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 151 of 365: How do we predict the future?

Everyone is trying to devine the next big thing. Reading the tea leaves on Twitter or letting the alerts drift in to the inbox of your choice. We are all looking to get in on the ground floor of the next version of the web (3.0, 3d, etc.). We are looking for what could be, in every cute logo or interesting color scheme.

I keep thinking that I will know it when I see it, too. I look back on what was the next big thing, and I knew it then, right? I saw Google way before they were Google. I was searching with them back in high school. I should have just invested in them when they went public. I didn’t, though, and so many other people are in the same boat. And that is why we keep looking for the next Google.

That’s not the only reason, though. We keep looking because we want to know the future. We are looking for reasons enough to invest our time or effort, if not our money. But we keep looking in the same places. We are looking toward app stores and startups with vowels missing.

Predicting the future requires a little bit of crazy. It isn’t going to be the same companies, although they will be major players. It will be someone that sees something completely different from the same set of rules and situations.

While I know this isn’t going to be it exactly, here is something that the future might be:

There are a special glasses for making things appear to be in 3d, but I believe that there are new glasses coming. I believe that there are glasses that block out every other frame of a movie. The reason they do this is because there are two movies playing, interlaced so that the glasses will display only one and block out the other. The sound will match for the one you are watching. You will be able to sit in the same theatre or in front of the same screen and watch two separate films.

This is crazy talk. It doesn’t exist, nor will it. There are two many unanswered questions. There are too many things that don’t make sense about something like this, but this is the future. The future of ridiculous technology that seemingly is more intrusive and convenient at the same time. These glasses are impractical. They are the unfortunate offspring of wanting to be completely immersed by the media you are consuming and wanting to be with others who are interested in being with you but not in consuming the same media that you are.

The future is in sharing the same space but not the same experience. The future is in finding connections without having to know all of the same people or the same facts. Differentiation is the future, whether that is with glasses or with a single online profile that knows more than it lets on.

The next Google is going to be the first company to let people be who they are with one another. They will present technologies to get people together. People have been trying this for years, but it is the one thing that is still severely lacking. The physical devices have presented screens to separate our learning and understanding. The ones that are coming are ones that bring it all together.

The ones that have already had their shot at this rather elusive prize probably won’t get it quite right. Google, Apple and Microsoft pay lip service to the future, but they really are trying to shore up the markets that have made them profitable. They won’t see someone coming up on the outside with a crazy gadget such as those glasses. They will see it as something that can’t possibly catch on, and then once it does, they will try and copy it or buy them out. But it won’t work this time. This time, the future will be too interested in creating itself anew. And it will.

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Question 142 of 365: Who controls the power of suggestion?

My children have trigger words. Certain phrases cannot be said in their presence. If these words are uttered within earshot, the response is so immediate and severe that you will wonder if there will ever be another state of mind for them. These are words like “ice cream” or “science show” (also known as Mythbusters). These words are so highly suggestive to my children that they find themselves repeating the words over and over until I have no choice but to act. I either have to give in to what was already suggested or explain, in detail, why the suggestion was merely a mistake and that it is not an appropriate time.

I have trigger words too. Mine are usually overheard from across e room or at a dinner party. If I hear those words, I immediately gravitate toward whomever has said them. Among them are WordPress, iPad, Moodle, wikis, Vonnegut, and Schools. I will drop whatever I am doing to make myself available for those conversations just by virtue of them being suggested. And just like my kids, I am wrong about their suggestions much of the time. Often I mistake people talking about schools in the abstract as something to engage people in a debate about the future of education. They tend to be more interested in talking about a few of the teachers their children have had throughout the years. I often confuse the interest gadgets like the iPad as wanting to have conversations about what is possible to do with them. Too many times people are just talking about how it is just a big iPhone or about something they heard on the news about them.

The power of suggestion is quite strong with me. I can be convinced to engage in almost anything so long as it has one of my keywords somewhere in it. Kind of unfortunate for me, but incredibly fortunate for anyone who is trying to get my attention.

