A fractal. Latin fractus, meaning fractured. It is recursive by definition.

What comes to my mind is the Mandelbrot set. In 1975, Benoît Mandelbrot first coined the term fractal. Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models of many “rough” phenomena in the real world. In The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) he writes:

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

If something is rough, that’s learning. As you approach a new topic, you start from a fuzzy idea of what it could be. As it comes into focus, new details expose themselves on the fringes, enabling you to discover even more interesting perspectives you were not aware beforehand.

Fractals are seen in many parts of nature. Even fractal cosmology exists as an area of study. In a New Scientist article (2007) Labini & Pietronero asked the question, “Is the universe a fractal?“. Their study of nearly a million galaxies suggests that the matter in the universe is arranged in a fractal pattern up to a scale of about 100 million light years.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy in the universe increases over time, as change happens. In layman terms that would be analogous to a room getting messed up over time as people live in it. In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in the system that is no longer available. As entropy increases in the universe, at the same time incredibly intricate and detailed order emerges from the details. Think of the human brain on planet earth for example.

Fibonacci spirals also depict the fractal pattern of beauty in nature. Golden ratio is a very well known principle in mathematics and art, first originating in the Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) in the 13th century. Good examples of forms with Fibonacci spirals include the spirals of shells, various flowerings, the branching of trees and arrangement of leaves on a stem.

The internet looks like a fractal.

So what do fractals have to do with learning?

When considering learning, we are pattern recognizers. Just like fractals, our neural networks evolve over time and extend outside of us. As our environment changes, so do we.  As we process information, in addition to entropy, new patterns emerge. By increasing the ammount of information, you increase the possibility of new patterns to be recognized by people.

In the digital world, entropy is information overload and order is the pattern that emerges from the interconnection of such information.

Knowledge is like a hologram. In holograms, even smaller pieces of it include the picture of the whole object. Knowledge is like a hologram. The experience changes as your point of view towards the object changes. The knowledge is not in a single image, but distributed on a network.

This is pattern recognition. And it’s the culmination of fractal learning. It’s a Mandelbrot set that zooms into the details indefinitely. Universe is fractal by nature. So is learning fractal by nature. It’s rough, it’s self-similar, it’s recursive and increasing the likelihood for serendipity is key for building higher structures.

Here is a recent Finnish presentation recording of my talk on the subject at a conference (Verkkoja kokemassa):

Here are my slides from the Distance Education & Teaching conference in Madison, USA (still waiting for the presentation recording to be published):

Here are the slides, a nice remix of some new, recent and past work:

Some of my advice for libraries:

• Focus on the end-user and customer experience, not just the information.
• Look beyond first hand metadata, to second party recommendations and third-party metadata.
• Utilize open data more, build interfaces for people to do mashups with.
• Transform the library facility to something that encourages participation or new reasons to go to a library.
• Build mobile applications to locate books and get instant social navigation to library books on-location and online.
• Understand the changing framework, not just the the (changing) content.
• Don’t do the mistake of replicating libraries online as it is. They already did the mistake of replicating the classroom online.
• The web is not a destination, but a network of decentralized components. Harness the network properties.
• Look at QR-codes or similar cheap technologies and stamp them into every book for contextual information.
• Look into mass-customization: how to customize the library experience to each individual regarding recommendations etc.
• Understand the technological, social and economical drivers for future developments.
• Rethink the virtual visit to complement physical visits.
• Look into user-generated taxonomies (folksonomies), information visualization and new ways for “putting the same book in multiple shelves”.
• Understand contextuality provided by the web and how to tap into it from the library perspective.
• Stop watching TV and work on (the next) wikipedia.
• What augmented reality applications could libraries develop/use?
• Involve the net generation or experts from outside your own field for rethinking the justification for your existence.

Google’s mission is the same as libraries have had for centuries. It’s time to understand digital convergence in new ways.

Most conferences are organized and provided from the top down. Social technologies, peer-production and open innovation models provide new opportunities for people to organize events from the bottom up. Social media applications can support event planners and participants before, during and after the event. Many alternative approaches exist, but most of them still demand a lot of technical skills, vision and labor from the part of organizers. There are also a lot of interesting concepts for running more participative events physically and how things might connect to virtual environments, but the information is scattered around the web. In my presentation I will go through some of the most interesting concepts, ideas and tools for running better, digitally mediated events. I have applied some of these principles for a project called Bantora, that I’ve been working on lately. Early on in the development we paid attention to what happens before an event: how people find each other online and turn their passion and ideas into great events. Everything starts and ends as digital. In this presentation I will go through lessons learned about the role of social media at events and how to make the best out of it. Finally, I would like to present a vision of how better events could fundamentally change the way we interact and do our work.

