How I Learn

Transitions - Cycling Fall 2009 in Boston & Vancouver

Early September Morning

.

water dull

soft under the haze

breathing easier

.

Dark earlier

.

dusk haloed

still some moths and

hesitating on the path

.

The street gets narrow

.

awareness shared

ears pitched back and eyes peripheral

the cars close

.

For Rich Slezak

.

tires pumped hard

on dry pavement for that

twitch of speed

.

Along the Charles

.

turning clean

turning turning turning

along the river

.

For Andrew Wilson

.

soft clicking of

a clean chain lubed

running smooth

.

Off path

.

a fucking flat

walking across the bridge

one step at a time

.

Crisp weather

.

lactic burn

thigh ache retching

harder uphill

.

---

.

turning into the sun

warmth slowly easing

the wind chill

.

Riding loose

.

light opening spaces

focused on the angles

as cars converge

.

After a cold

.

coughing phlegm

after fifteen clicks

lungs fill easy

.

Along the Charles

.

rounding down

to the eights’ rhythm

easing back up

.

In Vancouver

.

dead cold soaked

getting colder & rain blinded

trying to brake

.

Barometer

.

distance into height

one circle at a time, blood

thickening thinning

.

Over Lion’s Gate

.

wind stopped

almost still, swallowing

air to the top

.

Somerville MA

.

new in town

finding all the streets

with pot holes

.

In Clips

.

pulling uphill

working deep muscles

back of the thighs

.

Still scared after all these years

.

cringe but don’t

flinch from the door

rain traffic night

.

Medford Street

.

walking to work

noting breaks in the pavement

to avoid on the bike

.

Town to town

.

around Boston

feeling each town’s health

as jolts in my back

.

Across the line

.

in Medford

keeping thumbs hooked

in the jam

.

Going home

.

exhaling alcohol

thinking the road’s straight

finding the curve

.

Mountain climb

.

going uphill

oxygen burn extinguishing

gravity’s torpor

.

End of season

.

crystal cold

knuckle ache &

knee twinge

.

---

.

first ice

crinkling the gutters

December First

.

---

Moved back to Vancouver in October (though I am back and forth a lot). Interesting to feel in one's body the differences between the two cities. Vancouver's steeper and much longer hills, the depth of the rain in Vancouver in November, the greater urban variety in and around Boston ... both cities are great places to ride.

I will likely not order these short links into cycling sequences for a while. I have a full cycle of winter, spring, summer and now fall, and it is becoming too much of a habit. I'll see if and how the writing evovlves.

Playing Go Against Myself

I started to play Go again a couple of years ago. I had played intensively when young in Japan, going to Go clubs and playing against some decent players (5 and 6 Dan, who of course crushed me) and when I moved to Boston in October 2006 it was one of the things that I began to do again. I started to play games against myself as a way to regain my board sense and to get a feel for the stones and patterns, but it has become one of my favorite ways to relax (after cycling of course).

Playing a game of perfect information (a game where chance does not play an explicit role and all information is available to all players) against oneself is a good way to stay honest. When playing other players I sometimes try to lead them into traps or take advantage of their miscues. I don’t think this is a good way to play, and it leads to bad habits that stronger players can exploit, but as I like to win I sometimes fall into the mental trap of exploiting other’s weakness. I can’t do this when I play against myself – I am not quite that schizophrenic – so playing against myself means taking turns at finding the absolute best move for black then white, assuming (is that the right word?) that my opponent has as much insight into the board as I do (I hope so, since my opponent is me).

This makes the game one in which the goal is to seek balance and to find patterns. Each move made into a place of deep repose where all of the different tensions on the board are resolved as best I can, and each moving setting up its own new potentials. I am learning a lot doing this, not just about Go, but about the relations of spatial to temporal patterns and how they can disrupt each other.

Sometimes the play can go quickly, when the call and response is obvious or when I am working through Joseki  I know well. Sometimes I even stop and look up Joseki online at sites like Sensei's Library .

Usually the games are pretty close, ten points either way, with black having the edge. But some times the game cascades in one direction or the other and black or white gets a massive victory. There is something important for me to learn here, but I am not completely sure what it is. There is something about this experience that reminds me of self-organizing criticality, where a system seems to suddenly take control and organize itself. It is also a good reminder than small choices can cascade into larger patterns and that these will not always seem to be fair.

(Photo by Yoshie Hattori)

Summer Links (June to August 2009)

.

.

.

 

 

 

Against the grain

.

wind filled

of whole cloth

legs fading

.

Falling hard

.

tire cut on

broken drain legs scraped

on the street

.

Pushing

..

wind sprint

till ribs crack

again again

.

Heading south, 6:00 PM

.

on Mass. Ave.

each engine stinking

in the heat

.

Summer drizzle

.

rain chilled

sweat it off on

the first sprint

.

Summer rain

.

water on the road

in the air in the lungs

coughing

.

Up Mass Ave.

.

exhaust harsh

lungs tight in the heat

holding a line

.

Marginal

.

vine whipped

along the road edge

raising welts

.

