The scarcity of attention rule

Fred Wilson, a well known VC, covers on his blog a topic that I think is very relevant to the field of learning:
The overabundance of information leads to a scarcity of attention

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

Wow, that is a very very interesting statement.

Only several years ago there were not a lot of online courses available. Since then the technology has matured to the point where almost anyone can create and publish content (just look at blogs!). Now companies have access to libraries with thousands of courses. But all to often I see people searching Google first, looking for answers and getting thousands of search results (informal learning) or having mind-numbing access to those thousands of online courses through enterprise libraries (formal learning), both of which are resulting in a quick-hit, good luck knowing how 'right' the answer is, learning experience.

Frankly it scares me how many people take the Internet at face value. Yes, Google, Wikipedia, blogs etc are all great sources but there is little in way of context to help judge it's value.

But on the other hand I find myself not really needing to 'learn' something but rather 'find and discard' an answer, knowing that I can always dig it up again later if need be. Heck my world seems to be changing so quickly that I'm lucky if I can find the answer to my question in one place as I often have to pull it together from several sources.

Jay Cross says that 80% of learning is informal and I wonder how much of that informal learning is being done by Internet searching. Maybe the first course every person should take should be on effective online search techniques and how to assemble knowledge from multiple sources of varying quality.

Do you agree?
- is there simply too much information, stored in containers like courses, out there? (is Google the new incarnation of the learning object repository?)
- How do we in the learning industry prune away the excess but still ensure that it is relevant to each learner and not overly generic? (is it our job to do the pruning or do things like tags, social networking and RSS enable each learner to do the pruning their own way)
- if learning is now truly able to be continuous then how do we create effective learning experiences that can span across multiple delivery mediums independent of time? (anything published on the Internet will last forever especially with search engine caching)
- are we to become knowledge navigators to our learners? (equipping our learners with tools versus content like courses and saying 'the answer is out there, now go forth and find it'?)

Internet 2.0, CSTD, Demo Site ...

Lots of exciting things are happening at Ensemble and I wanted to give you a brief update on "Internet 2.0" and Canada's largest conference on learning. I also added at the end of this post info on our new live demo site!

Internet 2.0 - "The Power of Us"
Over the last several months there has been a lot of articles and talk around how the Internet is evolving to be more than simply connecting people to content, that "Internet 2.0" is about connecting people to one another. Amazon.com, eBay and even Skype are all examples of leveraging that collective knowledge.
What is even more exciting is that we are now seeing the same innovations happening inside of companies as they use collaborative mentoring as a way to manage all the online interactions they have with everyone they touch.

Ensemble Collaboration OnDemand
Using learning as an example, the same way online courses are built from content objects, our online collaborative workspaces are easily built from collaboration objects. These workspaces are then linked to from your courses, LMS, intranet and even your corporate web site to give you one central way to manage all of your interactions with everyone your company touches. Now sales people can share best practices online after taking training on new products, new employees can ask the questions they really need answered and your customers can mentor other customers. Accelerate sales, lower your support costs and have more satisfied customers.

Ensemble goes to Toronto!
Ensemble will be at Canada's largest conference on learning next week during November 7-9 in Toronto. We will be showcasing a number of different customers so that you can see our solution live and in action. If you are attending the conference I look forward to meeting you at our booth, #315-317! But if you want to learn more now you can watch and listen to a quick overview of our solution.

We just updated our website and added a live demo area where you can try firsthand the Ensemble solution. Using a fictitious company we built several interconnected collaborative workspaces to show how a common collaboration 'layer' can solve specific challenges while uniting everyone together. Check it out.

consolidation continues - BlackBoard + WebCT & more ...

[cross posted to the American Society for Training and Development's Learning Circuits blog which has generated several good comments]

Wow, consolidation is running rampart in the eLearning space as everyone continues to merge or acquire. Look to your left and look to your right; easily one of those will not be around in six months. Today BlackBoard announced plans to merge with WebCT; the two leading providers in the higher education eLearning space (BlackBoard alone forecasts US$150M+ for their fiscal year).

Now having gone through a "merger" myself (SkillSoft and SmartForce) it sounds like BlackBoard is really acquiring WebCT and it doesn't bode well for WebCT given that there is a tremendous amount of product overlap between the two companies (a similar comparision would be if SkillSoft and NETg, the leading providers in the corporate education space, merged). It also doesn't bode well for WebCT's willingness to play with open source (sorry Harold!) If you are a WebCT employee you may want to dust off your resume with comments like this:
The combined company expects to realize significant efficiencies by leveraging shared development infrastructure, and mitigating duplicative marketing initiatives and administrative expenditures.

