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Like many other biologists, Seeley sees a bee colony as not just a collection of individuals but as a sort of super-organism. Thus the brain analogy above.

This extends to decision-making, which is the main subject of Honeybee Democracy.

Honeybee Democracy provides not just a look at a particularly rich life of inquiry but some nice, unforced parallels between the workings of honeybee colonies, small human societies, and our great big human brains: Certain group dynamics, it seems, are scalable and fractal.

By 2013, Gartner contends, 40% of large companies will have context-aware computing projects on the way. Context is driving content and intelligent customer interactions, delivering Web experiences that will engage site visitors and deliver better business results.

Web content management is at the most significant inflection point in its 15-year history. It's now all about the context.

The fading ranks of middle management have lost their edge, thanks to revolutions in both technology and globalization. Indeed, the latest wave of technology advances—cloud computing, advanced mobile applications and devices, and rapidly expanding social networks to name a few—have greatly eased access to knowledge work. Nowhere is this change seen more dramatically than with the rapidly ascending workforce in high-growth markets outside the United States. Business writer Seth Godin remarks ominously, “If you're the average person out there doing average work, there's going to be someone else out there doing the exact same thing as you, but cheaper.” The game has shifted to a far more competitive, globally-connected field of play, requiring individuals to differentiate themselves in authentic, compelling ways like never before. Godin concludes, “If you're different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more.”

How We Will Learn: Technology-Enabled Informal LearningWhen we talk about fostering agility, curiosity and continuous learning, we’re fortunate because today we have a host of Web-based technologies (including social, mobile, video, games, and personalized portals) that can serve as perfect tools to support the self-directed learner.By utilizing technology-enabled informal learning resources, collaborative learners can easily share and exchange knowledge, and self-directed learners can continuously teach themselves. These tools allow us to gain and share knowledge when, where and how we want it.Technology-enabled informal learning (that is, technology-based learning that takes place outside a formal classroom environment) also makes sense for organizations because we know that people learn in a variety of ways, and they usually like to learn on their own terms. This insight is derived from Howard Gardner, the influential educational thinker, who has argued that all of us have multiple intelligences. Adjusting and adapting to this cognitive norm, Gardner explains, will generally result in greater skill development and sharper problem solving.

According to ASTD’s Learning Executive’s Confidence Index for the fourth quarter of 2011, almost 55% of learning executives expect an increase in the use of informal learning and Web 2.0 tools in their organizations over the next 6 months.

First, semantic technology helps us “Find more relevant and useful information because it enables us to search information from disparate sources (federated search) and automatically refine our searches (faceted search).”

Second, semantic technology helps us “Better understand what is happening because it enables us to use the relationships between concepts to predict and interpret change.”

“Build more transparent systems and communications because it is based on common meanings and mutual understanding of the key concepts and relationships that govern our business ecosystems.”

“Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,”

“Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is essentially lost, benefitting no one else and perhaps even being forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts, however, all of us might learn faster.”

Using eye tracking, the researchers showed that as knowledge maps are modified successively by multiple users, new users spend less time looking at specific content elements, shifting a greater balance of their attention to structural elements like labels. “This suggests that distributed sensemaking facilitates the process of ‘schema induction,’ or forming a mental model of the information being considered,” Counts said.

I recently discussed the idea of interest graphs with Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto, who described how his company determines visitors’ interests so its content-industry customers can deliver personalized experiences.

It is sensemaking that is needed, a way of pulling together disparate data sources to provide meaningful output.

Business intelligence/analytics tools need to cut through the data and understand the core meanings and implications.