Going hard

.

something cracks

in the drive train

going softer

.

Flowers

.

road kill

attar of rose blossoming

fear

.

Dehydrating

.

worm tube

from mouth to anus

clamped to the seat

.

---

 

.

piss thick

condensed with effort and

acid burn

.

Charles River Light 7:00 AM

.

water blinded

mind in pieces as

breath rasps

.

On hot streets

.

cerebellum balance

in some time place

just this one

.

---

.

white matter

jittering with bike

arms eyes legs

.

---

.

grey soothed

motion hyped

reaction time

.

Reaction time

.

car shear

sharp hot metal

much too close

.

River ride

.

water blackened

mind blackened the wind

eating strength

.

---

.

light dappled

green always moving

with breath

.

---

.

leaf tannins

pooled in quiet

between roots

.

Road work

.

tar’s off

bitumen pitch in the road

sticks

.

---

.

exhaling carbon

the world warms

muscles rest

.

Charles east of River Bridge (Boston Side)

.

gorge choking

on small flies still

having to breath

.

No rain

.

trail dry

dust hangs a moment

in the wind

.

Clean ride

.

wheel balanced

around the spokes

singing

.

Sullen weather

.

thunder lurking

in the drenched air

pushing in

.

A change in the weather

.

cooling soft

across the bridge

fine rain

.

Hard, Hot

.

lungs full

not satisfied trying

to breathe more

.

---

.

fresh sweat stings

eyes half blind

going uphill

.

Fatigue

.

going slowly

into the wind

ground down

.

Distant storm

.

sullen heat

dripping from the sky’s

slow static

.

Summer passing

.

some limit

of applied force

turning the wheels

.
---
.
tired on the bike
even the slightest hill
dulls the edge
.
---
.
sun shorter
as the distance home
fades away

.

.

.

Most of these were composed as I rode around Boston, in to work along the Charles and home up Massachusetts Avenue, or on longer rides to the west. I struggled on the bike this summer, never really built up good endurance, as one can see in the lines. Not sure why. I need to ride more of course, always need to ride more, but I am aging and distracted. Cycling helps me to centre and at the same time to open up and drift on lines of thought that get woven into the rhythm of my legs, lungs, heart. Crossing distance increases the duration of my life and let's me bring more into each (longer) moment: moment, movement, momentum all share the same root - to move, which traces back to push, but also Kamah-Mutah (to be moved by love) - all extracted from Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

.

 

Photos by Yoshie Hattori 2009

Priviliged Hands

This post is dedicated to the great Dutch marine biologist Geerat Vermeij who wrote a book with this title. Vermeij is blind and knows the world through touch, smell, taste and sound. He has trained his hands to recognize thousands of marine organisms, especially those of the littoral.

My own hands are clumsy and dull, but I learn a great deal through touch and by watching the hands of those much more skilled than I at work. One of the great pleasures of my time in Boston is that my wife Yoshie and I live in a very small walkup in the South End. When we are in the apartment at the same time we are close to each other and can see each other working. Yoshie works with her hands. She makes small, intimate objects by knitting wire forms then weaving in found materials - strips of paper from packing, plastic, bits of metal or heavier wires. Sometimes these are dull colours to give the wire patterns ground. Other times, the found objects can be magpie bright. The forms capture the movement of her fingers. Quick, deft movements, like a bird in flight, then sometimes slower, almost stopped, as she applies strength. The objects themselves are light and strong, supple and alive in the hand. Held up to the light they reveal something of their structure. Holding them in my own hands I remember the movements of the hands that made them. One more way of stitching together time. Hands hold a privileged form of memory.

As I travel I try to touch as many things as possible and remember textures and temperatures. We (or I) lack a rich language to describe texture. I wonder if one could create some kind of visual notation for touch, much in the way some modern composers have created new, more textural, ways to score music: grain, roughness, swirl, sharpness, continuity, concavity, figure and ground as felt in the finger tips, heft in the hand, static and friction, or slip and glaze. The touch of something that crackles. Wondering how to hold flow in ones hands. To know the tension in a string is to know how to touch movement.

Some things touched:

Slimy kelp

The warm rough head of a Jizo at Nishiaraidaishi

The haft of our favourite cooking knife

Yoshie's feet

An old metal bolt, some rust, about three kilograms

Crack in a rock face trying to hold

Rope burn as the sheet runs out too fast

Old chain grease with road grit

The smooth grid space of the keyboard

Orange peel

A fish still alive dieing in ones hand

A dog's soft ears

A child's hand

The same child's hand, years later, bigger and stronger than my own

Dust on the pages of a book

Smooth then rough bark of an Arbutus

A sweaty cheese

Paper cut

Oiled skin

A broom handle, a rake's

Clay soil

Sandy soil

Peat

Bulbs

Hands are the skin over muscles tied by tendon to jointed bones. Arthritic knots. Fine hairs showing the tension. The shape of a hand is its memories.

 

Maybe Spring, Yeah Spring - Cycling Lines March-May 2009

.

Milder, maybe?

