Question 236 of 365: Who wins when others fail?

I don’t want to hear about other people not doing their jobs right.

It isn’t interesting, novel, or beneficial. It may make for cleverly underhanded conversation or ambitious posturing, but it doesn’t really do much good. I can complain about others not pulling their weight or not working the way I would, but I just end up feeling petty and unoriginal.

I don’t believe in basing my worth in an organization based upon the worth that I see in others. Everyone is judged on his or her own merits, and I am not responsible for the final word on quality. Even if you are evaluating work done by someone else, talking about it as an absolute failure is negating any contribution you may have made to the work. If you see yourself as so separate from the community of work that we are all engaged in, I don’t see how you have any ground to stand and judge what others have done. If, on the other hand, you are subject to the same environment, then you are responsible for making sure that mediocre work is not valued in the community. It is your responsible to set standards for yourself and others, but not to impose a sense of superiority about whether or not others have made the cut.

The fact is: you didn’t do the work. You could have, but you didn’t. And anyone can stand and tell you that they could have done a better job, but their lack of experience is disengenuine. You look at others work as a representation of the person who created it, and criticism of that work as criticizing the person. While I believe in being a critical friend sometimes, I cannot stomach the glossing over of hours of work in the hopes of summing up contributions into a soundbite.

You are either building capacity or you are burning bridges. There is hardly anything in-between. If things don’t look like the way you want, build relationships with those people who aren’t “doing it right.” If there needs to be a change in personnel, so be it. Don’t talk about it as if it were nothing. Don’t talk about work as not being worthy of your own prerequisites.  There is no line in the sand, across which is your sweet approval.

For our ears only is a hollow sentiment. Stating that something is not good enough to everyone but the person who could make it better is dishonest at best, and downright evil at worst. Nothing good comes from tearing down our future before we can even get there.

No one wins when the people around us fail. We are not better than those we work with, and we do not know better either. We just know different, and if our different is indeed better, then others will see that too. If our different is truly a success, there will be no denying it. Pointing out failures without providing a viable alternative is not winning. There is nothing learned from it because we haven’t done any of the work and we don’t know what lessons can be gathered from the failure itself.

I don’t need to hear it. It is one of the things that is holding us back from creating real change.

Question 125 of 365: Who moved my privacy?

Virginia Woolf wasn’t kidding. Having a room of one’s own matters. That is why teachers who keep their materials on carts are the ones who we pity. It is the reason why we still have stigma around cubicles. It is the reason that we put our names on doors.

In a couple of weeks, I will lose my own room. For the past 9 months, I have been able to meet with people on my own terms. I have been able to put my children’s artwork on the walls. I have been able to avoid ridicule from everyone who ventures into our office for my manual typewriter sitting on my desk.

We are all moving to a historic school building, one of the first ones built in my district. And this is rocking our department to our very core. We spent at least an hour today meeting to just discuss the anxiety around the move (not the move itself, but dispelling the anxiety around it). There is a serious reorganization underfoot and it makes everyone nervous. The feeling in the air was that our family was splitting up. It was a divorce proceeding, or at least the aftermath of one.

“On this day, you can pack your stuff. The next day, you will no longer be able to visit your old home. The day after that, you will be surrounded by strangers.”

This isn’t what worries me, though. I could care less about the loss of being around a few key people. I usually talked with them through online collaborative means, anyway. The thing I am worried about is losing my own space, and losing my sanity along with it. There are very few places that I can really be alone in thought. My room was one of the last vestiges of a bygone era.

For years I lived in the basement. I did this on purpose. As soon as my parents would let me, I moved all of my solid-wood furniture down to the basement and set up camp. I put up christmas lights on the ceiling. I plastered the walls with posters from the local art movie house. I let the technology on my desk spill over onto my dresser and on my bed and on the bookshelf and on the floor. This was the space that other people only visited when I asked them.

I don’t want to return to those days, but I do wish that I could figure out how to preserve some of that privacy. For as open as I am about my work and my collaborative instincts, I feel the need to have a space to spin around in my chair if I need to and not be questioned about it. I am not in any way looking forward to going back to sharing the music I choose to listen to with others. The privacy that I crave is the kind that relaxes shoulders and puts feet on tables. The kind of privacy I desire lets me put up sticky notes and record videos of them.

I want to be able to go for a few hours at a time without having to put up a facade of work sarcasm. The small talk gets ridiculous after a point. And, that point is about after the first 15 minutes of the day for me.

So, I internalize this privacy and I put all of the christmas lights into my head. I use headphones and I step out to make phone calls. I drop out of the space that is supposed to be so colegial. I find reasons to be away from co-habitation. And that is exactly what it is. It is an environment in which we are all a part, but no one has the space to create something new. Everything just seems to take on the sanitized undertones of being civil to one another all of the time.

And this is the grand irony. In all of my calls for collaboration, I still want it to be a choice. I want to be able to go in and out of collaborative spaces at will. I want to be able to begin from a place of personality rather than homogeneity. And for me, this isn’t negotiable.

