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Question 59 of 365: When is Judgement better than Feedback?

Published on February 28, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Uncategorized.

I speak a lot about the value of perpetual beta or the need to emphasize process over product, so this maybe an entirely hypocritical thing to say. But… Judgement is better than feedback sometimes. Knowing in an absolute sense that someone hates your idea can be preferable to having any number of people try and help you make it better. Sometimes getting an objective kick in the pants or pat on the back can galvanize passion in a way that the incremental process of working toward a goal never can.

And, very soon I will be looking for judgement. Not, from my network, but from the outside, from people I have never met (online or otherwise). Very soon, I will be demonstrating an idea in the hopes that people will tell me that it sucks, unequivocally. I want them to be rabid about it too. I want them to be so mad that it doesn’t work the way that they want it to that they will challenge me to think about it differently.

I also want other people to make the judgement call that it is worthy of their time. I want them to believe so much in my ideas that they will be willing to back it up with funding, connections, and full throated support in everyday conversation. I want their judgement to be absolute, not dependent upon the next version forthcoming.

And when the judgements come, they will be swift. It will be a moment of consideration and then a decision. People will pronounce fate, and do it based upon evidence I have provided. They have the control, and yet, I am the one putting myself up for such a judgement. I am submitting myself to being graded for the first time in a long time.

And that is why I think it is special, and it should stay special. Grading and this kind of judgement on what you have done, should be something that only comes along once in a great while. It should hinge upon you being ready to stand up to criticism and believe that you have put the best possible version of what you believe forward for review.

That is why I believe in defending dissertations. It is why I believe in writing grants. It is why I believe in applying to schools. It is why I believe in the interview process.

And for the same reason, it is why I do not believe in standardized testing. It is also why I do not believe in many versions of performance review (the kind that is based on progress, not a culmination or an application for something new).

I believe that moments of judgement should be based on individual achievement, not measured against a standard. A test cannot measure what an application can. A review based upon Smart Goals will never be as good as a review that requires a person to rewrite their job description and apply for that new job. A judgement means that you have done something worthy of esteem. A feedback loop means that you can never take a step back and pronounce something as good.

So, as I head on into my next judgement. I hope people like what I am doing enough to tell me, and I hope people hate it enough to do the same. Either way, Judge me.

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Feeds in a workflow.

Published on January 3, 2009, by in Uncategorized.

For as useful as they are for aggregating information, rss feeds are not all that easy to put into one’s workflow. You have to make a point of going to a special page and maintaining your reading list. Google reader (http://reader.google.com) makes it pretty easy to do this, but you still have to make a habit of going there.
 
At one point (not that long ago), I had over 2000 unread posts in my aggregator. It seemed unlikely that I would ever be able to sift through it all and pull off any kind of conclusions. I was under the infamous guilt of falling behind. More than that, I felt like my PLN was leaving me behind.
 
Well, no longer. I have found a way to make my rss feeds more immediate, a way for my feeds to literally alert me to their presence. Enter http://snackr.net/. This Air application (good on any platform) is the only way I have figured out to put feeds onto my screen in the way that Tweetdeck or Twhirl has done for my twitter account. I no longer go to google reader for anything other than maintenance because it syncs directly with Reader. If you have enough room on your screen for one more way to connect, I would recommend Snackr highly. If only for the ability to show others that Rss is not abstract. It is real, and it is a powerful way of exploring connected and authentic learning.
 
Reflective aside: What would anyone think of a collaboratively maintained educational Google Reader account that could be used by Snackr apps in schools? Which feeds should be included and why? Is it just one more thing or would this kind of workflow influence allow for real change?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

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“Hope Online” Professional Development 11.14.08

Published on November 14, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

Do Not turn off your cell phones and laptops.
If you have them, use them.

(Throughout this workshop, you can ask questions via text message by texting hopeonline and your question to 41411. You can also add to our questions without a cell phone by going to http://www.textmarks.com/HOPEONLINE)

I am not here today in order to introduce to you a brand new initiative that will require extensive amounts of training and make your life busier before you see any real benefit. I am also not here today to say that there is any one tool or strategy for making the ways in which you work actually work.

Rather, I am here to ask you a lot of questions, mostly about what you are spending the most time with in your job. What are those things that take away from what you would rather be doing, the rewarding experiences of working with kids and other adults who are working with kids.

In order to do this, let’s get one thing straight. Information is infinite. Attention is finite.

