CONTEXT:

There are about 55 people in the room. Eilif Trondsen provides brief overview of Forum events. Jay Cross is valiantly trying to get a webcast working with Centra on other end. AIBO dog is introduced and wakes up, stretches, beeps. Eilif Trondsen turns the dog off. Sharrin Bennett is in the corner doing a graphical capture of the meeting on large white sheets of paper. Jay facilitates the meeting with a request “Let’s not go back to the discussion of the fundamentals” but push forward and be forward thinking with technologies.

Before the meeting starts, Jay tells a story about Lee Richter who recently was in a near fatal car accident with airbag that saved her life. Two broken legs, ribs. She was on her cell phone when the paramedics picked her up. Jay passed around a card for folks to sign and send. Other folks can send cards to her address:

Lee Richter, 6922 Pinehurst, Oakland, 94611

PRESENTERS:

Tracy Mendez, Xerox

“New Start” effort which is a Xerox company to map recent technologies to business needs.

Steve Smoliar, FujiXerox

in Palo Alto spoke about a new Xerox product called Media Depot. Launched from Japanese language-based research product.

The premise is that you have a large repository of digital video and need tools to retrieve that video content. The need is for browsing and summarization of video.

The tool is reminiscent of Adobe Premiere’s visual representation of video as color lines across a vertical bar. Video is represented as vertical bars and can be accessed by clicking on particular bar sections.

If the video is taped in special Xerox studios, one can map Powerpoint slides to the video over time. 

“Monga interface style” (Japanese comic book layout with different sizes of rectangular frames. The larger frame, the significant of the frame, then the larger realestate.

Used internally at Xerox to document seminars as well as piloted during a course about knowledge management.

Sally Crawford from Crawford and Associates asks: If you were filming a person using a Powerpoint presentation, how can you link the video, voice, and powepoint together?

Steve Smoliar’s response: We are in the process of designing physical rooms (in partnership with Fuji Japan) which one can coordinate video, control software, where video control sources are coming from, collect time based information.

Danny Bobrow, Xerox PARC

He starts with a canonical example: Xerox internally has 20,000 technicians having to constantly learn. This is a mobile workforce.

“Eureka” is a knowledge sharing process and a growing community of knowledge.

There is a cyclical process for creating, entering, reviewing, and sharing knowledge that gets added to Eurek. A field tech might have an insight into how to prevent a paper jam in a copier. The insights are later used as new knowledge in the field. Peer view validates and warrants the insights, entering the insights into a database, then back into the field for use.

Danny called this a “peer to peer” learning situation.

Steve Hunt, an organizational effectiveness manager at CISCO questions Danny that this is NOT really a peer to peer technology.  They are really a peer to community technology (individual client to server). Danny says the knowledge is peer-to-peer via a central system.

Field technicians learn and export knowledge to other teams in other departments (manufacturing, documentation, engineering, services) invented by the field technicians.

Documents distributed on a “as needed” basis. The Xerox word document in the context of this discussion is treated like a learning object.

The system can generate communities specific reports.

Question from the Audience: How to you get folks to contribute their knowledge into Eureka? Bobrow: You need to have community incentives, each community member gets something out of the community. For example sales folks have monetary incentives, while others might have knowledge/information incentives.

Question from Audience: What new partnerships or developments are you pursuing?

Bobrow: Clients are internal Xerox folks. How do you make XML interfaces work? Integrating LinkLite into computer/phone integration.

Stuart Albrecht, Vis-A-Vis

Company spun out through Cogswell College in Silicon Valley. Please come to visit the new studio in Fremont. We are all invited.

There are three markets and services they target

1) Build content for the eLearning space

2) Build Hollywood art and visuals

3) Build content for the children’s content in toy and toystores

Guiding design principle: People enjoy learning through stories.

Stuart shows an example from the AutoDesk Virtual Classroom Training which has a animated cartoon robot that looks like Microsoft Bob. When the system is starting, the robot shows engine flames coming out from it.

