I read in today's New York Times that scientists are reporting that they have uncovered fossils of what may an otter-like mammal that lived in China 164 million years ago. “The extinct species appears to have been an amalgam of animals. It had a broad, scaly tail, flat like a beaver's. Its sharp teeth seemed ideal for eating fish, like an otter's. Its likely lifestyle — burrowing in tunnels on shore and dog-paddling in water — reminds scientists of the modern platypus.”
It is a surprising discovery in that this type of mammal was not thought to have existed during the Jurassic Period: “Thomas Martin, an authority on early mammals at Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, said the find pushed back 'the mammalian conquest of the waters by more than 100 million years' and impressively contradicts” the conventional view…..Despite similarities with some modern animals, the Jurassic mammal has no modern descendants and is not related to any existing species. The discoverers have given it the name Castorocauda lutrasimilis, Latin for beaver tail and similarity to the otter.”
I must say that I can see the resemblance between the Jurassic otter and our mascot, “Otto.”

People ask me why I named the business, “The Otter Group.” OTTER is an acronym that stands for Online, Training, Technical and Educational Resources. The real value of the name, for me is in the logo and what it means: being optimistic and flexible; working smart not hard; being curious and a good communicator––all qualities I value and look for when I am hiring “Otters.” It is kind of cool to think that Otto may have a Jurassic predecessor and that somehow those qualities survived the demise of the dinosaurs.

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I am giving a talk at the Fletcher School of Government at Tufts Thursday, 2/23.  Attached below are the slides for my talk.

To see a list of articles referred to in the talk, please see del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/kgilroy/Tuftsotter

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I am giving a talk at Emerson College this afternoon.  My slides are attached below.
For the references for this talk, please check del.icio.us at this tag:

http://del.icio.us/kgilroy/Emersonotter

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This tutorial, part of our Learning 2.0 podcast series, talks about how I use the social bookmarking service, del.icio.us for learning.

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I've been a long-time fan of Guy Kawasaki who has flipped from blog critic to blog evangelist. Here is how he describes how he writes his blog entries. It is a good model:

I'd like to explain what I'm doing for many of my entries. It starts around 10 pm when the kids are asleep, Boston Legal is recording, and I'm home from playing hockey. (This process starts later if the Olympics are going on–seven hours a day of high definition TV hockey!–or I played in a late game.)
1. Look through my books and find a topic that I'd like to blog about–let's say, building a community.
2. Take the subhead/bullets and use them as the starting point for the entry. (I never copy and paste from my book's manuscript.)
3. Spend two to three hours writing the “body” of the entry–that is, the introduction and text in the bullets.
4. Send the draft to my buddy Thomas Kang who provides a reality check, makes suggestions, and copyedits.
5. Go to iStockphoto to find a picture that illustrates the entry.
6. Post.
The result of this process is an entry like yesterday's post, “The Art of Building a Community.”

Here's my version of his process:

1. Scan through the new material in my blogbridge aggregator and find something that I think is interesting–let's say, how Guy Kawasaki builds a blog entry.
2. Use the material in the entry as a starting point for my own thoughts on the topic.
3. Spend no more than twenty minutes writing the entry.
4. Look for a good illustration in my photos or in photos that are published under the appropriate license on flickr.
6. Post.

Here is the text from Guy's post on building community:

