What I’m Learning: Hall.com

This looks like an interesting idea to talk about a given topic or allowing others to engage and create a community. So far it seems to be a little light on functionality, but everything that exists is super intuitive and quite beautiful. They may have something here.

Hall.com: “Our Story

Frustrated by communication tools that were siloed and did not solve real problems. The team quit corporate america to solve the problem.

The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA.”

Question 267 of 365: How much are we willing to share?

My first email address that wasn’t tied to a major online provider like AOL was pacer@cyberdrive.net. It came from this local ISP in my home town. It was this cute all you could download on a 14.4 modem affair for about $25.00 a month. The reason that this ISP was surviving was that they were one of the first to offer the unlimited model, rather than the hourly rate for logging in. I thought that this was the best of all possibilities because I had been mowing the lawn for years just for the chance to log in a few more hours. This plan, however, came with one major drawback: the email address had to be shared. Everyone in the family had access. They might not have checked the address all that often, but they had access to it. Most importantly, my father had access to it.

Upon the occasion of my posting to a newsgroup with less than desirable users, I received an absolute torrent of email. Per our arrangement with Cyberdrive, my father received those emails too. After quite a long discussion about cyber safety (which didn’t really have a term at the time, so I’m pretty sure we just called it safety), he decided to shut down the account and I decided that sharing an e-mail address with my father was just about the worst idea ever.

I didn’t want him to know everything that I was up to, and I’m sure he didn’t really want to know either. We both realized that there was a level of trust and privacy that had to be built into our relationship. We had to figure out a way for the model of not sharing an account to work. I’m not sure we ever talked it through, but a few weeks after that incident (I had been grounded for a bit during that time), we both stopped checking that account and we moved on to our separate ones. It made sense to do so, but we knew that something had been lost. We used to be able to view the state of things from our family email account. I would get my updates from my newsletters and my father would get his. Sharing the email account made it easier to appreciate the things that we were both a part of. Now we didn’t have that.

I know other families that still do this. Everyone logs into one gmail account. It is something that prevents anyone going too far off the deep end of perversion or illegal activity. It focuses our attention on the family itself rather than the individual conversations. The privacy loss, though, is hard to swallow. When anyone makes a mistake or signs up for a ridiculous list-serve, we all pay the price.  We want to send out a united message from a single source, but we don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single identity or be unable to develop our own interests.

I wonder if there is a compromise that exists. I wonder if Facebook and other social networks might help us to maintain that level of inclusion without the headache of solely a family identity. They have shifted our expectation of what should be our own. They have let us connect to family members but not be swallowed by this association. Already, these services are stating the default sharing to be public rather than private. This allows me to group my family’s responses on walls and in twitter lists. I can see the communication and I can watch it grow. Somehow, this simple act of making more things public has allowed my family to share the things that they might not think to do, but keep hidden the things that are none of my business.

Social networks are just better at communicating what is yours, mine, and ours. Email just dumps everything into one pot and forces us to sort it out. This may be inciting in order to completely control what we are all getting into, but it spells disaster for the relationships we are trying to build. We need autonomy. We need trust and respect. In short, we may need Facebook.

Question 173 of 365: What should an interview be?

I am on a panel to help choose the next Director of Online Learning at the Colorado Department of Education. The panel itself is an cross-section of interests, from higher education to non-profits to multi-district online programs, each of the people who are interviewing the candidates is looking for something  different. And, truly, that is the way it should be. If we were all looking for the same thing, there probably wouldn’t be any need for an interview at all. We could just decide based upon the resumes alone.

The interviews commenced today and all 9 of us were able to ask our predetermined questions. We listened as this candidate answered to the best of his ability, and we feverishly scribbled notes on the official document, our own personal notepad, or (in my case) typed in a few thoughts on a brainstorming app on the iPad. The hour it took to hear all of what this person had to offer was not an undaunting task for either side. I’m sure that he struggled in some of the questions more than he let on and I’m sure that there was some struggle on our part to really see how well we could get to know him in the short time we were allotted.

The more that I thought about the process we underwent and the process that happens in so many conference rooms every day is incredibly strange. We sit together and grill someone on questions that will ultimately decide their fate, but are incredibly inadequate to determining if they would actually do a good job in the position for which they have applied. The questions we asked, about vision and communication and specific data and standards, all of them were in an attempt to paint a picture of who this person is. But, what we really want to know (or at least what we should want to know) is who this person would be in this position. Because we had no crystal ball today (neither the candidate or the interviewers), no one could really see what it would be like to have him leading the department.

