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Microsoft’s just released Surface, a new product based upon a coffee-table size (and form factor) touchscreen which supports multiple finger gestures and will include placing devices on them (e.g. smartphones, music players) and having them become ‘available’ to share music, photos, and whatever you might imagine. At first I thought it looked cool but limited, but they showed some intriguing scenarios such as having the table be a menu and placing your cards down to pay at the end, dividing up the things ordered between the cards. It’s fairly high resolution and quite interactive.

While I’m a wee bit worried about bending over the table (with my back aching from a weekend which included carrying large landscaping bricks), I can see some interesting opportunities. They showed one person drawing, and it strikes me as a great surface for co-construction of representations. You know I like models, and having a multi-touch interface on top of an application like OmniGraffle would be great to sit over and talk with colleagues about. They talk about sharing files, but I wonder if you could bring in your own applications.

I can really easily see kids all ganging up around one, too, like they already do with the whiteboard, lego, whatever. With that device connectivity, they could take their devices out into the world, bring stuff back, share, and create projects in a more natural way. Or even share their creations (drawings, Spore creatures, genetically created pets, what have you). Then, of course, finding a way to have different surfaces in different places and have them linked, so that they could collaborate at a distance (with VoIP, and maybe their photo or something on the side for ‘telepresence’.

And board games could take on a whole new dimension. Wizard’s Chess, anyone?

Ok, I’m game to play.

I’m not much of a video person (though I do watch TV, professional obligation ;).
I seldom have the time when I’m online, and would rather have a ‘readers digest condensed ™’ version to read when I’m on the go. However, I do recognize that capturing a presentation can be appropriate for the right audience. Say, for example, when the audience is above the novice level, and when contextualization is important (this is a model that shows my beliefs about when/how to use media).

Before the eLearning Guild conference, I was pinged by Veotag, a video tagging company. They were kind enough to buy me a beer when I stopped by and asked some questions (the things I’ll do for beer…). Basically, it’s a web service where you can upload and manually tag videos so that they can be hosted and you can index in to any particular place. I know Avaltus Learning does this as well, though I believe they do it for you, and charge accordingly.

I tried viewing a sample video, in this case of Guy Kawasaki interviewing Steve Wozniak, and it worked just fine, being able to jump around wasn’t a problem, and I could see that this could be a learning solution.

However, when I went to their site, I was dismayed to see that it requires Windows to do the tagging (not for viewing, I could see Woz just fine on my Mac with Firefox). In this day and age I find it hard to justify having a solution that depends on a particular platform. Yes, the corporate world is still largely tied to Microsoft, so this likely isn’t a deal breaker for most folks. But for me, while I think there’s definitely a role for capturing video and making it navigable, I don’t think this is a solution I’m rapt over.

This month’s Learning Circuits big question is What Would You Do to Support New Managers? I’ve noticed that some create long answers to these questions, but I try to be brief. Of course, I risk people missing the nuances of my reply, but there’s only so much time in a day ;).

I remember a project we did with a client who had just this problem. They’d developed a set of exercises to assist the ‘promoted from the frontline’ managers in switching to the new role of manager. They did a good job of breaking down the tasks into small chunks, and our task was making an online version. NOT, of course, just putting them online, but revising them to achieve the objectives in the new media. Now if only I could remember what those chunks were…

This is a great example, by the way, where there’s an attitude change and major skill set development as well. The attitude change has to be one of moving from being a colleague and perhaps friend to being a respected manager. There’re a whole bunch of associated skills including comprehending business drivers, aligning and measuring performance, inspiring (versus just motivating), coaching, etc.

So what would I do to support them? Let them listen to some folks who were in the situation and learned lessons, have them explore their own views of management and compare to other views, provide them with principles and safe practice, and then scaffold that practice over time while providing them with a community for support. And I’d practice what I preach, inspiring them, coaching their performance, basically modelling the behavior I would want them to adopt.

It’s really the case of how I’d like to be developed as a manager!

Well, it was a busy time to begin with, but the time for my Dad‘s remembrance was an unexpected (although necessary and fulfilling) addition to the load. As a consequence, I’ve had my head down with little time for reflection. However, there’s been an interesting synergy between a project I’ve been doing and a framework I’ve been developing.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Verna Allee (who I mentioned earlier) on a project, and getting to know her stuff better. I’ve also been abstracting from some work with a business partner across several organizations, assisting their elearning strategy. One of the things I saw was that there was a reasonable sequence of steps to take in moving from ‘content on a screen with a quiz’ and ‘virtual classroom’ to a technology-empowered performance environment.

I decided to justify the steps by mapping the organizational and individual benefits from each step, and they reliably include broader reach and more organizational value as you move up the chain. I also believe (but have yet to map, and not sure I can or will) that the steps have to proceed in this order. Or, rather, if you adopt one of the tactics, you’ll have to retrofit the others to move up a level.

I’m willing to be wrong about that last, of course :). I’ll be talking about this at the eLearning Guild’s always excellent Annual Gathering, so maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about it further.

The day before yesterday I listened to Jay Cross give his spiel on informal learning. I’m already a fan, but apparently some people were having trouble mapping it into concrete action plans the last time he gave it, and I suspect he wasn‘t putting enough initial framing around it. It got me to thinking…

Jay was using O‘Driscoll‘s model on the relative role of formal versus informal learning, and it occurred to me that one of the ways to think about the role of informal learning is filling in the middle. For the novice, you need courses to get the learner up over some initial knowledge/skill hurdles. At the top end, you need to provide a way for experts to converse and negotiate understanding. But what are you doing for the middle?

What do I mean? Jay got Cisco to talk about how they were making videos of presentations available. I‘ve heard of a case where engineers asked a firm to record the white papers as podcasts for listening to in the car. And all that rapid elearning (read: narrated powerpoints and captured webinars) similarly qualifies.

The point being that informal learning is about putting resources out there for the folks who are beyond courses, but are not yet ready to be creating their own resources. Making these resources and making them available, and allowing ways for these learners to tap into the expert conversations (and the experts) as well as begin communicating with peers, is what you need to do.

So, are you neglecting the middle majority, or not?