I admit it: I’m a user-group junkie. I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple—speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II.
These folks sustained Apple by supporting its customers when Apple couldn’t—or didn’t want to—support them itself. Now that Apple is the homecoming queen again, there are lots of people receiving, taking, and claiming credit for its success. The Apple user-group community deserves a high-five tribute too.
Now that I gotten that off my chest; I can move on to the topic of this entry: how to create a kick-ass community. I anticipate many comments to this entry, so I am warning you in advance that I am going to modify and supplement this entry frequently. RSS readers beware! 1. Create something worth building a community around. This is a repeated theme in my writing: the key to evangelism, sales, demoing, and building a community is a great product. Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around mundane and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try.
2. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! Most companies are stupid: they go for months and then are surprised: “Never heard of them. You mean there are groups of people forming around our products?” If you have a great product, then pro-act: find the thunderlizards and ask them to build a community. (Indeed, if you cannot find self-appointed evangelists for your product, you may not have created a great product.) If it is a great product, however, just the act of asking these customers to help you is so astoundingly flattering that they’ll help you.
3. Assign one person the task of building a community. Sure, many employees would like to build a community, but who wakes up every day with this task at the top of her list of priorities? Another way to look at this is, “Who’s going to get fired if she doesn’t build a community?” A community needs a champion—an identifiable hero and inspiration—from within the company to carry the flag for the community. Therefore, hire one less MBA and allocate this headcount to a community champion. This is a twofer: one less MBA and one great community.
4. Give people something concrete to chew on. Communities can’t just sit around composing love letters to your CEO about how great she is. This means your product has to be “customizable,” “extensible,” and “malleable.” Think about Adobe Photoshop: if it weren’t for the company's plug-in architecture, do you think its community would have developed so quickly? However, giving people something to chew on requires killing corporate hubris and admitting that your engineers did not create the perfect product. Nevertheless, the payoff is huge because once you get people chewing on a product, it’s hard to wrest it away from them.
5. Create an open system. There are two requirements of an open system first, a “SDK” (software development kit). This is software-weenie talk for documentation and tools to supplement a product; second, APIs (application programming interfaces). This is more software-weenie talk for an explanation of how to access the various functions of a product, and it’s typically part of a good SDK. I’m using software terminology here, but the point is that you need to provide people with the tools and information to tweak your product whether it is Photoshop, an iPod, or a Harley-Davidson. Here's a non-tech example: An open system school would enable parents to teach courses and provide a manual (SDK) for parents to understand how to do so.
6. Welcome criticism. Most companies feel warm and fuzzy towards their communities as long as these communities toe the line by continuing to say nice things, buying their products, and never complaining. The minute that the community says anything negative, however, companies freak out and pull back their community efforts. This is a dumb-ass thing to do. A company cannot control its community. This is a long-term relationship, so the company shouldn’t file for divorce at the first sign of possible infidelity. Indeed, the more a company welcomes—even celebrates criticism—the stronger its bonds to its community.
7. Foster discourse. The definition of “discourse” is a verbal exchange. The key word here is “exchange.” Any company that fosters community building should also participate in the exchange of ideas and opinions. At the basic level of community building, your website should provide a forum where customers can engage in discourse with one another as well as with the company's employees. At the bleeding edge of community building, your CEO participates in community events too. This doesn't mean that you let the community run your company, but you should listen to what they have to say.
8. Publicize the existence of the community. If you’re going to all the trouble of catalyzing a community, don’t hide it under a bushel. Your community should be an integral part of your sales and marketing efforts. Check out, for instance, this part of the Harley-Davidson web site dedicated to the HOG (Harley Owners Group). If you search for “user group” (with quotes) at Apple’s site, you get 112 matches. (The same search at Microsoft’s site yields 16,925 matches—I’m still pondering what this means!)

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Anne Zelenka has written an excellent post on how she envisions using reading lists. She says,

Big lists, lists with 100 or 200 or 1,000 feeds in them, those provide fodder for displays that aggregate, filter, summarize, pivot, contextualize, and personalize my news.

She is right about the need for what I would call “intelligent aggregators”:

Perhaps it shouldn't be called a reading list if it's used as input for an app that filters, rotates, and distills the contents into something that's information dense. It looks like the same thing–a dynamic OPML file hosted at a URL–but it's not used in the way we've been talking about using reading lists. Whatever you call it, this is the sort of thing I'm seeing great use for, but only in combination with better options for finding important conversations and concentrating them into a format that readers can grok quickly. The big challenge I see now is developing ways beyond simply looking for links to identify important topics. That may work well for politics and tech, but different domains need additional filtering and identification mechanisms, like comment counting and text analysis, perhaps even some Bayesian classification to make the news as informational as possible.

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Rod Boothby has published a very good white paper on Web Office: The Next Wave in Productivity Tools. You can download the paper from our site or go to Rod's blog for a copy. Here are some things that I think are spot on:
Rod starts out with portrait of the MBA graduating class of 2006 that describes my own vision of networked learners;

The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email, BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ultimately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.