Even though we do not have such a gift of seeing into the future and predicting the fit that a particular person would have within a given position, I think that we have the tools for which we could create a much better process for getting the right person for the job. Here is what I have in mind:

• Day in the life: I would like the candidates to take us through a day in the life of what he or she is doing currently, showing us concrete situations that cater to their strengths. The easiest way to do this would be to collect some objects that are of significance to their work (reports, documents, presentations, etc.) and show off their workflow within them in a synchronous format (live or in a virtual setting0. I would also like to demonstrate a day in the life of the position they are applying for. This would allow them to get a feel for exactly what they are getting themselves into. I think the easiest way to do this would be to take a snapshot of the director’s computer screen every few minutes and then do a time lapse of activities. I could also see this working for the candidate’s demonstration as well.
• Real problems: Rather than asking generic questions, I would really love to see how a candidate would solve an issue that is concerning the current stakeholders. I think that the products from this type of collaborative work to solve a single issue would provide a much better comparison of applicants than simply asking them about a problem they have solved in the past.
• Learning Network: I would like to know more about who these people turn to for advice and learning. I would like to see who their learning network consists of. To me, each of these candidates should have to demonstrate just how they go about dealing with a question that they don’t know the answer to. I would actually like to watch them put in a request to their learning network and see how long it takes to get a series of responses. A decent set of responses in a short amount of time would say to me that this person actually has set up a system of support that will be of value to the whole organization. It says that we are not only hiring this person but also all of the people that she or he knows.

While these may be a radical shift away from current interviewing practices, I actually believe that an emphasis on these three things is going to allow us to compare apples to apples. It will also show just how hard it is to fake your way through actual work, rather than just being able to interview well. It will show exactly what we value as well, which I think is important in any economic climate, regardless of how desperately the candidate is for the position or how desperate we are to fill it. In the end, our values are what will cause someone to stay with a job long enough to create lasting change and sustained growth. Let’s make sure they match up.

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Question 95 of 365: What do teams solve?

Groups seem to be the holy grail of social networks. From Linked-in groups to the new Facebook communities to the millions of people self-organizing in Ning networks, groups have become the default setting for communication and collaboration. When you are in doubt about the effectiveness of your web application, throw groups in, and you will have a winner. When there is nothing left to hang your hat on, set up a team that will send out e-mails to everyone multiple times a day.

And it makes sense. People want to organize around an idea. They want to set themselves up to answer the problems that a single set of people have. Where it all goes wrong is that people start to believe that by simply setting up a team, they have solved something significant. They work so hard to organize themselves that the energy for action just isn’t there. Even in the ease of grouping within a hashtag, very little seems to be done that isn’t in the effort of maintaining the grouping rather than moving it forward.

Teams are meant to change, to be modified, to evolve. And yet, we are creating teams and groups online that have no ability to become something different than what they once were. Once you are a “fan”, the group doesn’t change. Once you are a member of a Linked-in group, the members are mostly stagnant. And that is sad.

I want teams with iterations. I want the ability to change the purpose for any given group that I am within. Restating our hypothesis continually is the only way that I know to create rather than persist. And that is why Friendster is dead. That is why Ning networks grow and die. It is why people can leave behind entire bodies of work online when they are no longer interested in having those same old conversations.

So, why not let groups evolve. Why not allow ideas to branch naturally, one from another until you are working with only the people that are as invested as you are in solving the problem at hand. Why does the process of self-selection have to be the last democratic act that you can contribute to a group?

Here is what I am proposing:

• Self-select into a group.
• State your bias and interest in associating with the group.
• Establish a great schism within the group because of either disagreements, reevaluation of needs, or interest in solving different problems.
• Split groups, rename both, and reestablish bias and interest for the new groups.

With this in mind, teams never become bloated. Lurkers don’t outweigh participants. People aren’t cc’d because they exist, they are informed for consent in decisions. People have ownership in their group, because they are continually in the process of remaking it. They need it, because it needs them to thrive.

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Question 83 of 365: What does it mean to be device free?

We are dependent upon our computers for our livelihoods and our entertainment. We are dependent upon our cell phones for communication and connection. We are dependent upon dozens of technologies in our daily lives but if we were more accurate with this dependency, we are dependent upon specific devices. The computer that you use is yours, it is an extension of you to a great extent. So it isn’t just a computer, but rather YOUR computer. And the cell phone, is your blackberry or iPhone or Android device. You have tricked these things out just the way you like them, and it matters that you have done this because it makes you feel ownership over them. It makes them feel like they have been watched over and cultivated for your personal use rather than just anyone who can pick them up.

If you lost those particular devices, you might feel a sense of loss that is strange and compelling. It might feel like your right arm is gone or that you have lost a part of your history because of what was on that device. It is this weird notion that we are that connected to our technology, but I would like to make the case that this type of attachment may be ending.

Even as we are heading into the world of amazingly tactile electronics and personal experiences with those devices, I believe that our goal should be to achieve total device freedom. We should stop seeing our devices as the personalized entities that are capable of bringing us joy and agony through the process of creating with those tools. It is my belief that we need to be looking for any way that we can to achieve a total lack of ownership from any given device that we may have purchased or been gifted.

I come to this conclusion out of necessity, I suppose. Yesterday, my computer crashed. It was an absolute failure, not something that could be fixed by any amount of hacking or troubleshooting. The operating system just refused to move beyond the first 30 lines of operation in the command line view. It is what you might call a dead computer.

And I felt nothing. While I wasn’t super thrilled about having to use a different machine while this one goes into the shop, I really didn’t feel that I had lost anything too important. In fact, I felt free. I felt as though anything that I could get in my hands would allow me to continue the work that I had started that morning when my computer was working just fine.

I realized in that moment that there is literally nothing I can’t do in the cloud.

My photos are on Flickr. My movies are on Youtube. My files are on Google Docs. My contacts are in Gmail and Gist. My audio and image editing are on Aviary. My ideas are in WordPress. My music is on Last.fm. My community is in Twitter. My bookmarks are on Delicious.

Hyperlinks are my hard-drive.

While some would claim that this isn’t good, that I am just asking for one of these services to go under and then I would feel the loss that I should have felt without my computer, but I believe that these services too are inconsequential. I can move from one to another without thinking twice. I can import and export. I can backup and restore. But, true freedom is in knowing that no single device holds “me” within it.

In fact, the only thing that holds all of these services together is my identity. And that isn’t wrapped up in any single device. While I like my Macbook Pro, I don’t need it to have my identity with me. While gmail is my happy home for most of my official communication, I could filter and funnel and work around any slippage of that service.

There was a time when my devices owned me, but that is no longer the case. It is thanks to the cloud, a better understanding of how to store things for better access and simply knowing myself well enough to believe recreating the world around me every day is possible.

So, I think that we should strive for this type of freedom. We should be free to have things break, free to lose huge chunks of data from those formerly important devices, and free to reimagine how we interact with those things that we interact with.

I am not my computer, and that is kind of nice.

Conflict of interest

I accidentally posted this too soon, but here is the official version
of this idea (which is bound to change at some point).
 
What does it mean when you are faced with the following challenge:
 
The place that you work has given you the freedom to explore different
learning platforms, work with creative people, collaborate on process,
policy, and pedagogy, and the means to not have to say no too often.
 
The future you see for education is different than what is being planned.
 
The opportunities to branch out and create your own learning spaces
have never been more numerous or more engaging.
 
The community you actively engage in advocates for open communication
and documentation of every move forward that you make with your own
learning.
 
The boundaries on that communication have never been more clear: “Some
meetings are secret.”
 
The platforms for learning and support that you use are at odds with
“having someone on the other end of the line” when something goes
wrong.
 
So, what here is a conflict of interest. Can all of this coexist and
not create chaos, unrest or animosity between my job, my network, my
living, and my passion?
 
(Too vague? Give me a few months, and perhaps specifics will surface.)

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

New Responsibility

I was thinking about waiting until I got a little further into the
project to start blogging about it, but since I made the choice to
start blogging daily, I have really found that this forum let’s me
think through all of the things that I need to.
 
So the new responsibility is this: I have been put in charge of
administrating multiple moodle installations in our district. The
reason why this new charge I have been given is so strange to me is
that up until 2 months ago, the only “official” moodle installation in
our district was at a high school in parker, which I had little to do
with.
 
 The reason for the shift is nothing short of an economic and
pedagogical perfect storm. Our district had slowly been building the
capacity for more and more teachers to start asking for a way of
teaching and engaging with their students online, and with the failure
of our bond election, the only choice for an LMS was to have someone
who was already working in open source to implement and support a
solution like moodle.
 
The best part is, however, that no one I have talked to thinks that we
are settling for something. From all of the initial conversations, all
stakeholders believe that professional development, online learning,
and blended learning fit well within a vision of moodle that includes
outside assessments and google apps for communication.
 
I guess the only reason for this post is to ask for advice. If you
were asked to design and implement learning environments for an online
school, a professional development program, and a blended model
(online and in centers/schools) using moodle, what would you make sure
to do (or not do)?
 
While I have a definite vision for the way forward, I am not the
smartest person in the room (considering that I have no idea how big
this room is). I want to know more… Always more.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Making moving easy…

Every night this week and last I have been packing. I have been
packing up my family to move us to someplace better, with more room
and more possibilities (and more than one bathroom). This move has
gotten me thinking a lot about what to keep and what to let go of.
Without extending a metaphor too far out, it has also gotten me
thinking about how to move an entire school or even a district from
digital learning systems that they currently use, to ones that have
more possibility and room to grow.
 
And, what can we leave behind in this move. When you move from an
email based system of communication to a feed and “friend” based
system of communication (twitter, facebook, or even project wikis),
what is no longer neccessary?
 
 
When you move from a server based architecture for storing learning
objects to a cloud based repository, what is gained and what is lost?
 
The specifics are becoming more and more clear to me as I pack things
up. As I pack up our assessments for the online school, getting them
ready to move again, we can leave behind proprietary formats. We need
to be able to plug them in anywhere and reuse them for many purposes.
 
As I pack up all of our content, I realize that we can leave all html
pages without an edit button on them.
 
And, as I try to put all of our tools and resources for collaborative
and connected learningn into their box to be ported over to a new LMS
or to new PD spaces, I am realizing that there is no box big enough to
hold all of them.
 
Every tool must be allowed to connect to others, just like every
person must be able to connect. If there are tools that do not
connect, they will be packed away permanantly and placed under the
stairs.
 
Well, I am off to pack some more, but I will continue to think about
what can and can’t be thrown out when we make big shifts in education.
I hope to return to this theme soon when I figure more out.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Whenever I feel like…

Whenever I feel like I’ve run into a wall in online school I start thinking about all the possibilities for communicating and things just seems to open up. Long story short I am looking for a way to use google ups as a domain as internal communication system that we can slowly open up with the wider world more buying from IT and the stakeholders.

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Digital Ex-Patriots and The Formula for Transparency

Well, I may be going out on a limb with this one, but I have described in the podcast a level of discomfort with technology that goes beyond the simple immigrant/native debate. The fear and panic that is associated with technology in the classroom comes from Digital Ex-Patriots. These people (parents, teachers, administrators, etc.) are so sure of their anti-technology stance that they are actively pursuing a life (of education) away from technology integration. These are the people that we must win over if we are going to continue our collaborative efforts and truly create change. Please let me know what you think about this concept in the comments or in an e-mail (benjamin.wilkoff@dcsdk12.org)




Show Notes:

• 00:00:00: Intro to Online and Offline Life
  Internation Community of Minds

• 00:03:17: Safety Vs. Panic
  The Most Discussed Post I’ve Ever Written

• 00:05:07: Creating Discussion
  Bud Hunt’s Blog

• 00:06:07: Twitter as Tool

  My Twitter

• 00:07:28: Formula for Transparency
  Discovery Online Code

• 00:08:16: Twitter as Classroom Communication
  Remote Access Twitter

• 00:09:40: Digital Ex-Patriots
• 00:11:37: Google Paper: Good or Bad Idea?

  Google Paper

• 00:13:14: Mass Phone Call Newsletter
  Pheeder

• 00:13:53: Paths to Transparency
• 00:18:03: The Role of Students in Classroom 2.0
• 00:19:20: Transparency as Conversation
• 00:21:35: Conclusion with Challenge
  Podcast Blog