.

rain finally

skin softening and salt

drips from the frame

.

Out the 117

.

pedaling farther

pedaling farther again

spring air

.

Spring, but still harsh

.

body tightening

against the wind

pushes back

.

March river birds

.

song woven

along the river thrush

then sparrow then

.

In slow motion

.

air swaddled

the sound whole circling

circles

.

Early climb

.

red hazed

the hill breaks me then

I break it

.

Still riding

.

choking on
falling blossoms gasping
for breath

.

---
.
rain punctured
half way out then
half way home

.

Cambridge side, along the Charles

.

mud ruts
the wheel handles itself
velocity direction

.

Rain approaching

.

moon shadowed
close enough to touch
with my breath
.
---
.
thunder depth
off west - maybe twenty
minutes to get home

.

After spring cleaning

.

road dust

on the clean bike’s

sheen

.

A longer ride in

.

blossoms mushed
into the rubber leaving
pink tracks
.
---
.
cloud mellowed
distance falling away in
the wheels' turning

.

---

.

circular repetition

going round and round until

a different rest

.

Geese with goslings

.

geese hissing
hissing back - asking politely
to clear the path

.

Clean ride

.

fixed gear locking
hips drive train rubber
to the floor
.
---
.
perfect cadence
in the gear ratio going
up and down

.

Warm morning

.

summer approaching

the river smell thickens

pedaling on

.

Climbing

.

losing salt into

sweat thick as blood

keep climbing

.

---

.

thigh ache

the vice tightens as

the hill ticks up

.

Under the leaves

.

chlorophyll wash
cycling cycling until
lungs full

.

Large pot hole

.
ping ping ping

spokes popping off
the rim warped

.

 

What to Record

I learn by returning to what I have tried to learn before. A little distance allows more depth of field, and a greater distance can let some patterns open up. So I keep some records of what I am trying to learn, and some of what I do, and come back to these at regular intervals to pause and reflect.

I am not sure that I am recording the most important things. Most days I note down where I slept that night and anything exceptional that occurred. Sometimes I will write down the details of an insignificant event, that I try (but cannot) choose at random. If I have a dream I may put it on my FaceBook page (I keep access to my Facebook down to a small number of friends and family). I enter in my weight, resting heart rate and blood pressure, how far I ride my bike and if there were any significant hills. Sometimes I’ll comment on road conditions. If I come across an interesting website, and I do most days, I capture it into CrowdTrust, and if I think it may be of broader interest I will send it out on Twitter or add it to FaceBook. Importantly for me, I record what books I am reading and a bit about each book. I used to note down the key references I discovered in reading a book, to let me weave a larger web of relations. These days I tend to just add these to my wish list on Amazon. I am trying to keep a ‘decision record’ of the type that Peter Drucker recommends, but as I do not make life altering decisions all that often (or if I do I am not aware that I am doing so) I find it hard to weave this technique into my own process of observing, revisiting and revising a little every day.

Every weekend I write down my priorities for the coming week and share these with my colleagues (we use an internal Semantic MediaWiki for this). This includes some notes on what I am learning and trying to learn. I encourage (with only middling success) other people to do this as well, and when they do it usually changes my own learning priorities. If one of my colleagues is trying to get a fix on, say, the use of metaphors in marketing, I will also follow this thread, as I am easily swayed, or try to be.

Every month I set aside a few hours to go back and think about what I was reading, thinking, doing at that month in past years. I have records going back more than five years now (and I wish I had started to do this much earlier). This is a simple but surprisingly powerful technique. It gives me a feeling for the longer, under the surface flows in my interests. I think of it as a way to loop sutures from one month to another across the years.

And once a year, usually between Christmas and New Year, I will take a few days to study the trends in what I am doing and sketch out a concept map of how the pieces are fitting together.

Almost every July I find myself reading something about the Tour de France. In winter I tend to be reading some form of longer poetry, either a collected works or an epic poem, often something in translation.

• 2003 Collected Poems, Basil Bunting

• 2004 The Cantos by Ezra Pound

• 2005 The Inferno, Alighieri Dante, translated by Robert & Jean Hollander

• 2006 Isla Negra: A Notebook by Pablo Neruda translated by Alastair Reed

• 2007 The Gem Glistening Cup: Waka Anthology, translated by Edwin Cranston

• 2008 The Dream of the Poem Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain, translated by Peter Cole

• 2009 The Book of Songs (Shijing), Arthur Waley translation

Looking back on what I read gives me a chance to look for some balance. I try to read a mix of business, economics and technology books, and mix in math, art and philosophy. In 2008 I even did an analysis of the original language and the gender of the author of the books I read. To my mild surprise, I found that most of the books I read were by white men writing in English (about 60%). If I left poetry and novels out of the calculation, about 80% of the books I was reading came from this narrow group. So this year I am trying to broaden my range, and I am actively searching for business and economics books, written by woman, from outside of Canada and the United States. (This is proving to be more difficult than I expected, North American culture mostly looks in on itself, and it takes a real effort to look outside, but more on that another time.)