This announcement comes on the heels of Saba acquiring Centra. Now this deal makes more sense as Saba continues evolve beyond its Learning Management Software (LMS) roots (Saba recently bought THINQ) by rounding out its services offering. Personally I like its focus on 'on-demand learning' and its Services Oriented Architecture as I think generic content is a tough business to be in. Plus Saba + Centra creates a US$100M revenue company which is not too shabby!

And of course back in August we had WebEx buying Intranets.com and SumTotal (created out of Docent + Click2Learn) buying PathLore as I discussed in this post.

Clark - you need to update your Chart of Consolidations!

The Resulting Big Five: (forecasted annual revenue)
SkillSoft $200M+
NETg $150M-200M?
BlackBoard $150M+
Saba $100M+
SumTotal $100M
* strangely none of the investors like any of these deals as the stocks of the related companies have all dropped when they have announced their news.

So whom do you think will be doing a merger or acquisition next?

What do you think of these recent ones?

Collaboration + Content = Learning?

First, on Monday, WebEx buys intranets.com for $45M in cash (details) then today SumTotal buys Pathlore for $29M in cash (details) and $19M in stock. And then I hear that back on July 27 Premiere Global Services announced that it was buying Netspoke for $23.2M in cash (details).

So a virtual meeting company buys a collaboration company.
A LMS company buys another LMS company.
And a communication services company buys a collaboration company.

Looks like the convergence that Elliott Masie has been talking about taking place is finally happening. Anyone familiar with my posts here knows that I am a big believer in the power of collaboration (and ideally done to such a level of integration that it results in mentoring not just with 'experts' but also with your peers) so it is heartening to see that finally we are moving past 'simplistic' collaboration (i.e. like stand-alone web meetings) in learning with WebEx+intranets.com and PGS+Netspoke while the fragmented LMS sub-industry is getting so much needed consolidation with SumTotal+Pathlore (and remember that SumTotal is the March 2004 merger of Docent and Click2learn).

All of this comes of the heels of SkillSoft releasing SkillSoft Dialogue, their version of a virtual classroom and NETg buying KnowledgeNet last year for their virtual classroom technology/LMS resulting in their Knowledge Now suite.

Are we finally getting to the point where educational content is merging with collaboration technologies which is merging with learner management infrastructure?

Collaboration is important as it allows learning to become a continuous process and acts as a quality feedback loop while helping to generate new content out of the resulting interactions, all of which sits on top of the learning management system. It has been long neglected in the eLearning industry due to it's complexity (trust me I founded scholars.com and struggled with the scalability of it's mentoring model long after SmartForce bought it) for it has been far easier to manage content objects than collaboration objects. I always said while at SkillSoft/SmartForce/CBT Systems that the value of SkillSoft is not the 5000+ hours of training but the fact that you could potentially tap into the collective knowledge of their 3 million users. Of course the Internet bubble burst and they went back to the tried-and-true model of producing generic content.

Anyway ... sorry for the rant but I have been concerned about the health of the eLearning industry over the last 2 years and I am glad to see this much needed consolidation taking place. Hopefully it will result in some truly innovative stuff versus people scrambling to get into liferafts. Think social networking analysis, workflow learning, collective intelligence, presence awareness, expert locating, communities of knowledge (made up of smaller communities of practice) ...

Or as BusinessWeek recently put it - The Power of Us. If you haven't read their cover story on how mass collaboration is shaking up business you should as they talk about how large scale collaboration has changed the delivery of services like auctions (eBay) and product like books (amazon.com) which makes you think about how mass collaboration could change the sharing of knowledge which until recently has been done on a small scale, typically geographically driven, basis or through static content.

PS - for those that care it is interesting to note that the 2 collaboration acquisitions were basically done at 2x trailing 2004 revenues (Netspoke) and 3x projected 2005 revenue (intranets.com) while the LMS acquisition was done at 2x trailing 2004 revenues (Pathlore). These multiples are indicative that there is a resurgence of interest and hence increased value.

cross-posted to the American Society for Training & Development 'Learning Circuits' blog

The Power of Us

For anyone who has heard me rant about the power of the Internet being it's ability to connect people together on a scale previously not possible it is invigorating to see that the June 20th US edition of BusinessWeek is all about this topic. The cover story, titled "The Power of Us" is an excellent article about how the Internet can connect all of us in new and exciting ways (there are also some online exclusives like Tour the Collectives of Cyberspace which are well worth checking out).

