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I’ve been a tremendous fan of Flipcams, the $150 pocket-sized video cameras with an interface even a first grader can figure out. The one downside was sound. Audio is more important than picture when shooting video. Flipcams have no jack for an external microphone.

Charles Jennings showed me an awesome Kodak mini-cam that solves the problem. Check the specs of the $180 KODAK Zi8 Pocket Video Camera:

• Capture HD quality 1080p video with 16:9 aspect ratio
• Plenty of room for more—record up to 10 hours of HD video with the expandable SD/SDHC card slot that can hold up to 32 GB[1]
• Make audio awesome—the external microphone jack lets you record in stereo
• Get a new perspective—take amazing 5 MP 16:9 widescreen HD still pictures

File formats

1. video: H.264 (MOV), AAC LC
2. still: JPEG

Capture modes

1. 1080p (1920 × 1080, 30 fps)
2. 720p/60 fps (1280 × 720, 60 fps)
3. 720p (1280 × 720, 30 fps)
4. WVGA (848 × 480, 30 fps)
5. Still (5.3 MP, 16:9 widescreen, interpolated)

Anyone want to buy a couple of used Flipcams?

If you want some heady reading for the weekend, this post on cognition and representation is the ticket. It offers a good development of the physical symbol system hypothesis and "the attempt to identify the code, or the codes, in which knowledge is supposedly represented." In particular, "What all of them appeared to have in common is the idea that mental representations are coded symbolically and are structured and computable." This is a view with which I disagree. To the extent that I am willing to countenance representations at all (and I'm sceptical here) I am more inclined to Searle's line of reasoning, "the most radical criticism of the classical view is the claim that the mind/brain is indeed a representational organ, but that the nature of representations is not that of a formal code." It's not a long paper, but it will keep you working for a while. Maurizio Tirassa and Marianna Vallana, Cogprints, July 30, 2010 4:26 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

David T. Jones makes the good argument that the very people calling academics Luddites are themselves Luddites. He argues that they employ an old-style top-down methodology that takes no account of the context of application. "Rather than tell academics what to do, you need to create contextualised experiences for academics that enable appropriation of new models of teaching and learning. What most senior managers at universities and many of the commentators don't see, is that the environment at most universities is preventing academics from having these experiences and then preventing them from appropriating the new models of teaching." David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, July 30, 2010 4:19 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Randall Munroe, XKCD, July 30, 2010 4:13 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

If alternative data storage systems geeks you out, you'll enjoy this discussion of non-SQL databases. "Brian Aker lists the features found in No-SQL, as well as the method of organizing and creating data within it. He also describes the general use of schemas and correlational systems in everyday language. His critical analysis of SQL as a whole encompasses several faults, too, including limitations on efficiency, organization, and the encoding language; it quite possibly has an element of satire to it. In this lecture, there is also a glimpse into data collection as a whole." Brian Aker, IT Conversations, July 30, 2010 4:11 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Nice video explanation of Metaweb. "If you are interested, you can join the freebase community that is part of Metaweb. Through Freebase users can add content to the open database, creating entities. Although I signed up as a member, the registering process had a glitch in Firefox at first, I could access it through Internet Explorer. When I tried a bit later, Firefox was working ok as well for accessing Freebase.
" Inge de Waard, Ignatia, July 30, 2010 4:09 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

via @captic – Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The traditional, industrial age hierarchic organization must evolve

Value creation has thus been shifting from protecting proprietary knowledge, to fostering collaboration, both within the company and beyond its boundaries, in order to help the firm participate in as broad and diverse a range of knowledge flows and thus improve its competitive position.  It is within this context that one has to consider the business value of social networks, and their impact in helping people better connect with each other, and build sustaining relationships that enhance knowledge flows and innovation.

via @bbetts -Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers

To conclude: a major reason why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers is that all information they provide access to is produced with a push-based production model. This model assumes that all information resources on the intranet must be produced in advance (only serving information needs which can be anticipated) by a small subset of all available resources (employees) and that the entire body of information needs to be supervised by a few people for the purpose of controlling the message, format and/or organization of the information resources.

A Man with a PhD: Natural selection: networks & diversity

One thing to remember is that true and pure natural selection would tend to drive genes to the best possible – the most fit – actually removing diversity. To a first approximation, selection would seem to produce a single set of genes that are ‘best’ evolved for a particular environment. Any other set of genes would be less fit.

In reality, selection is often not that fine, there are a range of different gene products that can probably be almost equally fit and most biological systems are designed to support a wide range of diversity.