They don’t have any learning sciences background, but believe that visualizations will enhance learning such as multimedia visuals that use 3 D models.

They emphasize engagement as a big factor in learner retention, but no data.

Another example shows a 3D game to assemble of submarine. The game is a way to introduce a product, but also used in the field to begin teaching. They have a vision of delivering these kinds of thigns on Compaq Ipaq handhelds.

Prior clients include Hasbro, Sony, and Autodesk. Many of the designers from Vis-à-vis have worked on Star Wars Episode I characters.

Their first customer was AutoDesk.

Christopher Frost OnTopix

510-665-1336

This is a low-threshhold, easy to adapt product that allows voice narration and overlay sketching of websites on the websites themselves.

One can author lessons, then play them back, but then the user can go to the website and do it. He shows an example of how one might use this to teaching someone how to fill out online forms.

The demo does not show how one might edit this and we all know it takes a great speaker to do those things right the first time. Reminds me of early product by Farallon Computing called Media Tracks” pre-Internet days.

He says they are working in the CRM space. No clients yet. Original product was for medical xray annotation.

Barbara Hayes-Roth, Extempo

(Background: Barbara came out of the artificial intelligence arena)

Adaptive Learning Guides – These are interactive guides that is based upon user-modeling. There is a 3d model of a person “Linda” who sits on screen and is ready to answer your questions.

Linda is the virtual guide (ala Eliza program). She presents a Powerpoint presentation with sample dialogues. The dialogues show how the system is able to parse text and make intelligent inferences based on text input.

Linda: Good morning, Joan. What can I do for you?

Joan: Hi Linda, I want to add profiling and personalization to the Diet Coach

Linda: Excellent, let’s go to another page.

….

Joan: Go faster. I only have 30 min.

Guides can personalize interactions. They can also have “pro-active assistance” on multiple channels. Student progress report can be provided by system. (How many correct answer did the user provide)

Danny Bobrow asks about inputs to Extempo system.

Barbara answers: Right now, it accepts text stream into the user model. Natural language interpretters are not good enough. System is limited by voice to text.

Another example is provided by a virtual learning guide who is a NASGAR driver, who supposedly has a Southern accent, but sounds more Swedish.

Server side can be linked to any front end interface (with any selected virtual guide person)

Question: Who is an example client?

Proctor and Gamble (office of CIO), was the first client.

Make an interactive “Mr. Clean”, and a 40 year old icon and make him interactive and create a two-way learning relationship to customers.

Offering cleaning tips from online dictionary as well as from

Keith Borman , Qarbon.com

Technology is contextual based. The technology  is called Viewlet” which buildings Java applets.

The product looks like “Apple Balloon help”: there are rectangular notes that can be layered onto of the Web, and voice annotated, playbackable.

Oracle was one of the first customers. Started with two users who liked it and it was easy enough, then spread through the organization,

Bruce Steel, The Brain

“Learning is all about knowledge transfer.” Our target audience is “knowledge workers in a community of practice.” (Sherry notes he has two often conflicting models of learning)

Learn, share, and create knowledge at the enterprise level.

The tool is a way to view online document hierarchies in a networked-based visual way. The screen dynamically reorganizes itself when documents are selected and viewed. The tool reminds me of the “Information Vizualizer” at Xerox PARC as well as Ben Bederson’s work on zoomable UIs.

The goal is to apply Brain technologies to company intranet.

Their first product was released in 1998.  200,000 copies have been download of the personal Brain, WebBrain,  Version 2 will be released this year.

Document management,

Intelligent knowledge sharing

Real-time collaboration tools

We are forming partnerships with Documentum, Simio, Lotus,

Example client: Prrudential Insurance company was a first client for the brain.

Prudential wanted to enable sales force to showing a needs based approach.

To show them what products and services were available from the company to the insurance brokers.