You gather a seemingly insurmountable amount of information every single day from e-mails, voicemails, web sites, student data paperwork and many other sources. It can be even more daunting to think that there is more information out there about how to organize that information. With your attention stretched so thin, it is hard to think that there are ways of getting any of it back. We are still going to try, and for the most part, we are going to look at solutions that are already in your workflow.

Well, I would like to present you with a few possibilities for a different way of organizing information.

The first is I would like to use my voice to listen to my e-mail, create e-mail, put an event on my calendar, send myself a reminder, create a text, and post to my blog. While this service has a name, I would much rather you think about the strategies that I am using in order to create more time for other things. Because I am able to use my voice to do these things, I can make efficient use of my drive time (of which, there is a lot).

Dial2Do – A way to use your voice to get things done on your cell phone.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to next highlight the use of short messages to capture information. Many times, I need to be able to capture information from myself and others, but there is no time in order to send out an e-mail. I need to be able to capture it now. So I send a text message to a service that aggregates the information for me and for everyone else who I invite:

TextMarks – A way to both capture information and share information through SMS.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I use e-mail a lot. Well, perhaps that is an understatement. I am available by e-mail about 20 hours of any given day. With that in mind, I would like to be able to use e-mail in order aggregate archive the most important things that I am sending out. I want to be able to attach anything I want and have the archive understand it.

Posterous – The e-mail blog that don’t even have to sign up for.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Now, if I am on my computer and I want to capture information on a topic. I want to capture it as I am doing my research, not go back afterwards and document what is going on. I want to be able to simply highlight text and pictures and have them all simply show up in a webpage that I can e-mail to someone or share with somone for them to add to.

Google Notebook – Collect text, pictures, and movies from webpages in order to be shared later with others.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

Well, what if I want to show others exactly where to go on a webpage using my voice. I would like to guide people through a series of webpages that I think are important. I want to do this in less than 5 mintues too.

FlowGram - Create a screencast of webpages and archive it to send to others.

An example of using this trategy to create something.

Now I would like you to figure out what you would like to be able to do in terms of aggregating and storing information. Brainstorm things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you gather information now and how you would like to change that to be less attention heavy and more information heavy.

Now that we have all of our information gathered and stored, we will want to collaborate and talk about that information. The easiest way to do that is to meet face-to-face, but for much of the time, that requires significant driving and serious scheduling.

So, I want to come together with a few others to talk something out. I want to be able to see, hear, and write with them. I don’t want to have to set up log in to anything. I just want to hit a power button.

Tokbox – Always on Video Conferencing.

An example of using this strategy to create something.

I would like to work on the same spreadsheet with someone else so that I don’t have to send e-mails of the same document back and forth and get lost in the versioning. I would also like to be able to have information be entered into the spreadsheet via a form that others can fill out so that I don’t have to do as much data processing tasks.

Google Docs – A truly collaborative version of office

An example of using this strategy to create something.

NaNoWriMo(2)

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Humor olco5

Finally, I really want all of this stuff to be accessible in one place. I would really like to not have to remember exactly what all of these sites are. I just want one place to go to where it makes sense to find all of these things. Almost like a well-maintained professional development environment for hope.

Our IQity classroom - A one stop shop for learning tools, collaboration, and further professional development.

Now I would like you to figure out what YOU want collaboration to look like at Hope. Brainstorm
things that you don’t know are possible. Think about how you collaborate now and how you would like to change that to be less
attention heavy and more information heavy.

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Create your own MobileMe (Sync Everything, at all times).

Published on November 12, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

An aside: it is too bad that every post I write seems like an attempt to get back into the habit of posting, but I suppose until I start blogging consistently again, that is just how it is going to have to be. I have missed way too many things that I have been thinking about to ever fully catch up, but perhaps I can start anew. Anyway, here are my latest thoughts.

Before I go into the details of how to sync yourself completely, I want to tell you why I even undertook this idea. Well, our school system uses an extremely proprietary e-mail and calendaring system called firstclass. Every person that uses firstclass in our schools is locked in to using the firstclass calendar for appointments and things of that nature. But, because I have seen the light of using Google Calendar (open API, shared calendars, embedding, etc), I refuse. In fact, I was so obsessed with the idea of converging the two that I speant an entire weekend (when I wasn’t having fun with my family) on getting Firstclass to sync with Google Calendar, and then eventually my new blackberry that the school district provided for me.