As I track my cycling everyday, and have set up a number of reports so that I can compare how much I am cycling and how it correlates with my weight (not much) and my resting heart rate (the more I cycle the lower my resting heart rate). A good hard ride with a few wind sprints goes a long way to controlling my blood pressure. I am now looking for some relations between my riding and my writing, a first hint of which can be found in my winter cycling lines (I am working on a spring cycle as well).

The passage from recording to reflection is still only single-loop learning, and I hope to return to this at some point and think through the movement from learning to recording to reflection and back to action in terms of double-loop learning. The concept of double-loop learning comes from Chris Argyris inspired by Gregory Bateson and second-order cybernetics. It reminds me a little of the need to stand beside in Zen meditation practice. Over time, my ambition it to build double-loop thinking into work and the systems we design and take to market, into my own learning and what I share with others, and into my relationships with Yoshie, our children, our friends and the larger circles I move in.

Sharing Things

 One way that I learn from my wife Yoshie is from the things we have around our apartment. We are living in a small fourth-floor walkup in Boston’s South End. The apartment is at the top of the building and puts us close to the sky. Yoshie brings many things home from our walks, or sees things in small pieces and cuttings that most people (myself included) would throw away. Studying these things, or just having them in the periphery of awareness as I work, infiltrates and shapes my thought in ways I am just beginning to understand.

I am not sure where this hour glass came from but it has become an important part of my mornings. I am usually up before dawn and one of the first things I do is turn this and let the grey sand begin to trickle down. By May there is usually some light and a tracing of bird song in the air by the time the sand is all at rest in the bottom of the glass. It is not quite an hour glass, it runs through a cycle in about 49 to 53 minutes. I am not sure what causes the variation, perhaps humidity.

 

 

Our apartment is full of the ends of things --- bits of wire, cloth scraps, notes with a few words, bike parts, whatevers. One thing one finds quite often is the slowly drying roots of foods we eat. The white rootlets of green onions are often lined up along the mantle in a study of how form is sharpened as an object dries. These are the roots from a couple of heads of red cabbage, several months old by now. They are dry and a bit brittle, and though you can’t see it in this photo (all the photos in this post are my own clumsy efforts) the way in which the leaves join with the stem can be seen much better than it could back when we were eating this in fall salads.

 

The painting is from my childhood. It is by Brenda Wallace, a close friend of mother’s, who for many years had one of the most interesting galleries in Montreal. I grew up dreaming about these shapes, and brought the painting back to Boston from Ottawa almost a year ago. It is on the bookshelf above the hour glass, the cloaked forms giving depth to the wall and a way back into memory.

Most weekends Yoshie and I will go for a long walk somewhere around Boston. We often take a train first, the commuter rail system around Boston is quite wonderful for getting out of the city and seeing the small New England towns that are so much the social fabric of Massachusetts. I ride through many of the same towns on my longer bike rides, but walking (especially with Yoshie) is a different experience. I hope that over the decades, as the car culture fades away, that the Lower Mainland of British Columbia will grow a network of small towns like this. The scale is human and democratic. This tin can was picked up on the road from Brockton station to the Fuller Craft Museum. I pinned the shoe insert underneath it to remind us of the walk.

Anything that reminds one of the sea and its wrack is good. Yoshie found this piece of rope on the beach at Rockport on Cape Anne. For some reason it makes me think of Richard Serra’s work, though I have no idea why. It also brings back memories of sailing trips. Once, many years ago, we were motoring south outside of Tokyo Bay in a thick fog and a dead calm, skirting the coast of the Chiba peninsula to stay out of the shipping lanes. We fowled a large water-logged cable, and I spent half an hour in the April ocean with a knife cutting us clear. That was as cold as I ever need to be. The rope on our wall, with its frayed ends and faint sea stink, has two tight splices, quite well done, the work of strong hands.

Yoshie works with her hands and there are usually small examples of her work here and there on the table or counters. Her main work desk is covered with the tools of her trade. Small pliers and hammers, scissors, files, crotchet hooks and the materials she works with – industrial paper and packing materials, wires, bits of plastic, small beads and strange little plastic knick-knacks in well organized patterns. I could spend a long time thinking about these patterns and what she keeps in hand’s reach. Most of my own work is with words or in conversations. It helps me to see the small tools she works with and it reminds me how important the hand and human touch is to shaping the mind.

  Sometimes she hangs her work on the wall in the entrance hall. Coming home and finding new forms on the wall sparks all sorts of new ideas for me. The piece on the left here was made for an exhibition on art made from found objects. It includes egg cups, old gold brocade, and the knit wire forms that Yoshie is known for. Hanging there, with the door to the fuse box as background …

People who work with me know that I like to have books around. I even read some of them. Being able to walk into a room and see the patterns of ideas suggested by a collection of book spines is a special joy, and I like to watch how the sequences of books on the shelves evolve over time. I tend to pull twenty or thirty books off our stacks over the course of a week. I may not actually read any of these, just glance through the index or read a few pages. Sometimes it is just the colour of the cover that catches my eye. At some point the books have to go back on the shelves and I usually just deposit them in groups wherever they happen to fit. So the books found together are sometimes a good picture of my interests at a point in time, until they get shuffled back into the general shelves, pulled out for more careful reading, or given to friends. I wonder how this will work for me with eBooks. I expect to use a Kindle or some similar device soon, if only to leave some room in the apartment for something other than books.