Continuing this theme of collaboration Sam Adkins wrote an article called "Innovations in Collaboration" for the latest issue of the Chief Learning Officer magazine which is a great indepth review around the state of collaboration for learning. Now just because the article mentions us doesn't mean I'm biased as I have known Sam from his early days at Microsoft where he created the Microsoft Online Institute! (my first company, scholars.com, was a founding partner with Microsoft).

I'm happy to see that more and more people are starting to realize that the Internet is more than connecting people to websites, it is about connecting people to people to leverage their existing knowledge so we can learn/work better faster (for anyone following the writings of Jay Cross (blog), this kind of collaborative mentoring is an essential part of his concept of workflow learning (website)).

Of course the challenge is that for collaboration to be effective it needs to be linked back to something, like an underlying event or topic (i.e. something that provokes collaboration versus being just passive). Collaboration for the sake of collaboration just doesn't work anymore (just look at the state of the commerical social networking companies out there). Patti Anklam has it right when she talks about "object-centered sociality" in her blog posting "Linking Out and Looking for Objects".

Effective mentoring (rant - collaboration to me is a guy using a nickname to go into an AOL chatroom to talk about essentially nothing; collaborative mentoring is about forming deeper long term relationships where something of value is exchanged) is more than technology, it is focused around optimizing the connections both between users and the collaboration technologies. You need things like eBay's rating system or Amazon.com's feedback forms when you start connecting tens of thousands of people together, the vast majority of whom do not know one another and thus have no context for evaluating interactions (this notion of trust and reputation). You need a backend system to manage the resulting experts and mentors so that they do not get overwhelmed. Heck, it is about making the whole process scaleable because the value of the network increases exponentially based on the number of using (basically known as the 'network effect') so you need a lot of people in order to get effective knowledge sharing.

If anyone is interested I blabber on about this in a narrated overview of Ensemble (to keep it fresh this link will only work until Friday, June 17, 2005).

Reinvent the "always"

If you haven't read any of Seth Godin's books then you may want to check out his blog as he frequently has interesting things to say (the ultimate compliment that I feel I can give a person is that they make me think and Seth certainly does that for me).

One of his recent postings, "What's the always?" is certainly thought-provoking:

Here's a neat way to invent a new Purple Cow.

Figure what the always is. Then do something else.

Toothpaste always comes in a squeezable tube.
Business travelers always use a travel agent.
Politicians always have their staff screen their calls.

Figure out what the always is, then do exactly the opposite. Do the never.

Sounds simple but it makes you think doesn't it ...

Search sucks - where's the context?

More so than ever I think that, unlike the '90s, the Internet now has too much information. That the information and answers people are seeking are becoming lost in all the noise (what some call the signal to noise ratio). Even the rise of blogs, which is tremendously empowering to individuals, helps to increase the deluge of information where potentially every person on the Internet can have a 'voice' which runs the risk of turning the Internet into an overwhelming babble of conversations. Where's the context?

Even Google I find is becoming less useful every year as it is simply returning way too many links and the number of times I find what I am looking for on the first page of search results seems to be getting lower all the time.

I think the problem is that people seem to feel that the answer they are looking will be found in one place. Today's world is much more complex than the '90s and the answer you are looking for will likely be compiled from several sources. There is no right or wrong answer, just shades of gray.

This is why I think that areas of study like social network analysis will become more important over time as content like articles and web pages are simply potential 'doorways' to the actual authors. If I like what I read then I tend to trust the authors. This sense of trust acts as a filter online.

I'm waiting for the day when Google returns search results that also includes the author's name and some sort of 'person ranking' like the way it does today with its page ranking algorithm. There must be some way to improve the notion of tracking web page links to include people links to add context. Even using something like the author's email address as a unique indentifier could help.

Google today uses the aggregate of clicks to return search results. I would be willing to give up some of my privacy to log into Google so that the search results factor in who I am and what I have clicked on or stored previously.

If this notion of trust works for eBay where people can do physical goods transactions why can't it work for the Internet for knowledge transactions?