He organizes the new tools that these graduates bring to their jobs into 4 main categories: blogs, wikis, social networks, and project coordination.
The article includes a good table that surveys the different components of what Rod calls Web Office and gives you examples of each of them. He goes on to talk about how these Web 2.0 tools and services can be linked together in the enterprise. This is his distinctive vision and it is both right and very powerful:

Imagine if everyone in your organization had a blog that described them, includedtheir resume, a list of all their skills, and
was automatically kept up to date with a list of all the projects they were working on. You could call these types of blogs
“People Pages”. That is the beginning of an enterprise blogging solution. Here’s what my team is building for our firm of 130,000 auditors and consultants.
We are starting with 5 types of blogs. Each has a fairly narrow focus. Except for the People Pages, each type of blog is designed to be written by a group of people. We are creating an automatic crosslinking script. Add someone to the list of people working on a project and the script automatically updates their People Page. We are also setting up automatically generated directories. When someone creates a Project Page, that project will be added to the directory of all projects. By adding this minimal amount of structure, we are going to be able to help people find the information they need when they need it.

Rod goes on to talk about what the impact of this structure will be for IT and how you manage and train using this kind of environment. This is an important paper. I hope you take the time to read it.
(Full disclosure: Rod Boothby is a member of the Advisory Board of the Otter Group.)

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I had a kick-off meeting for a project we are doing with the American Library Association yesterday. We are developing a prototype course for ALA called Library Futures. It will be delivered in a Learning 2.0 format using blogs, aggregators, and podcasts as the delivery systems and for user publishing and interface. (You can read about it here.)

I want to call your attention to one very nice thing that we have done that I plan to do for all of our new courses: build a shared set of resources using del.ici.ous. Here's how we are doing it:

Everybody involved needs a del.ici.ous account. (To sign up go here; it's free and once you get it, you'll never stop using it.) Once you have an account, then you should add a del.ici.ous plug-in to your browser. (For Firefox for the PC go here; for Firefox for the Mac, go here; for Safari go here; for IE go here.) When you have installed your plug-in, you should be able to tag any link from your browser to your del.ici.ous account.

Then you need a shared “tag” for your resource list. For the ALA project, we selected ALAL2. So now any time I come across something that I think would be useful, it gets tagged ALAL2 and saved into my delicious account.

Here's the cool part: when you click on your tag (in our example, ALAL2), you will be given the option of clicking on all items tagged by anybody as ALAL2:

By clicking on the “all” link, you get this url: http://del.icio.us/tag/ALAL2 and a list of all items tagged:

And you get an RSS feed of the shared tag: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ALAL2. When you add this feed to your aggregator, you will be notified any time anybody tags anything with the ALAL2 tag.

This is a great way of building a shared set of resources for a course, project, or team.

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Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat makes the case for why we need to “learn how to learn”:

“Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to “learn how to learn,” will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster.”



Here is a recording from C-SPAN of him speaking about the book: link

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I have been thinking about how to better define Learning 2.0 and, as usual, have found my inspiration in the writings of Peter Drucker.

In an essay on “The New Productivity Challenge,” published originally in 1985 in the Harvard Business review, Drucker rights about how continuous learning must drive productivity increases in the 21st century. Interestingly he defines learning as teaching: “Knowledge workers learn the most when they teach….We often hear that every enterprise has to become a learning institution. It must become a teaching institution as well.”

Brilliant. This completely brings together one of the paradoxes of the learning 2.0 world. Learners must learn to teach and teachers must learn to learn. Why is this so? One of the big new assumptions under Learning 2.0 is that everyone is an expert. Innovation and productivity are more likely to emerge as people all through the enterprise find small ways to make things better and then teach one another what they know. The Learning 2.0 model uses very simple tools that allow anyone to teach (blogs, wikis and podcasts) and smart filters so that the right information is flowing to the right people. This highly distributed model has been very successfully on the public internet with blogs as publishing devices, aggregators as personal filters, and things the iTunes podcast store as user-driven directories.

I had coffee recently with Dan Segal who had attended one of my talks. He pointed out that the message of the talk was learner as teacher and that it resonated with him because he had used this model to help people learn to do complex kayaking rolls and maneuvers. He helped me see the idea of learner and teacher and teacher as learner. It is so simple and so right. It was great to then later find Peter Drucker laying it all out 20 years ago.

This very simple but powerful idea also helped me to cystalize what I see as the service that the Otter Group can provide its customers. We have added a new mission statement that says, “Teaching people how to learn.” What that means in practice is teaching learners how to teach and teaching teachers how to learn. And our learning directors are skilled in doing just that.

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