While I cannot extrapolate that all people are this highly suggestive, I would say that from the experience with my children that we never really get over the few things that cause great want within us. We will always be triggered to buy, converse about, or simply lust after the ideas that we connect to the most.

And therefore we are highly controllable. To any great extent if others (or if a service) figures out what our keywords are (or if we simply hand them over in the case of a profile page), we will be manipulated into focusing out attention on only those things that we have professed our affinity for.

That is why the future of advertising scares me a little bit. Anyone that can access our desires, interests, and social connections will be able to serve up the perfect ad that contextualizes a product within the conversation that we would like to have. They will be able to lay out a path to engage with the next idea in the sequence they have developed to get us to purchase their service.

In the ever expanding world of “things that we like”, patterns will likely emerge. It is my belief that web pages and even books will be written for us based upon our interests and searching patterns. Rather than trying to find static pages with a few comments, when we search, the service will look at our complete profile and then compose an article with all of the information we are looking for, with carefully placed product placement in the text itself. The next generation of search will be “find and buy.”

These pages that will be written just for me will be composed into a book that I carry around with me, a reference library for all of the answers that have been created just for me. And because no one will be looking at the exact same pages, each individual version of the answer will be shareable and “likable” which will further lead to the web knowing more about how to better cater to your needs.

Our social interaction around machine created content will be in discussing the products and ideas that have been produced specifically for the purpose of that interaction. And why not? We will be getting better answers, more specific results, and we will only have to read it from our own perspective. We could even choose to see the Internet from other’s viewpoints as a change of pace, just so long as we keep “liking” and sharing along the way.

The power of suggestion will be controlled by those that understand our trigger words best, just as they always have. I use “ice cream” with my children, sometimes as a reward and many times just to see their smiling faces. They love me for both, just as we will love those who share the world’s knowledge with us and give us carrot at the end for us to purchase. I’m not angry about this future. After all, they will be talking about all of the stuff that I already know and love.

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Question 103 of 365: Who is watching out for whom?

I had never dressed up for Halloween until I became a teacher. It just wasn’t something we did in my family. But, when I became a middle school teacher, it was definitely an expectation. So, I was Peter Pan and Poneyboy a couple of times and it was never a really big deal. Not until I had Isabelle and Tobias did I really understand the true nature of Halloween. And while dressing up my children in their first costumes was a big deal for me, I think that it only amounts to a rite of passage in the end. The real power of Halloween is in the trick or treating event. The very idea that soliciting strangers is expected is foreign to me. I always felt embarrassed to go up someone’s walkway unannounced, must less do it in a disguise. But my daughter gracefully asked for her fair share of candy, even making specific requests a number of times. To her, this was what you were supposed to do on such an evening.

This year she was a Dragonasaurus (half dragon, half dinosaur) and my son was a chicken. Tobias had just learned to walk fairly well when we put him in this outfit that was just too small. We ended up cutting out the feet so that he could fit in it. As he walked down our too-narrow sidewalks, he tried to carry his candy bag. After one particularly successful stop on our route, another adult in our party was hurriedly trying to get to the next house with his daughter. This man ran directly over Tobias and knocked him to the ground, face first. His nearly-new teeth met the sidewalk, only protected by his lips, which immediately started to swell and bleed. As we tried to comfort him (and carry him the rest of the way), I couldn’t help but contemplate what exactly this other adult was thinking in moving so fast or so recklessly.

Tobias could have been seriously injured due to someone else’s lack of awareness. Luckily, his lips didn’t split and the snow on the ground provided a wonderful ice pack for him. Oh, and opening a few chocolate pieces of Halloween candy seem to ease the situation somewhat. Although, Tobias wasn’t watching out for the adults either, he probably just assumed that they would more likely look out for him so that he doesn’t have to. I know that I have forgiven this adult for hurting my child, but I am still not entirely convinced that he will really be much more aware in the future.