It’s not the size of your network that matters but how you engage folks of diverse opinion & practice – Neighbor Networks

This argument implies that one cannot hope to get ahead of others just by finding the “right” network. “People think of their network as something they can expand, or buy a new version of, or change in some dramatic way as if it were clothing that you can take off and put on,” Burt says. A network does not give added competitive advantage independent of your effort. Rather, it allows a person to become more skillful at managing various connections so that he gains greater competitive advantage. It is what a person does with his network that counts.

via @jhagel – Generating Serendipity: diversity; sharing; network weaving; provocation

Serendipity is the emergence of desirable novelty from a chance encounter, the discovery of something wonderful, unknown and unpredictable. It is the act of unexpected cross-pollination, the seed of something new.

Much of lasting value comes into being serendipitously. How many of the most amazing things that have happened to you have happened because of an overheard word, an accidental encounter, a connection made by a friend? Serendipity is the antithesis of control.

Connections drive innovation [and learning] by @timkastelle

The moral of the story is simple. Connections drive innovation. We need input from people with a diversity of viewpoints to help generate innovative new ideas. If our circle of connections grow too small, or if everyone in it starts thinking the same way, we’ll stop generating new ideas. And then we’ll forget things like how to make a fishing hook. Or a trident missile.

via @charlesjennings – Paris stages ‘festival of errors‘ to teach French schoolchildren how to think

“I’m a scientist. I had nothing to do with education. But then my six-year-old boy went to school and his teacher told me, ‘He’s a nice kid, but he asks too many questions,’” said François Taddei, the author of an education report published last year for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“This is the problem of the French system,” he added.

“You are supposed to know the right answer. You are not supposed to express your own opinions or ask questions.”

In The Learning Layer , the concept of reversing the idea funnel is discussed in depth. Traditional innovation processes take many ideas, and through elimination, narrow these down to a few. Flipping the funnel reverses this by breaking ideas into capability components and building on them.

Most business ideas are a bundle of two or more of our capability components [tangible & intangible assets - technologies, processes, people, IP, relationships]. For example, even if a business idea is based on a technological breakthrough, the overall opportunity is likely to also include other differentiating components, such as processes (say, a specific marketing process). It is the uniqueness of the bundle of components that provides the economic value-creating potential of the idea, and the ability to defy the easy copying by other marketplace participants that leads to rapid value collapse.

This is what effective innovators do, says author Steve Flinn – “They break things down into their essential features, and then try to visualize the effect of different combinations, orientations, and application approaches.”

One of my current projects is working on knowledge transfer, such as the commercialization of research, at Mount Allison University. I’m still learning how this happens here and at other universities, but for the most part, it seems to be a traditional funnel. However, this type of funnel can also be flipped.

Embedding the flipping-the-funnel process within the learning layer is a powerful, contemporary approach to the management of innovation and R&D. But there are other related learning layer opportunities that should not be overlooked. For example, technology transfer processes. Here the idea is to enable third parties to leverage inventions and developments that are developed by other organizations, whether private or public. As mentioned previously, extending the learning layer across organizations is an ideal way to generate creative synergy. And the flipping-the-funnel approach can be adapted, and coupled with the cross-organizational learning layer, to enable more collaborative and valuable technology transfers.

One example of cross-pollination in technology transfer is Futurity.org, which aggregates research findings from all AAU universities.

The ability to even conceive of a learning layer is due to our advances in network communication technologies. This has caused the explosion in web social media and user-generated content. While looking for a picture to illustrate this post, I came across the image below on Flickr, an image sharing service. The image was linked to a blog post that asks if the prevalence of social media require us to re-think the lead generation funnel. It seems that network effects have flipped some of our older industrial models.

SCVNGR Now Rewards Your Efforts

Pietzo: An Environmentally and Economically Friendly Way to Commute

Episend Shares Rich Media Messages With Ease

Fourteen Startups Showcased at Boston Events

Dexrex ChatSync Backs Up Social Media Messages for Enterprise

Mercavo, the Online Marketplace of Sales Opportunities

iZup: Keep Your Eyes on the Road & Off Your Phone

Wow, CoSN may have set a new record for claiming to lead while trailing badly. Ian Quillen writes of a new CoSN report released Wednesday "pushing for the educational use of new Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS)." Or, writes Quillen, "or the acronym literate among us, a better summary might be: LMS + CMS = LCMS (FTW!)." Those of us who have been around long enough will recall Maish Nichani's article of almost exactly that name, LCMS = LMS + CMS [RLOs], first published May 02, 2001. That leaves CoSN just under ten years late in calling this "new." As for "FTW" (For The Win)? Well, your call. Ian Quillen, Education Week, July 29, 2010 4:16 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

Have eBooks really come of age, or are bloggers just jumping on a recent media bandwagon. There's no question perceptions of eBooks are being helped along by advertising for the Kindle, Nook and iPad. But I think overall sales of these devices are still quite low - three million iPads sounds like a lot (I can't find Kindle sales figures) but in a world of seven billion people, and one billion internet users, it's a drop in the bucket. Christine Cupaiuolo, Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning, July 29, 2010 3:56 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