This yellow construction was also picked up on the shore of Cape Anne on a trip soon after we moved to Boston. I think it broke off a piece of fishing equipment. Cape Anne is important to us for its association with the port Charles Olson, who lived many of his most productive years in the major fishing port of Gloucester. We use it to prop the back door open (the door opens onto a deck some fifty feet above the back gardens, level with the tree tops). Sometimes I bring this piece of scrap to the table and keep it by me as I work. The worn yellow with corrosion showing through, the repeated cubes, the combination of past use and present, what, something anyway, helps me to focus and keep going. The sea is a hard way, and people who fish have more knowledge and make a harder effort at greater risk than most of us. This piece of scrap, picked from the rocks with a large sea running, seems to me as important as any work I am likely to do.

Learning from my connections on LinkedIn

About a month ago I posed a question on LinkedIn about how effective social software systems including LinkeIn are at supporting learning. This provoked much useful (to me anyway) discussion, which I summarized earlier. But one comment in particular stuck with me. Jon Husband, originator of the organizational design theory of wirearchy, pointed out that you get out of a learning network what you put in. So for the past month I have been working hard at using LinkedIn (and to a lesser extent FaceBook) as a learning network. It has been working.

I have done this primarily by seeding questions I am interested in into my network and provoking discussion. This has been successful in a number of ways, with success seeming to depend on the nature of the question and who I was able to draw in to the discussion.

I began with a somewhat technical question.

Is there a standard semantic model for business strategy frameworks?

"My new company LeveragePoint is built on a semantic platform (SMW+, triple store, etc.). Our business is to support the activation, embedding and evolution of strategies at organizations, at this point we focus on marketing strategies. The platform integrates the implementation and communication of strategies with learning and collaboration. We try to be as standards based as possible. We use DC and FOAF and are implementing SKOS and SIOC. Is there something similar for business strategies? If not is there anyone interested in developing one with us? This would need to cover the following types of strategies: Economic Value Estimation, Value Footprint, Segmentation (various approaches), Buying Process, Customer Portrait, Scenario Planning, Sustainable Business Strategies (Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle)."

This is a more important question than it may appear at first glance. Public vocabularies are the key to the semantic web and if the semantic web is going to be useful for business the vocabularies need to address business needs. Existing vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Dublin Core (DC) are powerful in their own domains, but they don’t address business issues. Google’s recent announcement of RDFa support is an example of how not to go about building such a vocabulary. Google’s vocabulary at Data-Vocabulary.org manages to add little to the public domain while ignoring the already existing power of FOAF and DC. Hopefully Google will open up and realize that what they need to be doing is to providing an open index of semantic vocabularies, leveraging the work of other in the same way they use the effort people make to link websites as a way to improve search!

Anyway, on the surface this question had a poor response, only two public answers, but there were also a number of private responses that pointed me in the right direction. Especially useful were comments from my friends at Vulcan that pointed me towards the work that Tom Malone and his group at MIT are doing on vocabularies for organizing business information.

I followed up my business model question with one on RDFa.

How are (will) search engines leveraging RDFa?

"My company LeveragePoint is developing a simple model of how a company's offers (services and products) provide value to its clients and solve business problems. This is a subset of the semantics behind our applications. We may also provide a simple form driven tool to generate this information as RDFa for inclusion on a website. We would like to know if and how search engines would index this information and how they would use it. We are interested in meeting with semantic search companies at SemTech in San Jose this June to discuss."

This provided some very useful exchanges, although again most of these were private. The question drew answers from people at Yahoo, Microsoft and Google that were very encouraging. I think there will be a role for RDFa in the public web and the response to this LinkedIn question encouraged me to begin to develop a business vocabulary to map needs, offers and value to one and other. This is based on Tom Nagle and John Hogan’s work on Economic Value Estimation and links to emerging work on value networks and the economic and value exchanges that flow across these networks. I will share more about this approach in the future, which is being developed under the name NOVO (for Needs Offer Value Ontology).

Enough semantic web geekiness, I thought, let’s explore some ideas around virtual and mobile technologies, provoked by recent experiences with iPhones and Android.

Will mobile and virtual blend?

"I have been thinking a lot about how people use and will use mobile devices. A couple of days ago I began to read Edward Castronova's book Exodus to the Virtual World. Let's assume he is right and living in virtual worlds will become a large part of the economy. Will the mobile and virtual trends continue in parallel or at some point do they blend? If so how? One possibility is sketched in the new novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez where game style overlays give players a critical advantage in the 'real' world."

