it is getting more divided into academic disciplines and what most practitioners access. Just my take, comment welcome.

The Networked Learning conference has a Facebook aspect but just to make it easier to log in. Real event in May but maybe more will happen in the meantime.