And that is pretty much the way I feel about big and little companies, large and small projects and expanding and contracting schools. I know that many of them have run over smaller entities in order to get somewhere new, but I don’t think that many are really learning from that experience. Many large companies continually give fat lips to those without as much balance or grace, rather than simply guiding them along and making sure that they are the ones that can take credit for the small companies success. The startup is little and untrained, and doesn’t really know where it is going. If an established firm really wants to get at the sweet rewards that the startup is collecting (is that stretching the metaphor a bit far?), it is much better to guide the startup along the path, investing in its future earnings. That way, when you count out the bounty, the large companies can take their cut (perhaps the largest and most complex profits that the startup would really be able to digest fully).

As for projects and schools, I believe that there really is an aspect of collaboration that is being lost in running over the small pilot program in favor of the high-profile endeavor. Just like the mass produced costume that many kids wear, the large project seems like a sexy alternative to a boutique solution that really fits a given situation. Whether in a national charter school or a top down IT-based initiative, the price of a packed solution seems to be justified simply by the fact that it comes shrinkwrapped. The hand-sewn answer, while perhaps not as pretty, is one that we hold onto for years. It is the one that stays with us and builds a mythology all its own. We tell stories about its creation, rather than create reports on why we have moved on to something else. We hand it down to others, who remake it to fit their own needs rather than watch it deteriorate and be thrown away at the first sign of diminishing returns.

I would like us to watch out for the creative costume or the littlest solicitor. Because it is through them that we will learn the most about how to do our jobs better. It is through them that we will find a balance that we so desperately seek. And it is through them that we can become joyful about the process of going and asking for others to support what it is that we need: whether that is candy or a living.

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

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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And now, a Poem for my future.

I don’t often write poetry on this blog (or much at all since I left college), but here is what I wrote today:

I’m playing with fire for a reason.
I’m learning to ask and to answer.
I’m reading between the lines, and finding passion there.
I’m treading water with relish.
I’m walking into oncoming traffic and finding that I’m not the only one here.
I’m raiding the refrigerator, leaving only the ketchup.
I’m harvesting my own organs, not exactly sure where they should go.
I’m making sure that everything is rusting around me.
I’m stuff pillows with whole sheep.
I’m roughing it.
I’m starting to inch my way out the door. At least, I think it’s a door.
I’m french kissing disaster, foreplay with potential.
I’m opening my coat and letting the cold breeze fill up my sleeves.
I’m laying in a bed and breakfast, waiting for the morning paper.

I’m still here, despite all my posturing.
I’m still thinking, despite all my action.
I’m still waiting, despite knowing the direction and location and result that I want.

Yes.
I’m still waiting.

SpeedGeek Learning Version .1

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

I won’t buy anything that only does one thing

I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a Smart Board, CPS clicker system, an iPod touch and an Apple TV. The two former products are meant to do one thing well. They are advertised specifically for educational purposes, and they work. But the two latter products are meant to do anything that the community makes them do, and they are not specifically marketed as educational components.
 
The latter products I keep on coming back to because they can do more and more as the community supports future development, and I guess that this is the difference between products I want to use and ones I don’t. The ones I care to use for education, are the ones with built in communities. They are the ones that get pushed to their full potential.
 
So I guess what I am saying is that if I am ever put in change of large purchasing decisions for a district or school, I will be choosing to purchase and support products that connect together and have a community surrouning them.
 
For example: I am right now using my iPod touch with an open source program called boxee (remote on the touch and the full program on the Apple TV) that is a full fledged media center in order to watch powerful TED talks in high definition on my TV using WiFi to stream the content. It is all connected.
 
Shouldn’t it always be this way?
 
(As an aside, I realize that this example is filled with apple products. I don’t believe that apple has a monopoly on connectedness or hackability, it happens that this is the community that I associate with most easily. I would actually love to hear about other devices that you keep on coming back to because they increase in value over time.)
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

A question

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous