Question 277 of 365: Are we on the clock?

I used to put my hours on a time card. I used to slot it into metal container made especially for that purpose. I didn’t punch in because that would have required too much investment on the machine that actually made the punches. I would just carefully scrawl the time and date of when I started and stopped working. I didn’t guesstimate or fudge the numbers. I just looked over at the clock around the corner and wrote down the time that it said. If I was clocking in, I would put on my fanny pack of money and head out the door to take orders. If I was clocking out, I would grab my cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms and well done cajun fries. It was my first job and I was glad for every hour that I had it.

Now, I write almost nothing down about the time I spend on a given day at work. I arrive when I need to for meetings and to get my accomplishments done. I leave when a late meeting is off site or when it is time to get my children. Some days, I don’t come to the office. I just work from home and listen to music while I type up emails and solve the problems that seem to be most pressing. Most of the time, the clock holds almost no importance to me. I don’t look at it longingly, hoping for it to go faster. I don’t count hours and think about how many more it will take to buy another CD or movie ticket. I don’t even think about it in terms of when my next class will come in and want to learn something that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet.

Recently, I have felt almost no need to justify my time to anyone. My goals are easy enough to set and achieve. Clear out my email. Blog once a day. Meet with the people that want to meet with me. Collaborate on projects that I set in motion. Everything is persisting. My work products are so instantly sharable that I feel valued from those that have no relationship to my accountability. I don’t have daily checkins with anyone and the projects that seem to get the most attention are ones that require tending rather than envisioning or planning.

In some ways, I long for the clock. I long for the simple piece of paper that had all of my ins and outs on it. I wish I could justify all of the time that I am taking to square up with what I want to be doing. I wish that my email checks were all there in black and white showing me just how much time I spend on archiving and filtering and sometimes even replying. And more than that, I wish I could actually dedicate a block of time to creating and doing. When you are on the clock, distractions are not okay. You can’t look into putting linux onto a boot cd just to see if you can boot it up on an old mac, at least not without writing it up on the time card.

I do not envy those working in food service, save this one sacred truism: they know what they are doing.

I sure wish I did, or at least I wish I could know what I have done. As it stands now, I have to reference things like the “the long tail” and community creation as successes. I have to show things like PDF files and Moodle courses as the meaning of my days spent in this chair.

Burgers and fries are easy to quantify; ideas are not. I am working on it, though.

Question 229 of 365: Who started it?

Sometimes the best ideas are not our own. Definitely not mine, anyway.

Sometimes when we check into our communities, we realize that they have gone on without us. They have brilliant ideas about what should come next and they don’t require us for much of anything. The ideas abound. Ones that we would have never considered, or at least considered useful. Others can and do create what we would have thought too difficult to manage or attempt.

And yet, we can and do jump in. We take one look at the big plans that others have started in motion and we take part. We tend to our communities and it becomes something that is a part of us as well. I’m okay with the plans that others people have for me, or the ones that we co-author over time.

Today, I checked in on one of my communities and they were working on creating a broadcast, of the community itself. How is it that they came up with that idea before me? How is it that they started developing it, sharing phone numbers and emails? How could they have figured out how to advance the community beyond the current set of messages going back and forth?

And yet, I injected myself into the conversation. I created a collaborative document for them to help plan. I encouraged them to fill out their roles and their ideas for the project. I gave them ideas about how to broadcast and which tools would help them to make it valuable to the rest of the community. I made myself useful, sure. But, it wasn’t my idea in the beginning. I didn’t start it.

And that is a pretty wonderful feeling, all around.

Helping myself out… by asking for help.

So I haven’t blogged for a little while because of all of the work I have been doing for our district’s online school, eDCSD. I intend to blog that out more fully in a separate post, but now I am at the TIE 2008 conference and I have some time to think about how everything (seriously everything) is fitting together.

Teachers are sitting around me trying to figure out Photo Story. They are listening to a man who knows something about building learning communities through new media and web 2.0 resources. This is right up my alley. Or, at least it used to be. I used to love listening to hear people talk about what to use in the classroom in order to create a more collaborative environment. I talk about it when I present. I demo visual tools (although mostly of them are web-based) for creating environments. Why doesn’t this mean something to me?

I feel different than I did last year when I talked to Bud Hunt, Will Richardson, and Karl Fisch. I don’t feel like I am a part of this conversation right now. I feel a part of a different conversation, but I don’t know exactly where it is happening.

I want to be a part of the conversation that is about massive creation. I want to be a part of creating something that lasts, not a singular experience. I want to feel connected to all of the people I talk to, forever. I don’t want to meet anyone new who doesn’t want to share and create with me. Why can’t it be easy enough to simply add people and create with them. Why is it not possible to look across the edubloggosphere and say, “you and me, let’s go.”

I want to be a part of that conversation. I want a creation station for all of us. Where is it, though? Where is the learning playground? I want to play.

So, I guess I will throw it out to you. Where is your playground right now? Where are you going to simply create learning with others (please don’t tell me that the most learning is happening simply through twitter… I don’t think I am alone in my for need something more robust to actually create conversations that last and that I can keep coming back to). Anyway, any suggestions for where my learning community is?