So, this is how you sync everything:

Calendars:


Contacts:

Now, for the details…

(Update: I didn’t put this in the initial post, but I think it is worth mentioning that Firstclass does have a way to sync with both Palm Desktop Software and SyncML directly, but since my district hasn’t set either of these up, I thought it was important to try and find a better way of doing things… there are also third party services that do some of this, but I want a FREE workflow)

In order to get your first class calendar to talk to anything else, you will need to export it as a iCal file:

Now, you may look at this picture and ask, why I wouldn’t just export it as a blackberry file and skip all of the steps in the middle. Well, there are a few reasons. One, if I did this, all of the events would be duplicated every time I exported and imported. Two, because I am on a Mac I do not have any blackberry desktop software to make this sync work.

So, onward we go to iCal. First, you will need to set up your Google Calendar to sync with iCal, using this handy dandy tutorial from Life Hacker.

Now that you have your Google Calendar set up to sync, simply import into iCal your latest and greatest export from Firstclass:

Now, if this isn’t your first time doing this, you will end up with a lot of duplicates. If that is the case, just use the iCal Dupe Deleter. This is also a good tool for deleting duplicates from Google Calendar if you have ever found yourself with too many of one item.

Now, you have synced completely to your Google Calendar and you are ready to sync to your blackberry. Simply point your device to this address and download your over-the-air sync application.

You can now enter an event in Firstclass, iCal, Google Calendar, or on your blackberry and they will sync with one another. Pretty cool, right. But, we are not done. If you would like to have your calendar in an even more universal Format, you can put it on a SyncML server, like Funambol.

All you have to do is download their blackberry application and you can sync to your heart’s content there.

For Contacts:

If you are also looking to sync your contacts, you can simply use your Blackberry or iPod touch to talk to Funambol using their built in programs (search for funambol in the App store, or use the above link to download the blackberry funambol application).

Then you can sync your contacts with the funambol server.

As for your Mac, you can use the Preference Pane sync.

This will let you put your contacts on your mac, on the funambol server, or on your blackberry and they will all sync.

I understand that MobileMe does a lot more than this, but I believe that if we can create a FREE workflow for each one of our teachers, students, and administrators that syncs information to the place that they need it, we will be able to have the conversations that truly matter. We will no longer be stuck trying to find information, it will always be ours. Although you may not geek out at all that I am proposing, I think there are some pretty heavy implications for continuity in the systems that we are creating. If you have figured out any more syncing tricks, please leave a comment and add to the value of our collective research.

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CAGT 2008: Technology and Community

Published on October 10, 2008, by in Uncategorized.

Presentation (both live and PowerPoint):

Technology And Community

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Cell Phone Back Channel and Idea Network:

Audio Reflections:

Subscribe Free Add to my Page

Topics and Links from the presentation:

  1. Make the Community Visible
  2. Make the Community Inclusive
  3. Make the Community Public
  4. Make the Community Always-On
  5. Make the Community Lasting
  6. Tending your community
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Online Learning and Web 2.0: OL Teach 2008 (Secondary)

Published on August 5, 2008, by in Uncategorized.
Online learning is not about computers, the internet, or learning from home. It is not about giving kids a different educational option, or even leveraging the power of digital natives. It is my belief that the goal of online learning is to make learning ubiquitous. It is about pushing our education to include everything, from the context of the everyday to the workflow of original thought. This presentation aims to explore this notion of ubiquitous learning. Please, push back at these ideas, it is the only way they will get any better.

The Presentation:

Secondary (OL Teach – Take 2)

The Collaborative Podcast:

The OL Teach Text Messages:

Get your own at TextMarks!

The Backchannel and Moderated Discussion:

The Voicethread for Sharing Ideas:

The Links for further learning:
Preserve the learning links:

Creation as norm links:


Authenticity as expectation links:

Please feel free to leave comments or questions (video, audio, and text) on this blog post, you can also reach me by e-mail at ben@learningischange.com.
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Online Learning and Web 2.0: OL Teach 2008 (Elementary)

Published on August 4, 2008, by in Uncategorized.
Online learning is not about computers, the internet, or learning from home. It is not about giving kids a different educational option, or even leveraging the power of digital natives. It is my belief that the goal of online learning is to make learning ubiquitous. It is about pushing our education to include everything, from the context of the everyday to the workflow of original thought. This presentation aims to explore this notion of ubiquitous learning. Please, push back at these ideas, it is the only way they will get any better.

The Presentation:

Elementary OL Teach

The Collaborative Podcast:

The OL Teach Text Messages:

Get your own at TextMarks!

The Backchannel and Moderated Discussion:

The Voicethread for Sharing Ideas:

The Links for further learning:
Preserve the learning links:

Creation as norm links:


Authenticity as expectation links:

Please feel free to leave comments or questions (video, audio, and text) on this blog post, you can also reach me by e-mail at ben@learningischange.com.
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