Question 186 of 365: How should we submit our work?

I think a lot about the submit button. The process of taking something that you own and uploading it to someone else is an act of trust. I am trusting that everything that I submit to Flickr will be there when I look for it, without some crazy provisions or copyright license on it. I am trusting that the presentations I upload to Slideshare will be embeddable wherever I want them to be. Whenever I submit an assignment in an online course, I am trusting that it will be valued by the person on the other end and not just put into a virtual file cabinet to make one more check on a class checklist.

This trust isn’t something that we should take lightly or that we should let rest as it is. There is inherently a problem with turning over your work to something else via a button. The transaction method of turning things in is all wrong. When we have to turn over all authority of the things we have authored, we are no longer able to take responsibility for where they end up. And we should be able to do that. We should be always able to make decisions about our content, continuing to extend its existence wi every link and collaboration.

I want to start making Dropbox the standard for submitting. The very idea of dropping your content into a folder on your desktop and having that sync into a space that other people and services have access to is he future of sharing. Removing content or revising it updates the files everywhere that they are referenced, preserving your control and your ability to revise and continue to come back to where you have already been without recreating or storing every ne version on every different service that comes into existence.

I want to turn in assignments by dropping files onto my desktop and revise my answers with a simple save. I want to share them with everyone else who is in my class and have the facilitator see that sharing as well. I want to have photo sharing sites get access to my collection through a sync from my computer. I want to always maintain the copies but know that they exist and are accessible easily.

The possibilities for creating are simple and elegant when you remove the pressure of the submit button. When you no longer have to wait until something is good enough to start syncing it our to the world, collaboration has the ability to take hold of everything that you do. When you don’t have to be connected to the web in order to check in on what other people have contributed, we aren’t tethered to any device or service. Sharing ownership of our work and also being able to continue to expand its use is the next journey that we must attempt.

This is the workflow I see:

Any file that is on your device is on the cloud is also shared with others and is found on other’s hard drives. The redundancy allows for backup after backup of our work. All of these drives and versions are networked and allow us to see as a work progresses because a visualization of all edits across the world will be a part of the metadata of the file itself. Each file will be editable on all devices either by a local program or a cloud based service. The file will not care which. Microsoft word and Google Docs will simply be the way we revise the much more powerful part of this process: the sharing. Each file will become linked and embeddable. And because of the way all of these hard drives are networked, the file will not be embedded just from the cloud service, but it will also be embedded from the original source (your device). This will mean that we will always be able to track where content has come from and where it goes to. The single source of truth will be the person that created it, and if they delete it, all that will be left will be the remixes and revisions that work under fair use.

None of this will happen if we keep on with the submit button as the only way to share (this button takes many forms, but it is the function that I think is going to hold us back). We need to move toward sharing responsibility for our files and our ideas. We need to submit by moving things around on our devices and not just on the services that seem to come and go every few weeks. We need share via a link that will always exist, instead of break with every whim of a few shareholders. The infrastructure isn’t what needs a tweak. It is us. We need to push what our own devices can do and what we are willing to pay for as well. We need to become our own data centers and wharehouses. We need to become our own cloud, all with the idea that Google or someone else will also have backups of our stuff too. Because you know they will.

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Question 136 of 365: What is a family reunion?

I have never been a part of a family big enough to require a reunion. We have had many family gatherings over the years, but never a reunion. Father’s side, mother’s side, and weird couplings around weddings. These are the closest that we have come.

This week is something of an experiment. My family of four, my parents, my two brothers and their fiancées, and my paternal grandmother will be convening at our house. Costco, target, Peets coffee and tea, and a very short trip to Macy’s. So far, so good.

It just makes me wonder what we are supposed to be doing to get the most out of our time together. Should we be going out to the Zoo like we plan or should we be staying in and watching movies. Should we send my children off to school and have some more adult time, of is it sufficient to keep them with us every day so that the whole family will get to hang out with them as much as they would like.

And why do these questions suddenly matter so much to me? Well, I think that questions of family are the basis for most of the questions that I am asking. If the family is the most basic subset of a collaborative team, I should want to see just how far I can take my ideas of working together within an intensely tradition-based group.

So, my first order of business was to create a Google Doc for planning out the whole week. At certain times, each member of. Y family has logged in and put in their preferences for food, entertainment, and sleeping arrangements. My mother and I spent a good afternoon getting the document worked out, carving conversations in the comments and then responding with new pieces of information elsewhere in the document.

My father then set up a dropbox.com folder for all of the PDF files and directions that we needed. This folder syncs with my computer and iPad, so I haven’t been out of touch on any aspect the whole time.

The next order of business is to establish a familiar reunion hash tag so that all of us can tweet no matter where we are in the city and we will all be able to follow along. We will also be posting to flickr and facebook using this tag for easy searching. I can’t wait to see the geotagged Map of our trip.

Asfor the plans, maybe we should be putting the whole thing on plan cast so that people will be able to follow along with our exploits. Or, perhaps we just need to post our itinerary afterwards via FourSquare. I feel as though it may be better to know where we have been for some reason than where we are going.

I think we should probably scrobble the whole weekend’s music lisning on last.fm. I also think it might be a good idea to track our coffee consumption with a live coffee cam set up to stream from the kitchen.

Okay, so perhaps those ideas are a bit much, but I am interested in pushing the idea of a family reunion to the estreme, mostly because I can’t stand the idea of being in a family with matching t-shirts. I want to be a part of the family that tags things via bar code (a la stickybits). I want to be a part of the family that doesn’t ever give up in trying to all be in the same place at the same time, even if that means skyping someone in.

I want to literally put my family on the map, a Google Map.

They say that the key to a family is communication, and in this one small area, I think THEY are right. What I would like to attempt is to communicate as much as we possibly can so that no one is left behind, and no one forgets what they are supposed to do, or even what happened. This week is going to be fantastic, not only because it will be filled with my family, but because my family will be working together to create the types of environments that I always want to be a part of.

Who knows, perhaps we will do such a good job of experiencing, communicating, and archiving our adventures that we will be able to play them back like a short film and allow future reunions to simply continue the story.

More than anything, I hope that this week is something that we will struggle to top in the future because we take enough risks and find the right amount of relaxation and fun. Shouldn’t be too much to ask for.

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Question 101 of 365: What is the next vanity?

I used to fall asleep in crazy positions.

My parents tell this story about me falling asleep with my chest over my knees at the foot of the bed in Disney World. While that is basic fetal position, it is usually done on your side or your back. I was just folded in two, taking up the smallest footprint on the bed possible.

The one that I remember, though, is falling asleep in our van’s middle bench-type seat. I somehow became unbuckled and dangled myself off with my knuckles touching the ground and the rest of my body somehow staying on the bench. The reason I remember, is that I woke up like that. I woke up to my mother telling another woman about me. She kept on talking about the crazy ways that I would fall asleep and then she went on to talk about other things that were more flattering and personality driven. I wish I could remember more of those.

I realize now that I didn’t start moving and fully wake up because I wanted her to keep on talking about me. I wanted to know what she and this other woman thought about me without asking them. In short, I was vain. I had this sense that other people would talk about me when I wasn’t in the room (or awake, apparently), and I wanted to know what they were saying. It was one of the first ways that I knew that the world continued on out of earshot and eye sight.

Not a lot has changed, I’m afraid. I am still vain, and I still want to know what others are saying about me. I don’t pretend to be asleep now, though. Rather, I empower my eavesdropping ability using a variety of technologies. I run Google Alerts for my name, getting daily update whenever someone mentions something on the web about me. Hootsuite performs a perpetual search for mentions of my username. My blog gets an alert whenever someone links to me, as does my Google Analytics account. My Facebook and Flickr accounts are alerted any time I am tagged in a photograph. I even get updated on Slideshare whenever someone likes one of my presentations or decides to embed it into their website. There is a certain science to my vanity now.

The problem is, where does vanity go from here. How can I possibly eavesdrop on more people or figure out just how good or bad the things are that people say? To me, the future of vanity actually lies in the moment with my mom in the van. She wasn’t tagging me in a photo or linking to me as a person, she was simply talking about me in casual conversation. She was telling stories that didn’t require any technology to augment their reality. Yet, if I hadn’t woken up, I would never have known that those words were being said.

So, I believe that the future of our quest for vanity and self-branding will be in the power of voice and conversation. In the not so distant future, I believe that all speech will be able to be parsed and tagged. Moreover, I believe that all conversations will have the capacity to be auto-tagged and analyzed. I’m not saying that all of our conversations will be recorded, but I think that everyone with a device in the pockets will be able to use it to see the networked representation of what they are talking about.

For example, I like to talk about movies frequently. I believe that if I bring out my phone and plop it on the table in front of me, it will be able to pull up all of the information about the movie that I am speaking of without me having to type it in. It will follow the conversation on screen and continue to present me with further topics to explore, further ways to travel down the rabbit hole. In doing so, it will be tagging my conversation and it will allow me to play it back if I would like to or publish it (and the conversation path) along with it.

With a technology such as this, vanity will be a very real part of our lives every day. We will be able to know exactly when people are speaking about us and be alerted as to the context of that speech.

I also believe that this will happen in video first. I believe that we will start to tag each other in speech with the videos that we are creating. Now that YouTube has decent transcription service going on all of their videos, we aren’t too far from making that text live, searchable, and hyperlinked. As soon as the conversations in video response become tagged with our names and our ideas, video will be the next thing to start making us more self-aware.

The next vanity will be the same as the first. Our words will make us more and more vain because we will always know our references. We will become a part of the taxonomy of communication. We will have an analytical value based upon the number of conversations that are about us. And that will be scary and validating, seductive and pointless, ugly and freeing; all at the same time.

Question 98 of 365: What will we have time for?

I remember a discussion I had with my homeroom teacher in high school that went something like this:

Teacher: I used to play the guitar, a twelve string, and I really loved it. I haven’t played it in years, now. I think it may have a hole in the back, but I can’t remember. It is in my closet at home.

Me: I can’t believe that you would ever stop playing the guitar once you knew how.

Teacher: I just don’t have time for it anymore. Of all of the things that I have to do, playing guitar is no longer one of them.

Me: I don’t understand. If I had that nice of a guitar, I would always make time for it. How could you not want to constantly be writing songs and playing in the evening? How is it that you could lose your passion for something that you loved so much?

And I was completely sincere in my dumbfoundedness. I could not fathom going a single day without strumming along or humming my own tune. And yet, that is where I find myself at this time. I haven’t written a song in a couple of years and I only play in order to entertain my children. This is clearly out of sync with my high minded high school self.

And yet, I had no way of predicting that having two children or a full-time job would really require so much of my energy. I couldn’t see that blogging would almost completely take over my creative output. It just wasn’t possible for me to foresee that music could take a back seat to other passions. I was basing everything I knew upon my (then) current world view, and all signs pointed to the fact that I would be writing songs until I died.

Because I based everything I knew about the future upon everything I knew about the present, there was no way for me to predict what I would have time for. And it is now pressing down on me that the things I have time for now may change significantly because of the same sort of shifting priorities and circumstances.

Simplistically speaking, we will have time for all of the things that we make time for. I will make time for my family and I will make time for my work. I will make time to be creative and for some sort of technology. These are givens, and yet, my ability to predict what any of those will look like is next to nothing. There doesn’t seem to be any crystal ball that will work for determining future time allocation. And yet, that is what I am aiming to do.

I am interested to see just how much I could predict if I was given the right set of circumstances. I believe that this would be incredibly useful to a great many people, assuming they are like me and want to know just how interesting of people they will become.

So, here is what I would like to see:

The following data points would need to be allocated:

• FourSquare, Gowalla or Yelp (for location points)
• Twitter (for time of day and topics of interest)
• Flickr (with facial tagging for people you are most often with)
• RescueTime (for figuring out just what you spend the most time with on your computer)
• Facebook and Delicious (for determining “likes” and shifting vocabulary for describing things)

I would like to be able to see where I have been, what I have been talking about, who I have been with, what I have been doing, and my language and interest in all of it in a single monthly report. I would like it to look something like the annual report I get from Capital One for my credit card, where it is broken down into the different types of things that I spent money on. From this data, I would like the report to project out another few months or more into the future and see exactly what it is that I will be spending my time on. I would like it to see the trends in the ways that I am starting to tag things in delicious. I would like it to see the shifts in my tweets from one topic or group of followers to another. I would like it to make a best fit line in terms of where I will be in the future, taking all of these data points into account.

This would be one way to not only identify the things that I have been looking at, but also those that I should look further into. That part would come in, when it would compare my monthly reports with those of others. If it was able to see trends that are starting in the group of people that I most often talk to or about, it would be able to see just where I need to spend more of my time in the future. Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

Then again, I could always just look at my own past and call myself an ignorant kid who really didn’t understand the ways in which life can change in an instant and call it good. Perhaps that is an equally good answer.

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Question 40 of 365: Why can’t we focus on making something, rather than the something itself?

It is the product that we are after: the book, the video, the iPhone, the worksheet, and the report. These products are the result of a huge amount of processing, working, collaborating, and creating. And yet, we are so focused on the product itself that we have almost no idea how it came into being. We are so interested in what the product can do for us, the idea that we could be learning from  the creation of that product and helping ourselves to the knowledge of what it takes to create something great is simply left behind.

I have three examples for this kind of misguided focus.

The first is of a single YouTube video. For effect, let’s choose a meme: Takeing a picture of yourself every day for a number of years. The result of this meme is a serious amount of introspection, reflection on what matters in one’s life and an amount of dedication to an idea that many people do not choose to follow. The video is just the byproduct of this reflection. It can garner a huge level of interest, but the process is what matters, not the object at the end of it.

Other videos are even further removed from the process. One of the most engaging videos in education, social media, and technology in the last 10 years was created by a friend of mine, Karl Fisch. He did a powerpoint presentation that gathered a lot of data about technology, schools and the ways in which the world is changing. The process that he went through to create the powerpoint was rich and worthwhile, and every iteration that has been created off of his original vision has undergone some version of the process. Yet, all of the people that have watched the video believe that the final product is what should be the conversation starter. I believe that the process of thinking through the implications of technology, education, informatics, design, and comparative analysis is where the power lies. If we truly followed the example of this process, we would all be trying to find the data in our own lives that will enable us to anticipate and engage in the future instead of taking someone else’s observations on data and declaring it to be gospel.

A second type of product worship happens when a piece of technology becomes the focus of endless discussion. Facebook is a product that you would think could focus on the process of creating intricate networks of people for all kinds of reasons, but in fact, the majority of the conversation about Facebook is about how to get the most friends, make money, or all of the content (read: products) that gets shared on that ever expanding network. The conversation rarely is about what an individual’s social network requires in order to be a sustaining and engaging aspect of a healthy social life. Facebook, as a product, too often wins out to Facebook, as a creation of interconnected stories that add value to your life.

The final way in which I see products being the focus of all attention is within the “upload” button. The upload button has become a pervasive part of the online ecosystem and it has quite simply turned all of our actions into looking for a product that we can “upload.” Whether it is a powerpoint uploaded to Slideshare, a photo uploaded to Flickr, or any type of file uploaded to Google Docs (now that it is basically an online hard drive); all of this uploading is causing us to focus on getting everything we do into a package that is uploadable. While I am seriously in favor of placing my work on the cloud, the fact that all of the collaboration and thought behind each product doesn’t get uploaded with it is a serious problem. Google Docs gets it right when you start from scratch in there. You can look back at the revision history and see what contributions and thought process made it an important document. However, that is only one path, and it is still incredibly hard to follow a thought process through a revision history.

What I want is a system that allows me to see the process of creation, from start to finish. I want to see everything that goes into answering a big question. I want to hear the fits and starts of answers. I want the “umms” to hang in the air while someone formulates a new thought. I want the rough edges in the middle drafts and the clean lines of the final one. I want the upload button to be modified into a “record” button. I want that button to be the beginning rather than the ending.

In essence, I want a YouTube that can show me how the ideas were birthed and provide a backstory to fill in all of the things that were left on the “cutting room floor.” I want a Facebook that allows you to see the connections and understand the true importance of each one. I want a social network that can look at the quality of content and not just the quantity (or the ability to view huge amounts of it). I also want a cloud-based service that doesn’t let the upload button to reign supreme. I want the uploaded work to be an iterative process, one idea leading to the next.

I guess that is asking for a lot, but perhaps this is more about my process of building it than it is about the product I want at the end. Right?

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I bought a house today!

This post doesn’t have a whole lot to do with educational technology, but I really had to let everyone who might care to know that my family is moving into a new house. It is our absolute dream home.

I have toyed with the idea of putting up the video tour that I did in order to show my parents, but I’m not totally sure that anyone that reads my blog casually really needs that kind of a detailed view of where my children sleep. If you truly would like to have that kind of voyeurism in your life, send me a direct message on Twitter.

For now, though, just know that I am happy with our decision, and that I cant wait to move in.

The Social Networks of Tragedies

The Social Networks of Tragedies Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (198)

July 05, 2007 07:52PM

This podcast is pretty heavy:
I was in Osawatomie, KS for the 4th of July. It flooded earlier in the week, and my sister-in-law lost her car and her apartment due to this natural disaster. This event really got me thinking about how we can use the technology that our schools provide (especially in 1:1 programs) in order to create social networks for a community. I hope that we can start putting together ideas like Steve Hargadon’s Public Web Stations (link below) in non-crisis times. If you have any ideas about how to do this, please shoot me an e-mail at benwilkoff@gmail.com
I am also interested in knowing if you would rather I don’t include links and pictures with my podcast, but rather simply upload the mp3 file. If you have an opinion either way, please post a comment on this podcast.
Show Notes:

• 00:00:00: Intro to Osawatomie Flooding
  Pictures
• 00:02:12: Supporting the people of Osawatomie
  News Article and Support Links
• 00:03:02: The 1:1 Social Network
  The Osawatomie 1:1 Initiative
• 00:06:24: The New School Community Center
• 00:07:51: Steve Hargadon’s Public Web Stations
  Public Web Stations
• 00:09:53: Bridging Social Networks and Analog Communities
• 00:12:15: How do we use tech in our schools to benefit the community?
  My Blog

links for 2007-11-21

• Interesting Snippets – a photoset on Flickr
  A photoset of interesting photos with provocative statements about the state of the internet and technolgoy.
  (tags: InternetandTechnologyIntroduction ProvocativeImages flickr quotes web2.0 Powerpoint Research statistics)
• Blogs for Student Learning
  Pretty darn great blog for introducing blogging
  (tags: InternetandTechnologyIntroduction BloggingintheClassroom Blogs BloggingasGenre)
• ATS Login
  Check dcsd paystubs online
  (tags: dcsd Paytubs)

I vs. We

I don’t know when it happened, but I have started using the word “we” in my podcast and blog when I would normally use the word “I.” I believe that it is due to my increased awareness and involvement of the community that I have surrounded myself with. I also think that many more of “us” should start using “we” when “we” write and speak. It makes me feel like I am a part of something, that “we” are going in a particular direction. I want “us” to be aware of how amazing “our” community can become, so long as we don’t fall into some of the pitfalls that I describe in the podcast. Let me know what you think of this idea at benwilkoff@gmail.com.
The image for this podcast is by http://flickr.com/photos/factoids/. I think it is amazing.

• 00:00:00: Intro to I vs. We
  Podcast Blog

• 00:02:00: Shoutout to Geeked!
  Geeked! Podcast

• 00:02:59: The Difference between I and We
  Image Attribution

• 00:04:51: I have a community!

  Edubloggerworld, my community?

• 00:07:28: The Coallition of We
  Support Blogging

• 00:08:12: Chris Lehmann’s Addition
  Humility

• 00:08:47: The Moment of Switch-Over
• 00:10:54: The 1:1 We connection

  Ripe Environment: Connection

• 00:14:02: Conclusion to I vs. We
  My Blog

The Social Networks of Tragedies

This podcast is pretty heavy:

I was in Osawatomie, KS for the 4th of July. It flooded earlier in the week, and my sister-in-law lost her car and her apartment due to this natural disaster. This event really got me thinking about how we can use the technology that our schools provide (especially in 1:1 programs) in order to create social networks for a community. I hope that we can start putting together ideas like Steve Hargadon’s Public Web Stations (link below) in non-crisis times. If you have any ideas about how to do this, please shoot me an e-mail at benwilkoff@gmail.com

I am also interested in knowing if you would rather I don’t include links and pictures with my podcast, but rather simply upload the mp3 file. If you have an opinion either way, please post a comment on this podcast.

Show Notes:

• 00:00:00: Intro to Osawatomie Flooding
  Pictures

• 00:02:12: Supporting the people of Osawatomie
  News Article and Support Links

• 00:03:02: The 1:1 Social Network
  The Osawatomie 1:1 Initiative

• 00:06:24: The New School Community Center
• 00:07:51: Steve Hargadon’s Public Web Stations
  Public Web Stations

• 00:09:53: Bridging Social Networks and Analog Communities
• 00:12:15: How do we use tech in our schools to benefit the community?
  My Blog