This question seemed to strike a chord. There were seventeen public answers and another twelve direct responses. The answers caused me to think more deeply about the question and identified some developments I was not aware of. Chuck Hamilton, who is involved in virtual world projects at IBM was especially helpful, pointing me to Bobba. Richard Smith pointed me to a great TEDs talk on the subject. There were many thought provoking responses, I encourage those who are inrested to read through clicking on the links. Thank you to all who contributed. I’ll give Jesse Wang at Vulcan the last word though “So, the real issue is that  the virtual and real world will blend, and mobile will be a key medium to accelerate it..” Wow. I just finished reading Brian Rotman’s excellent book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being and I think Jesse is right, the real and the virtual are blending, and changing our identities, our math and how we share and intermingle our ideas.

Experimenting with LinkedIn has been disappointing in one regard. So far most of the questions have resulted in answers to me rather than in conversations with and between my friends. Things went a bit better on my most recent question, which has resulted in more dialog.

Is there such a thing as "design thinking" that applies across disciplines?

"Many people refer to themselves as architects. There are product architects, software architects, network architects, social architects ... And many people refer to themselves as designers. Is there a common set of ideas, heuristics, algorithms and codes that apply across the different design disciplines? Can there be? Should there be?"

This question resulted in eighteen public answers and a number of e-mail conversations between people. It also drew answers from everyone from prominent software engineering savants like Philippe Kructhen (the articles he points to are well worth reading for anyone interested in design), to practicing architects, interface designers and information architects. The only things missing was an old relational database bear (I am still looking to provoke one). There is a consensus that there is such a thing as design thinking and that it needs to be better researched. I am looking forward to doing some design thinking on how to represent design thinking, and I hope to attend and if necessary to host some conferences in this area over the next few years.

So, is LinkedIn a good tool for supporting learning conversations? Maybe. My network is certainly a good place to have these conversations, and by using LinkedIn as a vehicle I have been able to learn from people that were not my direct contacts. This is very good. But, so far anyway, I have not been able to get the kinds of deep multi-directional exchanges I am hoping for (even if the Design Thinking question and answer was a step in the right direction). Is this because of LinkedIn and how it is organized? Or perhaps it is the nature of my friends (we are an opinionated bunch, and not always as good at listening as we could be). Maybe I just need to learn to phrase the questions better and to guide the conversation. All things to think about, and maybe to ask on LinkedIn!

Body Memory

The deepest learning seems to be physical, bound into muscle and bone, printed on the skin, and found in the repeated firing of nerve patterns. I dream that my bicycle learns from me, in the way my riding style and paths tune its vibrations. I know that my body learns from my bicycle. The deeper I can embody abstract thought the better I remember it and the wider the web of associations it can weave. Makes me wish I was a dancer, or at least a musician.

Now that it is spring, and I am riding longer and faster, I am noticing body memories from other sports in how I corner my bike or try to read traffic patterns to avoid the most dangerous places on the road. Dodging my bike to the right around a car that has suddenly lurched into my path I sometimes lead the turn with my right shoulder. The feeling is almost like running gates, something I did a lot in winter on skis, more than twenty years ago. The same balance and confidence I feel on skis I also feel on my bike, and the same ability to feel the terrain and react quickly is one of the things that keeps me safe. Riding faster, into a wider turn, I stay square on the bike, but drive to the left with my right leg and right shoulder, like carving a turn into ice. Of course you can't carve a turn into ice on a bike, but on a good road the feeling is the same. My years skiing all sorts of slopes in all kinds of weather help me stay up on my bike and have tuned my peripheral senses and tied them to my reactions.

The physical link between skiing and cycling is, for me anyway, very much short term and in the moment. But there are other body memories I call on when I am managing LeveragePoint (where I am CEO). When I lived in Tokyo in the 1980s we had a Yamaha 26 sailboat and spent a lot of time on the open water outside and beyond Tokyo Bay. One thing I like about sailing is that the present can become much longer. One spends time watching the sky for cloud patterns, feeling how the tide run is changing the current and working out how the wind and waves will shape up over the next hour, three hours, day or week. One lives in an extended present. Accidents at sea are often several hours (even days) in the making and happen when one doesn't bother to think ahead. Sailing into Tokyo Bay it was always important to work out the trajectories of the ships (it is a very crowded seaway), time the tide (especially if there was a low and the wind was coming up) and find a safe way through. One lived in the present and the future at the same time. I sometimes try to be in this mindspace when I am making decisions about the company and where we need to go. There is a lot of immediate pressure, especially with a new company in a transforming economy, and one is tempted to respond to the immediate needs and issues, many of which turn around survival. But I find I make better decisions if I bring my mind and body back to a state similar to that I am in when sailing. I try to keep in close contact with the present, following the instant messaging threads, watching the issues emerge on our development tracking system, following our CRM, and most importantly talking to people. But my goal is to track the present in the context of our future trajectories, and make immediate decisions that will, bit by bit, take us into a better place. At a small company, the big strategic moves are made in the tactical decisions. Each of these small decisions is committing us to a future that is always coming into being.

