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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Hacking a Digital Bathroom Scale (makezine.com)
• Hackers break Amazon’s Kindle DRM (theregister.co.uk)
• An Implementation Next Step? (sentimentsoncommonsense.com)
• Secret iPhone Agreement (now public) and Apple User Ethics (downes.ca)
• Hacker brings multitouch to Google’s Nexus One (go.theregister.com)

Question 75 of 365: What are the new Triple Dog Dares?

I’m sure that A Christmas Story has been formative for many just as it was for me. I’m also sure that many have thought about the Triple Dog Dares that they have subsequently faced as a result of that iconic line of dialogue. But, I think most people stop thinking of the things they are doing because of “dares” at some point. There comes a time when they start believing that they do not have to worry about the Schwartz’s of the world.

And yet, I would like to make the case that we are all being Triple Dog Dared on a regular basis. I would like to state for the record that we can never get away from our own personal Schwartz’s. In fact, I believe that we are responsible for more tongues stuck to flagpoles at this moment than at any other in history.

Here are the dares that I believe we are faced with every day.

• I Triple Dog Dare you to comment or respond.
• I Triple Dog Dare you to hire/fire me.
• I Triple Dog Dare you to learn something new.

We are daring one another to participate, to answer our e-mails or respond to our tweets. Our dares arise as we recycle each e-mail through our inboxes, constantly sending out more and more dares for response. We put tiny stresses on one another with these tiny little Triple Dog Dares. The flagpole we get stuck to in this dare is when the e-mails and tweets just sit there, when they fester in our inboxes and Tweetdecks. Our tongues are so attached to them that after months of putting off the most inopportune e-mail responses, we can’t really even communicate about the issues that are important to us.

We dare our superiors to fire us on a daily basis. While we may not actively want to get fired, we work really hard at pushing those around us to find out what we are doing that is not in the best interests of our business, district, or entity. We spend time distracted, dispassionate, or deluded into thinking that our work always reflects upon us well. We also dare our superiors to hire us each day as well. We work hard, apply ourselves and show off our daily accomplishments. We are constantly reapplying for our jobs in this case, even as we are trying to weasel out of them and find something else that is more to our liking. The frozen flagpole in this dare is the actual job we have. We get frozen into this pattern of fired and hired habits, forcing other people to write us off entirely as both incredibly useful and utterly useless for daily work and collaboration.

The last dare I feel on a daily basis is one that involves the persistent need for learning new things. It is an ever-present dare I feel from others, to become more knowledgeable about the things that they themselves need to know. The dare compounds until I have to dedicate time to becoming an expert on an assigned topic or anticipating the next thing that someone will ask of me. The pole I get stuck to is when I get so focused on learning for others and in anticipation of my later needs that I can’t completely focus on what it is that I’m supposed to be doing right now. Because the dare is to learn something new, I get stuck not resolving what I already know and applying it to what can be created with that knowledge.

Christmas Story or not, these Triple Dog Dares are very real for me. I have become my own worst Schwartz, as have the people around me. And I would like that to change.

I would like to not feel the stress of e-mail dares. I would like to let go of the need to be fired or learn new things just for the sake of learning them. I would like to be able to make my own (or at least manage my) stress and dare myself to be better than simply placing my tongue to a flagpole. I think that at some point I may be able to do that, but right now, I will live with my Triple Dog Dares.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rebooting A Christmas Story (wired.com)
• Oooh Fuuudge!! ScoreKeeper Chats With Paul Zaza, Composer of A CHRISTMAS STORY!! (aintitcool.com)
• 15 reviews of A Christmas Story (rateitall.com)
• Christmas Story: Boise boy licks pole, gets stuck (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Question 69 of 365: Why is action such a surprise?

I have had a number of conversations recently that have resulted in someone saying that they were surprised that things were getting done. They were surprised at action. While I was somewhat baffled by the reaction, it made me think about what the root of this surprise might be.

Getting things done has traditionally been hard. It has required labor, huge amounts of time, or many people who were highly skilled in the areas that needed attention. Action has required a level of organization and planning that almost insurmountable considering everything else that needs to go on. It also has necessitated permission to actually “do” something. Meetings must be had, protocols must be followed, the chain of command had to remain intact.

In fact, we had so much protocol, there is even an entire mystique and formula for who you should cc or bcc on an e-mail. We have created a space that requires little action in any given day. We have set up systems to look like getting things done: Things like conference calls with the vast majority of participants muted, like conferences without the time to implement what you learn, like tracking systems for time/milage/payment that are removed from the ideas and the tasks that generated them.