David Wiley provides readers with a full summer of afternoon reading as most of his papers are now available. "My blog contains over 600 posts, but my longer writing typically goes to more academic outlets like journals. Thanks to the help of the amazing folks at BYU's Scholar's Archive (our institutional repository), much of my peer-reviewed work now has a stable home online, too. I've gathered up links to these peer-reviewed articles as well as whitepapers and other long pieces on a new page called Articles." David Wiley, iterating toward openness, July 29, 2010 3:40 p.m. [Link] [Comment]

The Learning Layer: Building the next level of intellect in your organization, begins with some solid insights on how learning is the key to performing in the networked workplace. Learning has been the traditional realm of HR while most systems are supported by IT. This means that HR supports the people who produce the tacit knowledge while IT supports the systems that store the explicit knowledge. Steve Flinn, the author, uses the analogy of knowledge as stock and learning as flow. An organization’s intellectual capital is a factor of both, which “makes it really clear just how inseparable the management of a business’s knowledge is from the learning processes”.

The proliferation of current web technologies now presents us with two major opportunities:

The knowledge and insights within the heads of people can be leveraged without overtly taking actions to make it so. And that systems can actually learn, and more specifically, learn from latent intellectual capital.

Previous legacy IT systems used hierarchical structures, making them unsuitable for real learning applications, so “if we want an integrated organization of people and systems that effectively learns, we should start with a focus on a network-based architecture that has the capacity to reshape itself over time and that is layered over what came before, because that’s how the brain works.”

Flinn goes on to explain that Web 2.0 technologies have created “socially aware” systems that can identify some behaviour patterns between systems and users, giving us various levels of adaptation. Amazon.com is the best known commercial application of this, with its product recommendations. Very soon, adaptive recommendations in work systems will become ubiquitous, providing some extent of contextual and personalized learning on demand. The learning layer is an amalgamation of socially aware, adaptive systems with social networks [uniting KM and SoMe] .The social network is the larger network of connected people with smaller workflow processes inside:

Because the workflow is woven right into the learning layer itself, it also offers the opportunity for ‘recombinant’ processes, where process sections can be cleaved off and recombined to form new, synthetic processes. This is the ultimate in flexibility and efficiency, and can serve to make the benefits of processes realizable in even the most complex and fluid of work settings. Think of it as basically the mass customization of business processes.

Flinn also shows how learning value is created, can be measured and then assessed against project value, providing a clearer picture of the value of intellectual capital. He further recommends changes in how we develop ideas for innovation and suggests reversing the traditional idea funnel. Then Flinn takes these ideas and compares them against the three business archetypes: Product Innovator, Relationship Owner & Supply Network Architect.

The first three parts of the book are full of good ideas, insight and analysis, but Part 4 is a bit of a letdown. Implementing the Learning Layer, a mere six pages, doesn’t tell you much. However, there is a lot in the previous sections for guidance if you already understand processes and technologies from IT, HR, OD and  social media. If not, you could engage ManyWorlds for consulting and then implement on their Epiture platform.

In looking at the specifications for Epiture (aka “the learning layer”) the company describes it as a Web 3.0 system that includes enterprise level web site management; document management;  social networking and tagging & ontologies. Even without a full product comparison, I would say that several other platforms, including open source Elgg or Drupal can do much of this.

The key difficulty I see in the implementation of a learning layer is getting people to use it. As a layer, it is not integrated into the work tools. Even if socially aware systems collect and analyze data and feed these into the learning layer, the layer has to be used by people. Perhaps it can be effective if only a portion of the work force is involved in the active sharing of tacit knowledge through social networking. While I agree in principle with the learning layer, I’d have to see it in action and understand how the organization got there. I have little doubt in the potential of the learning layer but I’m not sure if it will revolutionize organizational learning.

In spite of my comments in the paragraph above, I would strongly recommend this book. Just the analysis on learning in networks is worth it. Much of what is recommended here reinforces 1) the wirearchy framework and 2) PKM and PLE development. Some form of learning layer could become the means by which wirearchies work and also use the cumulative results of individuals and their personal – knowledge/learning – management/sharing – systems/environments.

Other Related Posts:

Knowledge Stock & Flows

BRP & ERP

The first post in the new iPad Curriculum blog covers the topic of Go Sky Watch Planetarium (it's a bit revealing that there are no links in the article to the application; you don't get to link to it unless you're Apple). The new blog, writes the author, "I will post app and web app reviews, highlight educational tools that work seamlessly on the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, and give tips and tricks for using the iPad/iPod Touch in the classroom." I personally wouldn't dedicate a blog to a single platform, but I'm sure some people will find this new blog useful. Kelly Tenkely, don't forget to put your name on your new blog somewhere; I had to go back to your old blog to find it. Kelly Tenkely, iPad Curriculum, July 29, 2010 6:17 a.m. [Link] [Comment]