Body learning also helps me make abstract concepts real and to embed them in memory. I am reading Brian Rotman's book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being this week. He reinforces the importance of gesture and diagram in mathematical thinking (he is channeling Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Chatelat here) and the close links that exist between the body and the abstract. I see this everyday walking around the office and looking at the scrawls on the white boards and in people's notes. (I ran into Bruce Chew this week, Bruce is one of the wisest people I have ever met, in a room that has four walls of white boards, he had worked his way around three of them and was delighted to still have one more left.) The transformation of these visual gestures into code, and then back into vizualizations is a big part of what LeveragePoint does. Part of Economic Value Estimation's power lies in the simple and easy to read image of relative value that it provides. Over the next few years we will be trying to make these vizualizations even more powerful by keeping them simple, and making them into shared gestures that people can use to think together.

Creating a simple set of gestures can be a great mnemonic. For example, I find Kevin Lynch's five pattern's of urban navigation to be a very useful frame for thinking about navigation in general. To help me to remember these, and to explain them to other people, I have come up with a simple gesture for each pattern:

• Landmark: A 'thumb's up sign'

• Neighbohood: Hand spread, palm down

• Border: A chopping motion with the hand

• Pathway: A sweeping motion with the index finger extended

• Node: Hand spread, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of the other hand

One can even string these gesture together in a sentence. The Charles River is a Barrier on my way from the South End to MIT (chopping motion with my hand), but Harvard Bridge provides a Pathway over (sweeping motion with my hand, index finger extended), and leads to the Node of Kendal Square (hand open, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of my other hand), a Neighborhood that I like to explore (hand open, palm down, sweeping motions of the hand to suggest exploring the area).

It will be interesting to see how body learning transfers back and forth from virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, especially as user interfaces like the Nintendo Wii become the basic way we live in these places. The potential of these worlds for a physical form of learning may be the key to their rapidly growing popularity as places for people to learn together.

In any case, I am going to try to become more aware of the role that my body, physical memory, gesture and shared motion play in my own learning and that of my team.

A final thought from Rotman,

"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their prepatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away and completions - the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them."

from Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, Duke University Press, 2008, page 23.

Leveraging Social Software for Learning

On March 29 I posted the below question on LinkedIn.

How are people using social software to support learning?

I think most of us agree that there is an important social dimension to learning. But in what ways do social software applications such as LinkedIn and FaceBook help people to learn? I am an active FaceBook user (but only with friends and family) and am making more use of LinkedIn, but I don't find either particularly effective in supporting my learning or the small circles of people that I learn with. Am I missing something? I do find Wikipedia to be a powerful learning tool, one that I access almost everyday and for which I write at least two or three articles a year. But this mostly a solitary activity, except on those few occasions that a useful discussion erupts. Social tagging systems like del.icio.us and CrowdTurust seem to have more potential as social learning tools, but my gut feeling is that they have not yet flowered for this use. So, how are people using social media to enhance their own and their group's learning? 

You can find the question and the thread of answers here.

If you parse this out, the question is self referential, as it was an attempt to learn over LinkedIn while asking a question about Learning on LinkedIn! In this sense, anyway, the question answered itself. LinkedIn did help me learn, and it helped me to learn when I consciously used it to do so.

So what did I learn? Before digging into this I want to take a quick look at who answered the question. Last Sunday (March 29, 2009) I used LinkedIn’s ‘Ask a Question’ function to send the above question to 200 people on my network. I skipped people that I work with everyday at LeveragePoint and Monitor Group and made sure that as many people as possible in my network who are interested in learning, performance support, knowledge management and social media were recipients.

	On Linked In		Direct                Total
	Public	Private
1 st Degree	19	2	5
2 nd Degree	4
Other	2
Total	25	2	5	32
Response Rate	16.0%
On Linked In	13.5%
Direct	2.5%
Public	12.5%
Private	3.5%
Total	200

In my question I mentioned LinkedIn, FaceBook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us and CrowdTrust. It was interesting to see what other applications were mentioned in people’s responses and how often they were mentioned (these numbers are of course skewed by the applications mentioned in the question itself). My taxonomy is a bit arbitrary here, but hopefully suggestive.

Currently Popular Community Applications        11

                Facebook                                                            4

                MySpace                                                             1

                LinkedIn                                                              4

                Jigsaw                                                                  1

                YouTube                                                              1

Wikis                                                                                    10

                MediaWiki                                                          2

                Semantic MediaWiki                                        3

                Wikipedia                                                           2

                Zoho                                                                     1

                Confluence                                                          1

                SocialText                                                            1

Social Tagging                                                                   7

                Del.icio.us                                                           1

                CrowdTrust                                                         2

                Flickr                                                                    2

                Twine                                                                    2

Blogging Applications                                                    4

                Blogger                                                                 2

                Typepad                                                               1

                Wordpress                                                          1

Social Messaging                                                             3

                Twitter                                                                 3

Virtual Worlds                                                                 3

                SecondLife                                                          3

Legacy                                                                                2

                FirstClass                                                            1

                Learning Management Systems                       1

There were a few surprises for me here. On the positive side, Jon Husband had a compelling argument for blogs that I will discuss below, Lorraine Chisholm, Reg Nordman and Norman Birnbach all had good stories to tell about learning using Twitter and our friends at IBM (Michael Littlejohn and Chuck Hamilton) made a strong case creating collaborative learning environments inside SecondLife (something IBM excels at). On the other hand, I was surprised that no one mentioned instant messaging and Skype as a good way to support learning (I was with a client recently who wants to have IM integrated into its learning solutions) and I was disappointed that there was no discussion of social search as a mode of learning (I am thinking of applications like Wikia Search).

