Question 178 of 365: Are we backwards compatible?

I am on an old computer today. It doesn’t work with all of my newfangled iPads, Keynote files, or the standard version of Gmail. I feel a little bit lost on it, actually. I can’t do the things I would normally. I have to figure out workarounds. I don’t have any issues with doing this. I am energized by figuring out how to do new things with old hardware. But, it does make me think about just how little backwards compatibility really exists. Not just with our technology, but within ourselves.

It makes me think back to when I was using this tech the first time around. Who was I then? Am I compatible with that person, even? Back then, I had no idea about what two children meant. I hadn’t made some of my current closest friends, and I certainly hadn’t figured out that there was something after teaching. In short, I was probably about 25% of who I am now just a few years ago. And I don’t think that today’s me is all that compatible with the one I was. 

I’m pretty sure that the two of us would fight, actually. We would fight about what is the most important thing to be doing with our lives (creating greater change or teaching kids how to think for themselves). We would argue over money and influence and connections. He would probably read books right in my face (seeing as how I hardly have time to do that now). I would probably shoot back about how much I know about life through my son. He would laugh at the grey hairs and the bags under my eyes. I would poke fun at his uninformed workflow and lack of vision.

I am not the man I was, but I don’t want to be. I would never give up what I have for what I have been. That is why I feel as though backwards compatibility is overrated. While it may make sense for some technologies, I realized through the process of having to recreate a presentation from one that stripped out all of the links and some of the images, that the whole thing needed to be reworked anyway. I realized that the person that gave the presentation last time isn’t compatible with who I am today. Why should the presentation itself be that way? 

Sometimes, we should be forced to give up 70 percent of what we had so that we can become what we can become. In a presentation, it will transform the message and the intent. In a person, it will transform our actions and our personalities. 

So, are we backwards compatible? No. And we shouldn’t strive to be. We should go forward, relentlessly. We should forget and retry and revise until we can look at one version and the next and see the actual progress. Kind of like the ways in which we look at Internet Explorer 6 now. It is time to retire who we were (IE6 should die, actually). We can always look back, but we don’t have to keep building who we are so that compatibility is assured. It is convenient sometimes, but most of the time it just holds us back.

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Question 113 of 365: Why do we need collaborative email signatures?

I feel more complete when other people come into my space than when I go into theirs. I feel as though they are reaching out to me, especially if I haven’t given an invitation that must be accepted or rejected. Mass participation in something I helped to create is like no other sensation I know. It is as if I am being chosen from all of the activities that exist and when I see other people take part and engage in the act of co-authoring something, I feel energized and warm. It is those moments of potential when I notice I am not the only one with a particularly interesting idea that seem to lead to everything else. It is as if my mind bounces sets up everyone that is engaged within my head as a pinball machine and bounces the ideas back and forth. And then when the words start to come, the transformation from idea to reality is so complete and beautiful that I pursue it like my son pursues a new tiny raisin box. I can’t be the only one who sees collaboration like this.

So, I had an idea.

What if I demonstrated my value for collaboration within every communication that I sent out? What if I showed people that I believe in crowdsourcing and co-creation within every one of my utterances? What if I left an olive branch out there for others to grab ahold of no matter whether my tone was repentant, forceful or self-abasing in my voice?

As I thought about all of the ways in which I decry a lack of communication and collaboration, I had never really given others an option of exercising their collaborative muscles without first giving them concrete parameters for doing so. Collaboration always had to be for a specific purpose, rather than just for the joy of being a part of creating something together. I knew that I had to show co-creation in the contexts that others envision, rather than just opening up the possibility of letting collaboration happen.

In the hopes of spontaneous collaboration, I have set up an open Google Doc that is now a permanent part of my e-mail signature. With every reply, I will be telling people that I would rather be contacted through collaboration than through a phone number. I am telling people the ways in which I connect must be within a co-created space rather than on “my turf” or theirs. While this may be nothing more than an experiment, I am now inviting everyone to come together rather than simply take a look at my identity. And, I encourage others to do the same.

What if we all used collaborative signatures? What if we found ways to promote the values that we say that we have signed on for? What if we didn’t point people to our websites and our blogs, but rather we pointed them to take part in branding our conversations with everything that they bring to the table? What if we learned from one another without the boundaries of a single e-mail thread? What if we created the spaces for solving common problems and what if we actually solved them?

I get why specific spaces work so well. I get why Facebook and LinkedIn are so wildly popular. You know what you are supposed to do there. You are supposed to share information about yourself and establish a presence that others can come and interact with. What I am proposing is a departure from this because I am advocating for a space with undefined identity. In fact, the way I created the link to share the Google Doc, pretty much assumes everyone is anonymous unless they login from the Doc itself. I am also proposing a space that can change ownership and focus depending on who is there and how it is being used. Because people can exist in real-time within the document’s chat area, conversations can happen and then disappear. Because people can leave semi-permanent notes and ideas for one another, it is like having one massive whiteboard that other people can add to at will.

Given that so many of us are working from anywhere there is an internet connection, we need an office whiteboard that can be doodled on and graffitied. We all need a space that doesn’t have the parameters of meeting notes and agenda items or informal sharing that drifts by in a stream of tweets. We need almost permanence. We need open-endedness. We need collaborators.

And we should show this need every chance we get.

So, here is what I am starting with. Create your own space:

This is my public collaborative document for anyone who I correspond with to take part in. It is an experiment in whether or not giving people the option of collaborating and creating together will cause them to do so, despite the very different types of people that I talk to on a regular basis.

What kinds of things can you do here?

• Leave me notes. Leave other people notes. Drop in interesting pictures.
• Ask a question or answer one.
• Throw out an idea or build something new.

Obviously, this isn’t the place where you will write the great American novel, but you can take whatever is in this document and use it however you like. I am licensing everything here as Creative Commons Attribution-Only. Go bananas.

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Create your own real-time SMS to Twitter service!

For the past month I have been trying to figure out an elegant way of having an entire audience all tweet to the same account using text messaging on their phones. While I can think of a good number of reasons to want to do this, my main concern was in creating a twitter backchannel for presentations that anyone could participate in, regardless of their experience with twitter or backchanneling. I believe in the power of the audience and I want them to be able to ask questions and make comments on what is going on. I also thought it would be quite powerful to show people just how easy it is to harness the technology that most of us carry around in our pockets.

So without further ado, here is how you can give anyone a single number to send an SMS to and have it post to twitter on the account of your choosing.

Step 1: Sign up for a new twitter account using the gmail address+ feature.

While you may think having a bunch of people posting to your twitter account would provide you with a bunch of content, it is a really bad idea to let just anyone in the audience to put words in your mouth.

So, go to twitter and sign up for a new account, but instead of having to have a different e-mail address, all you need to do is to use YourGmailUserName+YourKeyword@gmail.com. This will still send all follower e-mails and direct messages to your Gmail account, but it will allow you to filter it out if you don’t want to receive any of it.

Here is what that looks like:

Step 2: Go into your Google Voice Account and turn on SMS forwarding to e-mail, which is a checkbox in Settings in the SMS and Voicemail tab (if you don’t have a Google Voice account, let me know, I have a few invites). It looks like this:

Step 3: Go into your Gmail and set up a filter account with the following parameters:

Subject: “SMS from” (without quotes)

Has the words: (whatever you want your keyword to be. I was using the twitter account name as a hashtag, so mine is SMStoTW)

Doesn’t have: (you can filter out any text message with a swear word or any words that you think shouldn’t be sent to the twitter account… this is a feature that I am really excited about)

It looks like this:

Then, click next step and have the filter put the message automatically in the archive as well as forward it to a YourKEyword@twittermail.com address, like so:

Step 4: Tie Twittermail to your Twitter account by going to http://twittercounter.com and clicking the “Who are you on Twitter?” link in the top right corner and then allowing it to access your new twitter account (make sure you are logged in as your new account and not your public account here). It looks like this:

Step 5: Change the twittermail address to be your keyword by clicking in the twittermail settings, typing in your keyword, and saving the settings. Like so:

If you did everything correctly, anytime that someone sends an SMS message to your Google Voice account with the keyword (or hashtag) somewhere in the message, it will post it instantly to your account. Like this:

Other implications of this workflow are that you would be able to update all of your twitter accounts via text message simply by including your own keywords in your SMS. Your keyword could be as small as a single character with the pound sign so you wouldn’t be wasting any of your 140. I am very excited about the potential of crossposting to multiple twitter accounts using multiple hashtags. I also like the idea that we could use it to engage the community with questions and comments, even away from a presentation setting. But, I’m sure other folks will figure out better ways to use this process that I haven’t even thought of yet. Comment on the post if you come up with anything or if you have specific questions about getting this to work.

Piloting you!

I had a lot of conversation today about pilot initiatives within a
larger institution. it seems as though in each project that I take
part in, there is reason enough to get a small group of (semi)
dedicated people together who will try something out and report back
on their success. Whether that is moodle, gmail, google sites, dimdim,
or ning; it seems as though there is never enough at stake to require
all users to jump on board initially. While this is good in a lot of
ways: less kicking and screaming, learning from mistakes with small
group is better, and less chance of falling flat on your face with
everyone watching. But, it is bad in many as well: no ensuring that
the pilot will go further, no urgency in rolling out to everyone, and
all pilots are basically representations of the person who creates
them.
 
This last point is what I would like to focus this post on. What I am
finding as I do more pilot initiatives is that I am trying to model
the pilot on my own practice and workflow. I am taking what I feel is
valuable and important and I am saying that others should feel the
same way. At the end of the day, I am piloting a larger and more
unwieldy version of me.
 
While it is flattering that others would want to help beta test me, I
am not totally sure how smart it is. I am not a typical user of almost
anything. I want to break things open and push them to do what I
envision, not what they were intended for. While I may have a good eye
for what others may need, I need people who aren’t using tools in such
ways to help design the pilots too.
 
I guess what I am trying to say is that I cannot pilot myself if I
want the pilot to actually do what it is supposed to: test whether or
not something will work for everyone. But, how do I ask those who are
less willing to try new things to become a part of a pilot. How do I
ensure that all voices are heard so that when things do go live, the
backlash from these users isn’t fierce enough to shut it down?
 
Easy question, right?

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Gmail Reboot, or the only mail client you will ever need

Although I have been a member of gmail since the good old days of invitation-only status:

But, up until this week, I did not use it for anything other than signing up for every web 2.0 service I could find and for giving people access to my google docs. I knew that it was powerful and that it was making everyone else’s life more productive, but I just didn’t see how I could get away from the incredibly proprietary FirstClass email that my district uses. Well, with all of the research that I am doing for Google Apps integration at eDCSD, I stumbled upon this single post that changed everything.

The following string, when typed into Gmail, will allow you to move all of your old mail from your inbox into a folder of your choosing (the fact that you can store things away and label them is also a nice addition to gmail):

in:anywhere before:2009/1/1

If you type that in and then select all of your conversations:

Archive them away. Draw a line in the sand. Start over in gmail. Reboot your life (okay, maybe that goes a little too far).

After I got my inbox down to 4, I started to think about how I was going to put all of the other pieces together.

In gmail, you can now add other e-mail accounts to send and receive from. This means that you can use gmail to be the gateway for all of your mail, not just the single account. While this has been around forever, it was a revelation to me:

This alone didn’t solve my workflow issues, though. I now had to make sure that my firstclass e-mail would redirect completely to my gmail account. Well, it turns out that it pretty easy to do within the Firstclass preferences, but it really isn’t intuitive. You have to go into “messaging” and then under “mail rules” you need to have your e-mail forwarding set to redirect to your gmail account:

I also wanted the ability to do something that I never had within Firstclass, which is write e-mail while offline. It is not often that I am without an internet connection, but whenever I want to reference something in an e-mail and I don’t want to fuss with getting the password at the coffee shop, I need a way to do it. Gmail offline is a great new way to do email.

Another feature that I would like to highlight is the labs addition of the “create google doc” from an e-mail button. It does just what it says… It creates a google document that can be shared and edited directly from the e-mail that you have open. I can’t tell you how many times I have copied stuff over from my e-mail to google docs just so that we can start working on something there. This will not only let me collaborate better, but it will also let me archive things that I want to come back to and work on later:

While all of this doesn’t seem to have an immediate pedagogical impact, I would venture to say that if we are interested in creating the most change within a system that loves efficiency and squeezing the most time we can out of every waking hour, we need to be thinking about ways of taking all of our closed communication channels (proprietary e-mail and calendars, files stored on one hard drive, and even archiving systems that are not searchable to the extent that gmail is) and shifting them to more open ways of learning.

So, I guess to all that are going to tell me that they knew this already, I would say to them: Why didn’t you tell me?

The Social Networks of Tragedies

The Social Networks of Tragedies Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (197)

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

The Most Change For The Most Kids

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June 27, 2007 12:30PM

It is with some hesitation that I post this podcast. I am a teacher, and I will always be a teacher. However, I have been given the opportunity to do more. I have been recruited (although not formally given the position) for a Technology Integration Position in a nearby school district. This podcast is all about coming to terms with the idea of leaving the classroom so that I might create change and achieve School 2.0 in a larger way. At this point, I am very much interested in following my passion for finding solutions, and if this job provides solutions for more teachers and more students and also for my family, I don’t know that I can do anything other than pursue it. I am, however, still looking for others who have either made this transition or who have rejected it in favor of the classroom. Please e-mail me at benwilkoff@gmail.com if you have any questions or ideas.

Show Notes:

• 00:00:00: Intro to the Great Transition
  The Podcast Blog
• 00:00:58: Karl Fisch put me up to it.
  The Fischbowl
• 00:01:59: Why is the first wave leaving the classroom?
  Slow Motion Distributed Car Wreck
• 00:05:28: The Long Haul Teachers
  Cool Cat Teacher
• 00:07:15: What Should School 2.0 Leadership Look Like?
  Leadership Development for Educational Technology Leaders
• 00:09:27: What happens to the classroom I leave behind?
  My classroom Website
• 00:10:51: Other Factors
  My Daughter’s blog
• 00:11:55: The most change for the most kids
  My Blog

Beginning the year, systematically.

This podcast is all about how I am starting my year. I would love to know how you are starting your year and how we can collaborate (share) any of the resources and systems that we have set up. Send me an e-mail at benwilkoff@gmail.com

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