Thanks to everyone for participating. Here are the slides and the recording is already available here (57min), recorded with Adobe Connect. Please provide feedback below.

In the presentation I also point at one of my projects called Bantora, that we opened last week for public beta. Bantora is about events++, making better events, time/space extended events, events that utilize social technologies and just get more of the good stuff out there. Keep in mind that we are just starting there, a lot of corners might be a bit rough, things are evolving in the next few months but we definitely would like to hear your feedback on how it could be improved.

This event (Spaces for Interaction) comes obviously at the right time regarding my personal interests. Maybe it’s about time for x-events to become a reality?

I would be interested in if someone knows about some other cool non-traditional face-to-face methods or some creative uses of social technologies at events that I have missed. Anything interesting coming to mind?

Video recording synced with slides available here.

Some of my thoughts at the workshop were recorded on video and some people asked if they could get back to those points, so I have gathered all of the video recordings where I’m talking below:

In the end of James Whatley’s presentation “Join the Community” I talk (starting at 02:20 on the video) about the net generation, born digital, information overload, pattern recognition, probing, we as sensory systems, self-organizing systems, prosumers, what is ownership in the digital age etc:

Link to video

In the end of Chris Moore’s presentation “Join and Collaborate” I showcase the human body metaphor for social technologies within organizations (starting at 06:28 on the video):

Link to video

Continued:

Link to video

In the end of Glenn Letham’s session “Join the Journey” right after the great guy from Yahoo! Research (around 03:10 in the video) I ranted about the internet of things and business opportunities in location aware applications. I was not supposed to talk but I managed to hit the table by accident, so I obviously had to give it a shot:

Link to video

Also check out Adam Greenfield’s keynote presentation, which was really inspirational to me (four parts, you can find the rest from the site).

Incredible 15 minutes by Clay Shirky on where our time is wasted and where it can be regenerated: TV.

To rephrase Clay Shirky, people in media are the last ones to ask the question, where people find the time to contribute to projects like Wikipedia. No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus media has been masking for 50 years.

In US alone, people watch television around 200 billion hours. That accounts for 2000 Wikipedia projects.

I haven’t watched TV for 2 years. What a feeling to wake up from dormancy.

In Finland, we have something called the TV fee. It is a permission to consume what you see on public television for a relatively high fee.

With recent development in Finland where people are increasingly fleeing from the duty to pay the permit, the solution is not more content, but more interaction. I was thinking, if this permission to consume could be turned around into a permission to produce. A citizen would get their own TV channel (videocasts, mobile blogs), their own radio channel (podcasts), their own news paper (blogs) and means to tap into the collective action of untapped productive potential of millions of fins and billions of citizens of the spaceship earth (social networking) for a small fee. That’s the direction where nationally funded media should head. I don’t know if there is anyone listening.

I make this statement in an interview with Olli-Pekka Heinonen, who is a director at Finnish National Broadcasting Company. They do have the right attitude, but I have to say that the gears are turning slowly (like with any large behemoth):

When I say presentation design, I’m talking about the approach on how you create your slides to complement (rather than overload) your story, how simplicity is applied and how metaphors or visuals are used to support your message. You might also consider the flow of your presentation, when you throw jokes, when you go into details, when you ask the audience a question, how you develop the story, when you add some audio or video and how to apply some cross-media feats.

This sounds quite simple but it requires a lot of practice, time and patience. Anyone can be a great presenter, even if you believe you don’t have any sensibility for visual communication. By applying some simple steps of advice you can get so much better results. Here is what I would suggest in order to improve an existing slide full of bullet points and corporate branding:

• Drop the bullet points to the notes section. If you know your stuff, you don’t need them. If you really must, split the slide so that you have a slide for each bullet point
• Think of a metaphor that could illustrate your point to draw the picture in the mind of your audience just as it is (think Jesus, much of his success is based on inspiring metaphors)
• If you cannot come up with a metaphor, use a simple photo to illustrate your point (see istockphoto.com for examples)
• If you need to add words, use a 2-5 words or use a short quote, if possible
• Never position text over a detailed part of your image, because it interferes with the background and reduces readability. If you need, edit the photo by reducing detail on certain parts with fades or blur, or cut it into pieces
• Use high quality photos. If the photo is a bit dull, use the built-in features to cheer it up by adding contrast or fiddling with gamma and brightness settings
• Remove all slide numbers, corporate branding, visually unnecessary elements and links. You can have those on their individual slides (e.g. on the beginning and end), but not on every slide
• If you really need motion, add slide animation that makes sense and supports the image (say, if you have a picture of a book, use a page flip transition)
• Make sure all elements are lined up symmetrically to slide borders or other considerable boundaries
• If your presentation has some identifiable major sections, you might want to use some slides to identify change of phase. Use similar style on each that stands out of the rest
• Use the largest font size you can afford with a readable font (arial, verdana, gill sans…)
• Use font color that sticks out of the background. With dark backgrounds use white or a very light color, with white backgrounds use slightly gray black or any almost black color
• If you have a Mac, use Apple Keynote to get really professional results with less work
• Be proud to do things differently than anyone else in the conference

With this approach you will get slides that do not interfere with your speech (avoid all situations where people start to read your slides or need binoculars to make sense of it). When using images and less words, the photos as metaphors give you much more freedom to modify your presentation on the fly if you need to.

The next step is to forget slides altogether, maybe even making your presentation completely non-linear and spontaneous.

For more advice, see the following excellent presentation by Garr Reynolds worth every minute of your time:

| View

I also created a 2×2 matrix to explain my strategy for releasing my presentation recordings. I usually use a camcorder with a wireless microphone to record my talks and I make them available in one way or another – even if the talk was complete failure, as illustrated in the chart below:

1. Top performance and great ideas
   Action: Video goes unedited on the internet. Job done.
2. Top performance but boring rambling
   Action: If you have less of those great ideas, it helps to drop back to audio form and edit out the parts that are complete nonsense.
3. Weary and unanimated performance, but great ideas
   Action: Better cut out the boring looks and bad hairday, and just release the audio podcast.
4. Weary and unanimated performance combined with boring rambling
   Action: If you look bad and the content is from somewhere down under, it’s better just cook up a fantasy of what you thought should have happened, in other words blog about it.

The point is to share, no matter what. We’ll see what I will do with the video recording from this event.

Engelbart’s vision is crystal clear. It’s a vision of human augmentation. We need to augment human capability in certain ways. In particular, we need to create — and project our minds into — a shared information space that works like a planetary associative memory.

And we need to populate that shared space with tools that support and amplify and extend our natural ability to analyze, visualize, simulate, decide, and act.

Some think that giving presentations is about broadcasting your message, but for me presentations are really about growing new connections: inside and outside. If I have the opportunity to speak, I also have the opportunity to get really deep into certain developments in our society to gain new perspectives. I don’t want to run the same speech every time, but remix my consciousness with new points of view.

The stress and preparation required for a presentation is always an opportunity for re-evaluating your arguments. Once the speech is done and the resulting adrenaline is getting you high, it’s time for reflection in a social setting how it went. I feel disconnected from myself if I don’t have a recording or other means to tear the presentation into pieces. In a sense, presentations are a gesamtkunstwerk (Richard Wagner) for me, a massive work of art shaking all senses. I feel sorry for those who repeat their rap to boredom and perfection, rather than progression.

Looking back, the quantum leaps that have emerged in my thinking have happened in my three trips to Italy: twice to Bolzano (Bolzano Conversation and ILIAS Conference) through Rome and once to Naples (EDEN Conference) through Rome. I’ve also had some great presentations in Netherlands (SURF Education Days) and Belgium (Dag van de Docent). I haven’t yet had the opportunity to upload all the presentations I’ve done this year but will do so eventually.

Why is Rome so important? Well it’s because of the reflecting conversations with Sepp, Susan, Robin and Roberto. Not to mention the transitory state that it has served for my trips. Thanks to Robin for getting us all in touch. Here is one of the more informal conversations we have shared, as transcribed by Robin:

• Robin answers Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad questions

Who knows what will happen in year 2008? Maybe I’m forgotted or in greater demand than ever. I’m very excited – and I have some great news in January.

Btw. If someone knows how to get rid of Google PageRank 0 for this blog, I would be very happy. I’m not a spammer, although my nerve waste can be a burden sometimes.