Action has become foreign to many. Because we don’t produce any products, we don’t have things to show for our work at the end of the day. We have become inbox cleaners and document hounds. We wait, in a bad way, for people to finish their part of the problem for us to start on ours. Action is a surprise when we find it.

I am a firm believer in creating at least one thing every single day of my life, and I believe that this is my humble (or not so humble if I keep talking about it, I suppose) way to make action unsurprising in my life. The things that I create (Blog posts, trackable conversations, online courses, companies, learning objects, and collaborative spaces) may not look like much in the face of people who create real objects, but I believe that in my own way, I am trying to stave off the starvation of ideas. I am trying to figure out how to solve the problems, and then actually solve them. I am trying to answer my e-mail, not pass it around to someone else. I am trying to engage those who are unengaged in the process. I am trying to solicit others as directly as I can to act on their own behalf.

Because action should not be a surprise. It should be a regular part of our day, something that we celebrate and see in everything that we do. We should see the change we create. We should see the products, even if they take some time. We should see the spaces that we inhabit as malleable, because getting things done isn’t hard anymore.

It stopped being hard when we could create virtual goods and services. It stopped being hard when we could create things on our own and solicit help from people outside of our organization. It stopped being hard when organization became as easy as a hashtag.

So, start a school. Start a business. Start a project that requires something important of you. Be deliberate in engaging others in conversation. Intentionally break protocols in your organization so that you can get things done. Not haphazardly. Not unreasonably. Purposefully and with a huge amount of hope: Act. Do things. Now.

Question 35 of 365: How should we react to budget cuts?

The pressure of budget concerns is absolutely crushing us right now. It is the reverberating hum in all conversations. In meetings is reaches climax, because the only reason we have staff meetings now is to discuss budget issues. They are all that matters to the people who sit in those chairs. And why not? We are talking about jobs, livelihoods, and careers. What could be more important than that?

My initial reaction to budget cuts is to say that I have a unique enough skill set that will save me from getting the ax. I react by distancing myself from anyone who does not have such a “skill set”. This is just as much of a defense mechanism as those who are trying to huddle next to one another for warmth and solidarity. My reaction to bad news is to state that I am above it, while others reactions range from disbelief, to intense debate, to outright overworking. I don’t think that any of these reactions are better than any other.

But, perhaps there is a strategic reaction that can be found somewhere in there. It is possible that among all of the gossip and unending rumors, there lies a truth about what to do when you realize that people’s jobs are on the line (including yours). As much as anyone can really have an answer, here is mine: make lots and lots of noise. Ignore all gossip and start talking about what matters to you. Get into the conversation with and about content because it is one of the only times that other people will be talking about everything but content.

When budget cuts are discussed, real work gets pushed to the side. Don’t let it. Stay on message. I’m not talking about being insensitive to the plight of your fellow worker, but I am talking about bringing things to the table that you are working on. Send out e-mail about projects you are a part of and ask for opinions and help. Blog about what it is that you are doing. Have conversations with anyone who will listen about what is going on in your district, your company, or your organization. Whenever anyone brings up the budget, you can tell them something new about what you are developing. You are a fountain of stories about what you have done and are going to do. Tell those stories repeatedly.

If you make that kind of noise, you will be one of the only ones who looks collected and calm, even if you have never felt a more potent fear. If you approach people with content and questions, there is very little they can do but to respond in kind. Yet, you are not ignoring the problem. In fact, you are facing the problem head on. You are telling anyone who cares to listen what value you have and by involving other people, you are stating their value too. While this is not an original idea, it is one that I need to be reminded of every day that I sit in on a meeting listening to an interim super-intendant talk about the “difficult economy” or “tough times.”

THIS is a part of my noise making effort. While it may not save my job, I know that someone will hear it and start a conversation of their own. If I can create a space that continues to work despite the paralyzing gridlock that happens when you turn people into numbers on a spreadsheet, then I will be truly “saved” in a much larger sense.

I did not get into my position in order to feel job security. Nor did I start my work to steer clear of controversy. I did, however, start in order to create change. And that is what I plan to do until someone tells me I can’t do it from here anymore.

Question 14 of 365: What is the future of outsourcing?

I do not claim to be an expert in outsourcing, nor do I claim to know all of the terrible (and good) things that have come from an acceptance of outsourcing as a reality. What I am claiming by my attempt to answer this question is that I think I may know where it is going. It may be quite arrogant to claim that you know where something is going without really understanding where it has been, but I feel as though it may be important to take this stab in the dark.

The future of outsourcing is personal. It is within your own daily workflow. It is within the stuff that you always wish you didn’t have to put up with, and now you don’t. And, I am not simply talking about the Roomba. I am, instead, referring to the idea that all of the monotonous aspects of your daily existence will be put up for bid. And, if anyone is willing to do them, they will be outsourced. I think the only real way to prove this point is to look at examples.

Prefinery and UTest allows you to outsource your beta testing. No longer will you have to figure out exactly who your users should be. You can rely on the crowd and a company to do it for you.

Smart Thinking allows you to outsource your stack of papers to grade. You can have someone else give your feedback for you. Isn’t “peer” review and writer’s workshop just another form of this kind of outsourcing?

SendGrid gives you the ability to outsource your personal responses to e-mail. We can now scale what used to be a human reaction to having completed steps or done something with an organization, business, or school.

Seed will let you outsource photography, writing, or other creative (but time consuming) work. The question is, how low will the network of creatives go?

Do my Stuff will let you basically put any task you have to do up for auction. Even cleaning bathrooms is up for grabs.

LivePerson will give you life advice and possibly outsource how you should act in your love life.

So, why does this all matter? Why is it that these services are worth even looking at, even as I make fun of the idea of how our future will look when faced with these realities?

Outsourcing (and some people call this version, enlightened outsourcing) in general lets us focus our attention. If it doesn’t do those things, then the future doesn’t look good. If we are outsourcing what is essential to our happiness, then we need to take a step back. But, on the other hand, if we are outsourcing the non-essential then we are streamlining our own existence.

I believe in that part. I’m just not sure if some of this is the answer. While it may be the future of outsourcing, I’m not sure it is a future that all of us can buy into. There may be a huge backlash coming where people take great joy in cleaning their bathrooms and doing their taxes and working with students and users directly. So, what will that be called? Self-sourcing? Unsourcing? Besourcing?

Whatever it is called, I would like to find a balance if I can. I would like to do what I can to be human and involved in the daily events of my life, all the while, not getting bogged down by the things that I have no interest in attempting. That doesn’t have to be a part of a movement. That part can just be for me.

Talking about teachers when they aren’t around.

I have been a part of way too many meetings recently when there haven’t been any current teachers present, yet teaching decisions were being made. True, one of the reasons why I wanted to move into my current position was because I wanted to be able to make decisions in our district regarding learning spaces and tools. But, I believed that everyone shared my level of respect for teachers. However, this is definitely not the case.

I cannot stand to hear long stretches of monologue about the ineptitude of teachers. I cannot handle it when teachers are reduced to knowing nothing. I cannot wait to leave places when others are complaining about the rogue teachers who are pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable in the district.

I love teaching and teachers, and the majority of other teachers that I have encountered feel the same. It is only when I get outside of a school itself that this view changes. But, why?

Why is it that the perspective changes so drastically when kids are removed from the situation, making someone believe that they know better than someone that is with the kids? This kind of viewpoint makes me believe more strongly every day that all stakeholders in a district should teach at least one class at all times.

That bears repeating:

All district employees should teach at least one class to students at all times.

Can I get an amen?

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?

Truth in advertising…

I have had quite a few people follow me on twitter recently that weren’t exactly people. They were organizations and schools. They were large groups of people that all somehow are tweeting with the same account. This, is a little unsettling to me and I’m not sure why.
 
I guess it is partially because I believe it is a little less than genuine to have a single voice represent an entire entity. I also believe that many groups are joining twitter simply to advertise that they are on twitter. This is even less genuine.
 
To me, an organization should encourage all of it’s members to become a part of a learning network. It should ask all of it’s employees to have heir own voices and then stream them all into a single place. The school should aggregate the conversation about learning in their space, not merely give updates as to the merits of their latest program changes.
 
You raise the level or discourse about any topic by giving that discourse an official channel. By asking all participants in an organization to tweet on behalf of that organization, you can actually find the pulse of what is going on. Which is, after all, the major goal of Twitter.
 
Sent from my iPod

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

New Responsibility

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

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

I’m not sure why this matters…

I just got word that the Chief Information Officer for Douglas County
Schools (my school district) is now on Twitter
(http://twitter.com/rmweldon). Allong with both McCains, I am the
third person he is following at the moment. I guess I’m not sure why
it matters, but there is this small part of me that is happy to know
that.
 
Not that he is following me, but that he is following someone… that
he sees the platform as one that is worth exploring. I don’t expect
many tweets or that it becomes his main platform for asking questions
and getting answers, but I guess it does matter. It matters because I
can now ask him questions. It matters because he is a part of my
learning network now (because I am following him too).
 
So, I guess if you are reading this, please give him a warm welcome.
And Randy, if you ever read this, I look forward to learning from you.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous