Hello! Welcome to acidlabs. If you’re new here, you may want to read about Stephen Collins or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
acidlabs and Hinchcliffe & Company are pleased to announce that they agreed to a partnership that will see acidlabs deliver Web 2.0 University’s courses in Australia and New Zealand. Partnering also with Web Directions, who will provide event hosting and publicity, Web 2.0 University is a first in the region.
Web 2.0 University is the world’s leading education service to help business and technical leaders move their businesses into the 21st Century. Web 2.0 University contains practical and hard hitting premium education that delves deeply into the design patterns and business models for taking businesses fully into the modern online world.
Aimed at both the Fortune 500 and web startup audience, Web 2.0 University delivers must-know knowledge on how to design next generation online products and services. Thousands of product managers, executives, and architects on three continents have completed this highly rated Web 2.0 education.
acidlabs will deliver Hinchcliffe & Company’s Web 2.0 University courses in the region, and thanks to our expertise in understanding the needs of regional business through our consulting activities, will deliver the courses custom tailored for the local market
In addition to the general events, acidlabs will offer company-tailored versions tuned to the specific needs of organisations.
The Founder of Web 2.0 University is Dion Hinchcliffe, President & Chief Technology Officer of the Enterprise Web 2.0 advisory and consulting firm Hinchcliffe & Company, based in Alexandria, VA. Dion speaks and writes prolifically in addition to working with clients ranging from Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies to technology startups. He is Editor-in-Chief of Social Computing Magazine and as well as publishing and blogging widely speaks throughout North America and Europe about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Enterprise Social Software, and SOA.
Alexandria, Virginia based Hinchcliffe & Company is one of the world’s most highly-regarded Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 consultancies, assisting its clients through strategic services including consulting, advisories, briefings and education.
Today I confirmed that I’ll be speaking at one of Australia’s (if not the world’s) best knowledge management conferences - actKM.
It’s a highly-regarded event and some of the best KM people in the world will be attending - Dave Snowden, David Gurteen and my friends Matt Moore and Matthew Hodgson. These people are folks I look up to greatly so I’ll need to be on my game!
The official program is announced soon, so watch for it if you’re even a little interested in knowledge management.
I’m a couple of days behind on the announcement, but here it is…
Stewart Mader, formerly of Atlassian, has now gone independent. He’s using his serious knowledge of wikis to trade as a specialist wiki consultant with his company Grow your Wiki. Stewart’s a great guy and expert on using wikis’ amazing capability to bring information to life, and get people more deeply involved in the creation, growth, and use of the knowledge available to your organisation.
If you’ve not already bought Stewart’s great book, Wikipatterns, you should. And, if you need a wiki consultant, grab him!
As the parent of a child not too far off entering high school, a number of issues surrounding her education concern me. Not least of which is how are governments in Australia - Federal and State - dealing with the increasing need for students of today to have an education that is connected, collaborative and conversational.
It’s my view that schools are falling a long way behind the 8-ball in terms of providing our children with the type of education they need these days:
connected - yes our schools are largely online, but use of online resources is limited by computer availability, blocking of legitimate resources, lack of teacher training in using online resources. It’s often the case that the kids are ahead of the teachers in their skill level at finding and exploiting online resources, or that sites that contain blacklisted words are blocked in spite of legitimate educational content, or that resources in schools are so tight that kids get physical access to a computer in class or the library only occasionally;
engaging - the classroom is still largely run on an Industrial Age model where our kids are taught to behave like factory automatons, ready for a job on the production line. It’s anti-creative and busywork focused and not at all designed to equip our children for a world where bursty thinking, creative knowledge work is ever-increasingly the norm. Take a look at Sir Ken Robinson’s talk from TED 2006 if you’re not convinced:
dynamic, diverse and passionate - literacy and numeracy are unarguably critical components in a well-rounded education. But the target shouldn’t be “functional literacy and numeracy”, it should be deep expertise. As well, the notion of creative and arts subjects as lesser to literacy and numeracy is madness. In all schools, the aim should be to produce graduating students that are not only appropriately educated in many subjects, but to do so in such a way as the students are invigorated and excited by the things they are taught. We need to graduate more people like polymath, Ben Dunlap, of Wofford College. Ben’s talk at TED 2007 is truly incredible:
delivered by the best possible teachers - my daughter’s teachers have been largely very good, but it’s not enough. Teachers need to be driven, passionate, exceptional. And they need to be paid for it. The best teachers with the best outcomes in their classes should be paid a wage and bonuses that reflect their excellence. By no means am I saying that teachers aren’t good enough. Mostly they are. But the system they work with doesn’t allow them to fly. Until only recently, Australian teaching unions were vehemently opposed to performance pay for teachers;
collaborative on as many levels as possible - between students, between teachers and students, between classrooms, between different schools, between different countries. I especially want to see more involvement from parents, particularly in areas of low socio-economic profile. The involvement and encouragement offered by parents in the education process is a key factor in educational success or lack thereof (I am witnessing this first hand in my extended family);
targeted at producing graduates equipped for work in the 21st Century - in Australia there is a massive skills shortage across many industries. It’s arguable our schools, from primary school to universities, are not adequately considering the needs of business and society in preparing graduates for work and worthwhile, functional participation. Issues such as the shift to knowledge work in much of business, the need for creativity, the apparent schisms between worker generations are all issues I feel are sometimes inadequately dealt with.
I’ve been thinking about these issues for a while now, but was prompted to write about them by two events:
my friend, Bronwen Clune, contacting me and suggesting that we create a movement in Australia to take action on these very issues from the point of view of connected, digitally empowered parents, and;
a visit, to happen tomorrow, to my daughter’s school board (of which I am a member) by the State Opposition Leader, Zed Seselja, so that he can put his party’s position on education.
My view is that there is just one critical question we should be asking our educators and the politicians responsible for education policy and programs:
What are you actually doing - now, tomorrow, next year - that will ensure our children are equipped with the best connected tools, inspired and engaged by the diversity of their education, taught by the best possible teachers and equipped with all the right skills to enter society as a valuable, contributing collaborative member of the workforce?
I’m not interested in policy exploration, white papers, committees and the like. I’m interested in positive, measurable action.
An interactive view of the all the memes that swept across the internet and burrowed in our zeitgeist. Potentially an enormous timesuck as you casually wander off down the rabbit hole…
Some of my recent talks discussed the notion of weak ties and their power in social networks. Mark Granovetter was one of the original people to talk about this phenomenon, way back in 1973. This is his staff profile at Stanford with links to many of his published papers.
My friend, Laurel Papworth, posits an interesting theory about content creation and generational learning. I believe she’s absolutely on to something here.
Organizations shouldn’t avoid Web 2.0 participation for a fear of bad behavior said IT research firm Gartner. Instead they should anticipate it as part of a multi-level, trust-based social experience backed by a well-defined policy.
This post just discusses the report, which you can have for your very own for the low, low price of US$495. Grrr.
Companies are using more Web 2.0 tools and technologies than they were last year, sometimes for more complex business purposes, according to McKinsey’s second annual survey on Web 2.0. Companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise.
Starbuck’s failure in Australia has nothing to do with branding, but it does have a lot to do with a failure of understanding your market. Australia has a well-established cafe culture and good coffee can be found pretty much everywhere.
My experience in Australia of Starbucks is universally bad. In the US, it was universally pretty good.
Stephen Collins is Founder and Chief Troublemaker at acidlabs. This is his personal blog and the official web presence of acidlabs.
This blog looks at trends in social media and networking, knowledge work and the knowledge economy and issues of management and leadership, focusing on their respective influences and applicability to the business world and life in general as we build understanding of the disruptive nature of these tools and the power they place in the hands of consumers and workers.
Stewart Mader, formerly of Atlassian, has now 