So, what did I learn? The most important thing is the most obvious. You get out of a community what you invest into it, and this is especially true when you want to learn socially. This is why I found Jon Husband’s response so compelling. He pointed out that good bloggers understand that they are part of a community and that they are engaged in conversations with other members of their community. And the best blogging platforms (such as Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress) provide functions such as Trackback and Comments that support the creation of these communities.

The biggest surprise for me was the way in which Twitter is supporting learning. Three very different people all called this out: Lorraine was a software engineer with a fine arts background and is now a user experience designer, while Reg Nordman is a consultant with a focus on sales and Norm Birnbach is a public relations guy who makes excellent use of social media tools in his own work.

Lorraine Chisholm’s comments…

“For example, recently the IxDA had a conference in Vancouver that had a very useful twitter stream. I have found that following the right people leads to a wealth of material and insights that have catalyzed my professional development. The beauty of this is that you are always discovering new colleagues to follow and trimming others to create your own customized and finely tuned stream. Good control over signal to noise ratio. I was a total Twitter skeptic, but it turned out to be a very useful and inspiring tool, once I grokked it.”

Norman Birnbach’s comments…

“We've been using Twitter as a learning tool. Beyond participating on Twitter itself, which has been useful (and has led to a couple of media placements as well as a better understanding of what reporters are interested in), there is Twitter's culture: you get and maintain followers by being informative. We've found lots of useful articles, blog posts, and podcasts, which we circulate among the team, and often discuss as a team. In return, we provide useful links and insights to people following us on Twitter.”

Reg Nordman’s comments…

“I have discovered that the numerous twitter aggregations (ie tweetdeck) that allow you to run multiple live searches on key words etc is very useful to my directed research. 
e.g. lead generation articles, fuel cell news, and so on.”

Reg’s comment was especially thought provoking as I began playing with Oneriot this week. This is a Twitter search engine that tracks URLs in tweets and then goes out and builds a rich index based on these URLs. This gives a much richer idea of the conversation than an index of the tweets alone could provide.

Then I got thrown a curve ball from David Vogt. David is a physicist by training and is exceptionally skilled at applying physics metaphors to the phase shift that is happening in learning. In his own words,

“Your question leans on a 'classical' model of learning - just when the web is enabling us to harness learning in 'quantum' terms. 

Consider "my learning" as a set of 'interest vectors' entangled with broader societal interest vectors. Both sets are evolving. There's a strange loop relationship between them. 

Entanglement is where the money is. For example, I learn a lot from reading the New York Times because it does a great job of amplifying social interest vectors, even though I'll never be able to unravel the people and research that makes them a great amplifier. I also learn a lot from Google because I can specify one of my interest vectors with a few keywords and it always feeds me something fresh. 

Similarly, my "value" rests with my ability to amplify the resonances between my individual vectors and those of society (for example, a great blog may synthesize two or three of my vectors). A learner's problem has always been that amplifying personal entanglements is hard work. Facebook and LinkedIn provide very low ROI. And all available amplifiers are analog (rarely amplifying more than one vector at a time). 

Properly done, web2 should make entanglement fully digital, and fully in my control. “

There were a few answers from people in the academic world as well. Richard Smith at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver pointed out that most young people (i) don’t have the networks of experts they need to get their questions answered and (ii) do not necessarily know how to frame questions so that they will get good responses. This may well be true (but see Kyle Dionne-Clark’s response, Kyle is in third year at McGill in Montreal). Given this, one of the skills we need to support (and not just with students) is the learning of how to build a network of diverse experts who can help one to learn, how to ask questions of this network, and how to make sure you provide value back.

Looking at my own use of these tools in learning, wikis and social tagging have been key. My company makes extensive use of Semantic MediaWiki both in its applications and as an internal learning tool. I use Semantic MediaWiki as a learning tool everyday. I also use one or another of the social tagging systems everyday. These applications suit my personal learning style, which I have characterized elsewhere as Abstract, Historical, Written, Modeling, Social.

So here are my ‘working rules’ on how to leverage social software to amplify learning.

1.  Invest in your network, engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, share resources.

2. Use the applications that suit your own learning style. In my case, it is the ability to make and discover connections that makes social tagging and wikis so compelling, and the ability to model and think using models that makes semantic technologies useful.

3. Blend different applications to create new communities and experiences. I use social tagging and semantic wikis together. Other people are making excellent use of Twitter and Facebook, or blogs and social search. There is no one application that will suit all of our needs.