Question 187 of 365: What is our equation?

I used to believe that everything equaled out in the end. That at some point, everyone would get the same amount of opportunity or talent. I used to think that we were all special in enough ways to allow for everyone to have the same chance of success. I don’t believe that anymore. 

I once was talking to a very good friend about our test scores over the phone. He told me about how good his math scores were. I saw that they were better than mine, and in my need to make everything even out, I proclaimed that I had very good english scores. As it turned out, I did have good scores. He just had better ones. In both English (which I cared a great deal about) and in Math (which I didn’t care all that much about) he was better. I couldn’t reconcile this disparity. I kept on looking for a silver lining, a way in which his life overall was worse than mine or that I could feel superior so that this defeat would hurt less. I still haven’t found a way to make those kinds of stings any less potent.

Instead, I now believe that instead of an equation with an a person on either side of the equal sign, it is most likely a greater than or less than sign. This is a crude judgement, but it is in fact a much more accurate representation of the way in which we experience all people. Somewhere within our heads, we do an estimation of greater than or less than. We look for links from one person or idea to another, but we are not looking for them to be the same. We are looking for ways to categorize, to prioritize and to put them into a hierarchy. We can’t help but be a part of this lopsided equation every moment. 

And yet, it is hard to tell which side of the equation we are on at times or what is really being compared. I may be really good at getting my ideas across, but utterly fail in having revolutionary ideas in the first place. These things are not equal. One is greater than the other, but it depends on who is setting up the equation. 

The point is:

The greater than or less than equation is a little agreement within ourselves to treat some things and people with more respect and attention than others. And in the interest of creating a more collaborative and sharing society, I believe we owe it to one another to state our equations as loudly as we possibly can. If all bias can be boiled down to an equation with a little arrow pointing one way or the other, we can actually identify what it is that moves us and what it is that we need help with. With that in mind, here are a few equations that I believe to be true.

My children > other people’s children

Open Source > Closed Source

Community > Isolation

Publishing > Notebooks

Notebooks > Not writing/drawing/reflecting

Independent > Corporate

Corporate > Undervalued

Revision > Final Draft

Trust > Suspicion

Hope > Tradition

Change > Success

Failure >= Success

Music >= Silence

Stress > Pressure

Lo-Fi > Hi-Def

Family > Career

There are lots more, but I do wonder what would happen if we all laid out our equations on the table and started talking about them. Would any of us change the directions of the arrows? Would we be able to generate our list of the most important things in our lives, our priorities of a lifetime rather than just of the moment. I feel as though that might be important.

Question 81 of 365: What can we reverse engineer?

I would love to be able to talk about the reverse engineering of DVD encryption or iPhone firmware intelligently, but mostly I would be quoting from wikipedia entries on the topics. I love the fact that people can take a look at an object or technology and see just how it was put together. It makes me hopeful that anything we create could be undone. That is a very safe and satisfying feeling, knowing that people are working on undoing all of the problems that technology presents for us in the hopes of figuring out just what benefit was there in the first place. Yet, I can’t speak with any authority on any of it because I am not a part of those communities.

The best I can do is approximate.

I can compare their reverse engineering with my own. And I reverse engineer ideas. More accurately, I reverse engineer the stuff between ideas. Let me explain.

It is my belief that in-between any two ideas there is a machine that connect the two and makes the first one the “input” and the second into the “output”. It is a technology so highly advanced that no manual exists and therefor it must be reverse engineered in order to achieve the insight that both ideas represent.

Concretely, the idea of our schools as they exist now and the idea of our schools as they exist in the future or as they might be are ones that are both fairly easily juxtaposed. You can hold the two of them in your head quite easily. And yet, going from input to output is a massive problem for anyone who endeavors to be the machine in the middle. They are trying to exist where a mechanism is clearly supposed to go. The machine is something that is more complex than one person or even a single group of people. It must be reverse engineered, just like DVD encryption to figure out just what it takes to get from one to the other. Simply plugging in already made mechanisms for change, simply doesn’t work. You must understand every single circuit and ghost within that machine.

Other machines that require reverse engineering are between the ideas of collaboration and time management, community and creation, and data and decisions.

Because these machines are so complex, they require many people to work on figuring out how they work. There must be huge teams of people who are doing nothing but taking them apart and putting them back together. We need people courageously braking through the barriers intentionally put there by the machine’s manufacturer. We need people to talk about and promote every step of the process. The in-between machines don’t want us to know everything that they have to offer. They are interested in being intentionally obtuse and confusing, which is why we have to share all of the information that we have gathered as widely as possible, so that someone who is coming at the issue from a different angle take take up where we left off.

Another problem that I face in my work for Reverse Engineering is that many people do not believe that these machines exist. They believe that you have to create the go-between for big ideas and goals. They are okay to achieve part of the machine and then stop there because they have established at least part of the conduit from one idea to the next. Only some people can travel through their machines because they are kludgy and can’t perceive the whole problem. These half-baked machines are never enough to really place the two ideas next to one another. There are always intermediate steps that can either lead closer or further away from what it is that we really need.

I reject this premise, however. I believe that there exists a certain technology, community, and innovation that will allow us to place chaos in the middle east and peace in the middle east next to one another. We just have to figure out what that is. Let’s assume it is possible. Let’s assume that we aren’t just going to byte off a tiny bit of what we have promised. Let’s assume that we just have reverse engineer our way to understanding.

So, while I can’t reverse engineer my computer, I am doing it for ideas. The next one I want to tackle can be expressed like this:

Me [machine] funding for my ideas.

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Question 51 of 365: What do we model in our networks?

Question 33 of 365: Why should we jump off a cliff?

My experiences attending the Boulder/Denver new technology meetings, and more recently Educon 2.2, have really gotten me thinking about just how much benefit there is in jumping off of a cliff. Let me clarify. The most inspiring people at these events are ones that have stopped working for others’ ideas and started working for their own. The most interesting conversations are about ways in which individuals have found to risk a large portion of themselves in the hopes of creating something that exists nowhere else. Chris Lehmann has done this at the Science Leadership Academy. Natty Zola has done this at Everlater. They took what expertise they had and they decided that pretty much any day of the week spent in a freefall toward their ideal life is better than the best vacation from the ordinary.

And yet, seeing these examples of people who have jumped off of a cliff really doesn’t make it that much more inciting to do so yourself. There is still the chance that there will be no parachute in that backpack of yours. It is also pretty likely that no one will be jumping with you. You will probably have to navigate to a safe landing without GPS guidance or the help of friends who are holding on and trying to help you beat the wind resistance.

So, why do it?

You may feel a sense of happiness, accomplishment or ownership if it works out, but there are so many more reasons to not leave your current work. Each part of you that craves stability and uniformity calls to you and tells you no. The timing is always wrong. The environment just isn’t right. Other people are going to beat you to it or going to take the credit. You won’t get any sleep and your waking hours you do have will be filled with nothing but the crushing G-forces that are pressing down on your body as you fall toward the unknown.

The stress is just too much, and yet that is the reason why you must jump.

You must jump because everything is telling you not to. You must jump because your instincts are wrong. You must jump because even the sensation of going “splat” on the ground is fantastic. It is the scraping you off of the earth that is the painful part. There are plenty of people to do that for you, though. People really do want to see you try again. They want to see you whizz by them at 100 miles an hour, even if they know you will be the same pancake at the end of the dive. It is a morbid fascination that everyone has in wanting to see people do the things that they can’t. And yet, you can do this. You must.

I will jump off of the cliff soon. Not because I think that there is some virtue in it or because I know that the parachute will open; I will jump off because there is no alternative for me. There isn’t anything else to do once I have climbed up and seen everything that there is to see. I have looked along the route and gathered the information I need at the top. It is beautiful at the precipice, but there isn’t much to do up there. The only way for me to see something new is to jump. I want to find the perspective that will lead me to my next climb. What I will be going after when I leap is still up for grabs, however. Let me know if you have any ideas.

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Question 24 of 365: When should you fire your community?

Cultivating a rich and supportive community is one of the hardest and most worthwhile things you can do with your online presence. It is something that usually requires endlessly making contacts and leaving comments. It requires a consistent voice and a steadfast level of interaction. Most of all, a good community requires time. They are not made overnight and anyone who believes that they have found a shortcut to a great community is taking the term “friend” way too seriously.

So, if all of these things are true, why in the world would anyone want to fire the community that they have cultivated and start fresh with a different set of people? Many are afraid of starting over, afraid of making connections with a whole new set of people. This is one of the reasons why people stay in jobs they don’t like or frequent bars that no longer serve a social purpose. We are creatures of habit. And because of this, we are members of habitual communities.

Habitual communities are like legacy software. It is the same thing that we have done for so long that we can’t remember life without it, and it did seem to get us to the right answers and solutions when we picked it originally. We use legacy software because it is easier than making an enormous change, even though it may fit our needs better or revolutionize our learning and working processes. We stay in our community because it has, at one point or another, been “there for us.” It has gotten us through some hard times and it has kept us going on the path that we set out on.

Yet, I would like to make the case that we should be willing to fire our communities every once in a while. We should look at those people providing comments and theories in topics we care about. We should look at them and see if they are really the ones that will guide us into our future. We should look at them and see if they are holding us back.

This is exactly why I am not sure finding old friends on Facebook is a good idea. While it may be fantastic to make contact with people from your past, you are reconstituting a community that you fired at one point or another. You are surrounding yourself with people who may no longer yield any new benefit for where you are headed. They are people that made sense for a given time and space. Trying to recreate that time and space is counterproductive for the one you exist in now.

However, I do not take this process lightly. Firing my community is not something I would be so willing to do without first knowing that there is another community that might take me in. I know that I need the social interaction of other community members on a daily basis to become a better person (both online and in real life). I need them in order to make better decisions and have innovative ideas. But, the people that I follow right now may not hold the keys to where I am headed. They may not continue to nourish all that I can be.

But, where will the new community come from? Who are those people who will, once again, be willing to put in the time and effort with me to create a community together. Perhaps I need to construct a personal ad for my community (in the least creepy way possible), and perhaps I need to craft a Dear John letter to my current community.

Personal Ad for my new community: I am seeking a community of people who are interested in building new things no matter what sector of the world they may exist in. I am interested in open source, lean startups, educational technology, and asking lots and lots of questions. I am looking for people who are interested in communicating about ideas that will change the world. If you are looking for a person who never gets tired of learning something new or creating an interesting workflow out of many diverse ideas and tools, pleas contact me about your community. Thank you.

Dear John letter for my current community: I am so sorry, but things just aren’t working out. I thought that I was interested in learning about the newest and best podcasting, blogging and presentation tools for the classroom, but I no longer have much interest in tagging those for later reference. I now find that many of your links and recommended readings are somewhat recursive and never really seem to provide the case study analysis that would move the conversation along. If you are a person in my current community who is also interested in building new technologies, learning platforms and ideas; I think there may be a place for you in my new community. However, if you are still only interested in having conversations about how to use Google Docs in the classroom, I think it may be a good time to part ways. While I still want to know that people are putting the technology to practice in high schools around the country. I am just not satisfied with the stories of teachers learning about Delicious or RSS for the first time. My community can’t be about wondering what the next big thing will be. It must be centered around actually building the next big thing.

Why Google Docs should matter to Schools:

I wrote this impassioned e-mail in response to a discussion about using Google Docs within our district. You may be able to sense the passion, but I hope it is at least somewhat of a restrained response:

I only know that I have seen and experienced for myself, my students, and for the adults I have worked with closely (in both real and virtual environments), but I thought that I would share a few thoughts.

I do not believe that we should consider Google Docs as a replacement for Word or as a competitor for OpenOffice. It just can’t compete, and I think that telling teachers and students that it is a good replacement for those tools would definitely blow up in our faces.

The only reason why we should be considering Google Docs is because of its collaborative toolset. It isn’t about creating the same thing in a different space, as OpenOffice or StarOffice would be. It is about changing the paradigm of creation. Although having things stored in a cloud is nice becasue you can access them from anywhere, this is something we could do in a decent way when Universal Content Management is up and running.

Although sharing a single document/presentation/spreadsheet and working on it together does not seem like a game changer, my experience has been just the opposite. When I introduce the idea of live-collaboration on documents, both adults and students shift their thinking. They no longer consider doing everything by themselves. They start to have an instinct of clicking on the share button first, even before there are words on the page.

Concretely, when students have access to this tool, they plan their own projects. They are able to own their learning much easier than with trading files and keeping things separate. For example, before I left the classroom, I used to do a National Novel Writing Month project where each student tried to write a novel in one month. We wrote these on google docs and then shared them with one another for commenting. We also had a single document for planning and keeping track of numbers of words (a short novel being 50,000 words). It was a terrific success, but that isn’t what I found valuable. After I left, my kids wanted to do it again the next year. Although they had no class that was asking them to do this, and no formal after school club, they set up the organizing document and started linking their own novels into it. They were able to organize writing a few hundred thousand words simply by having the tool to do so. (Although this may sound like wikis would fit the bill here, but on many occasions, students would use the Google Docs as a defacto meeting place when they were at home or in different parts of the school. They would ask questions of one another and make comments while 3 or more people were looking at the same thing.)

As for adults, the shift comes in when work is actually done. Putting Google Docs (or a similar synchonous collaboration tool) into the mix allows the work to get done in the meeting, rather than after the meetings. It allows for teachers to collaboratively lesson plan. It allows for the best ideas to come together without having to wait until “you do your revision”. To include a real-world example, when our Language Arts department was trying to come together on non-negotiable verbage in the classroom, using a Google Doc allowed us to all put our initial ideas on the white space (including the shy members) and then publicly comment on them. It shifted our conversation from debating words on butcher paper, to actually crafting the best language to use with students.

I know you can all tell that I am pretty passionate about collaboration. However, I also believe in the security of data surrounding that collaboration. If it takes longer to get a Google Docs integration right, so be it. But, I am not interested in having adults or students create in the same ways that they always have. We need to move them forward because these are the tools of the modern workplace. If we are not teaching them to collaborate as an instinct then I’m not sure that we are doing the job we are here to do.

I just want to say thank you to **** for “throwing these things out for discussion”. The best plans I have been a part of are when smart people get together and debate things out. I think that there needs to be a lot more serious discussion on whether or not other collaborative tools could perform the work of Google Docs for sure.

Thoughts?

The Collaborative Instinct

It is so strange how links seem to be related to one another when you have a single idea in your head. The tweets seem to come together in a way that makes you think that “the network” pushes you into a certain direction, just so that you can take the time to synthesize what you know. Well, that has definitely happened to me over the past few days.

To get right to the point, for some time I have been thinking about the stages through which an adult learner becomes a connected learner, someone who knows just how to find the resources and people that will support them in thir own learning. Well, I don’t think that I have it all figured out, but I will say that one of the stages that has struck me the hardest is The Collaborative Instinct.

When I say Collaborative Instinct, I mean the compulsion that exists whenever a learner creates something (a word document, powerpoint, well worded e-mail, etc) to share it with others. The simple act of sharing your resources openly, as an instinct, is something that changes the way in which you learn. By saying that your ideas and contributions are valuable enough to be available to others–that others might see their value–can transform your expectations about receiving feedback on your work, the process of revision, and the long tail of learning from others. A Collaborative Instinct is one of the easiest ways to create a community of learning around yourself. Others will want to create around your content, comment on it and remix it. They will use their own collaborative instinct to publish their own works that are related to yours. However, even if you never see these things, even if your Collaborative Instinct stops at sharing your own words, the community is being created. It will wait for you until you are interested in further connecting your learning.

Now, why did I start off with a paragraph about the links that have informed this post (and what will likely be quite a few others)? From Will Richardson’s blog, I was introduced to this study that finds those who contribute online are the ones who have the power to influence others, they control the debate about education, finance, science, and nearly any other field that values contributions from a community. I would go further to say that those who have A Collaborative Instinct are the ones who can make their own decisions. If you are not adding to the world’s knowledge, if you are not sharing what you have to offer, you are letting others make learning decisions for you. Influence and pursuasion only come from action, and yet it can be the simple action of putting up a word document on a wiki.

The next link is just a beautiful blog post. Steve Hargadon has simply hit it so clearly on the head, that I’m not sure how much commentary it requires. In this post, he recounts a story of heaven and hell which is a perfect parable for The Collaborative Instinct. Hell is where there is ample content to go around (the stuff that is saved on hard drives, carried around on flash drives, and hoarded in email attachements), but no one can feed themselves because they only have very long spoons tied to their hands. In heaven, there is the same amount of content, but no one goes hungry for resources because they are feeding each other.

The Collaborative Instinct is about knowing what nourishes us. It isn’t the heavy collaboration that lasts weeks and requires tons of planning. It is in the simple handing off of a resource that we have created which is valued by another learner. We are nourished by the long spoon of the teacher who blogs about a better way to do classroom mangement or who has an activity that explains how you can use voicethread in math.

The Collaborative Instinct isn’t hard or a very big idea, but it does require a shift in the way that we create things. If we are creating documents in Word and then saving them to the hard drive, we need to be able to submit them via e-mail to a sharing space. If we are creating things in Google Docs, we need to be clicking the share button immediately after we have finished a first draft and either publishing them as a webpage or sharing them with the people in our built-in networks (schools, organizations, other face to face collegues). Or, better yet, we should be adding them to a collaborative space and building value on top of them like this.

The preceding wiki is a new place for people at Hope Online (an Online Charter School) to share their work. I introduced the topic of The Collaborative Instinct using these simple questions:

1. How do you share with others?
2. What is your first instinct when you create a learning resource?
3. What is your tool of choice?
4. How do you leverage the learning that exists on the web?
5. How do you organize what you create?
6. What are your next steps.

Through these questions we are getting at the Collaborative instincts of all Hope teachers. We are questioning just how people share resources and whether or not there is a better way to do so. It is my greatest hope that every one of them starts to think about “the next step” after they create something. That they won’t simply be sharing the resource with the one person that needs it now, but with everyone, so that they will inform the discussion of that topic and nourish those around them.

The next post in this series will be The Reflective Pattern, but I don’t think that I will be able to do that one today as well, so stay tuned.