The Philosopher's View

Waiting for another plane, I stumbled upon the blog and the website of an obviously brilliant thinker (sometimes I wish I had studied philosophy and mathematics but I know I would have failed, or suffered from constant migrane): Stephen Downes, from National Research Council, Institute for Information Technology, in Moncton, New Brunswick. In his blog, Half An Hour, he has just posted an article on The Reality of Virtual Learning.

Don't expect me to summarize a 17-page blog post while I am about to board. Probably this article will keep me awake on my flight to Cape Town. It is a tour de force through change management, learning, e-learning, virtual versus "real" realities, Web 2.0. Read more...

Last Day of Procedere Meeting - What to Do?

Synthesis of a three days meeting of network and collaboration specialists. Robert Schneider, a Swiss manager of a medium size company, at the same time self-employed trainer and coach. He gives perspective on our topic - what to do to promote collaborative methods in industry and society, and how to make stakeholders to collaborators. Read more...

What's needed?

At the Proceders conference, Raban Daniel Fuhrmann talks about what's needed to make the application of collaborative methods more popular in Processes of change in society and industry. He says we need to be aware and to increase awareness on a broader scale. He provides an interesting way of categorization of change interventions: If you look at the time frame of methodologies, there are:


- methods (which takes seconds or minutes)
- events (hours/days)
- projects (weeks/months)
- organizations (years)


Read more...

How to manage complexity

I am currently attending a conference of the German network Procedere which takes stock of participative methods in organizations. The underlying question "Woran hängts" (what's the problem?) assumes that these methods are not taking off as we thought they should. I might take a counterposition to that notion in my keynote speech tomorrow. Read more...