My privacy isn’t up for debate. Whether or not my official space is found within cubicle or an office, I will always seek out a room of my own. I will plan on finding the spaces that will let me set up shop and let my stuff spill out onto the floor. I will intentially create works that require collaborative spaces that others CHOSE to come into rather than are set as a default.

While I do not bemoan change in my life, I believe in marking its passing. Others can be nervous about shifts to job description or responsibilities, but the only thing I will be looking for are places to ask real questions and get beyond the political fight awaiting all unchosen spaces.

If I had a glass in my hand I would raise it to this:

To finding the next room of my own, wherever that may be.

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Question 117 of 365: When should you jump ship?

Other people affect us in the strangest ways. Retirement parties are one such example. The rash of these awkward moments in my life have really been getting to me. When people decide to cash in their chips, it really makes me eye the stack I have in front of me. It makes me wonder what they know that I don’t (which, if they are retiring after 30 or 40 years of work, is probably a lot). At these parties there is cake, but it isn’t about the cake. There are gifts, but no one cares about the gifts. There is small talk, but no one remembers what was said. The entire event is centered around the vacuum that will be left in the absence of the person leaving. While we pay attention and say nice things about all of the service that was one in the retiree’s tenure, the real issue on everyone’s mind is all of the things that won’t be done in the future because of this retirement. We all play out in our heads the stories of what will never be completed or worse yet, what projects will never be started.

And the same goes for people leaving to work elsewhere (although, they usually don’t get a grand party). We all know that they will be replaced either by someone new or someone shifting into that position from within. Yet, we cannot put ourselves into that place of knowing what it is that will happen during or after the vacancy. It is entirely the fear of the unknown that creeps in on us and makes us want to run to leave too. It isn’t the peer pressure of other people leaving that makes us question our loyalty. It is the fact that we have no idea who is coming in to replace them and what the organization will look like afterwards.

The best organizations can weather any large-scale changeover. There have been many shifts in priorities and populations in large school districts and Fortune 500 companies, and with each shift comes a new identity. And yet, fitting re-assimilating that identity is hard work, and not all of us have enough energy left for it. So, how can you take control of that oncoming identity shift? You make that change first. If you leave and start work elsewhere, you get to control what you want to be a part of. You get to choose your partners and your co-workers, instead of having them chosen for you as the organization morphs into something that is unrecognizable to you.

And yet, there is a powerful force within us that makes us want to wait it out and see if it will get any better. There is always this loyal streak that seems to engage our fight or flight instinct and it gets us to recognize just how hard the flight might be. We look around us, at the economic realities of the day, and we decide that it is good just to have a job. We make do with what we have. We take on additional responsibilities. Every day, we keep our head down just a little bit lower in the hopes that everything will start to shake out and we won’t have to move too far from where we are to maintain a similar status.

And then more changes come, more uncertainty. More people keep leaving, challenging our resolve. Stay the course or head out in a new direction? All of this head-down standing still doesn’t work so well when the ground underneath us is moving.

So, without putting too fine a point on it, I would like to enumerate the things that I look for in deciding whether or not to jump ship on any given day:

• I must be able to see myself in my leadership. This doesn’t have to be all leadership, however. It can be a single leader that I can look to and see that his or her values align with mine. I need to feel as though I am not working against the entire system at any given moment, and I need to know that someone will have my back if I take a risk.
• Reorganization doesn’t take people for granted. In any reorganization effort, I need to be able to see that the people who are working the hardest to create and innovate within the system are not passed over for people who either want to obstinately keep the status quo or folks who would rather forget everything that has been done before. I don’t want anyone else (or myself for that matter) to feel like someone’s pawn or bargaining chip in the Org Chart.
• Cost savings isn’t getting in the way of progress. You cannot put an entire organization on pause. Cutting can lead to better reflective practice, but it can also lead to better blinders. I opt for continuing what was promised and then delivering more.
• Sitting down and pounding things out becomes the default option instead of waiting things out. I will only stay on board so long as people are willing to sit down and write out what they want. I will not hesitate to jump if I start seeing people wait on the sidelines for too long, hoping that someone will come and solve their problems for them. Hardship is the time when collaboration matters most. It isn’t that you need to communicate more, you need to listen and be in the same space with other people as much as possible. You need to rewrite the organization and ratify it with everyone who is capable of putting their name to paper, even if we know that it will change again. Not knowing, believing, or creating the next generation of an institution is unconscionable.

Because I know that each of these issues is of value to me, I don’t have to live out one my favorite Clash songs on a daily basis. I am loyal and hard-working, but there I also know what is worth fighting for.

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Question 97 of 365: What are we willing to work for?

I used to tell everyone that I was going to become a teacher. I would tell them that it was the novels that I read in high school that made me first want to do it. I would say that those novels were the ones that I wanted to read for the rest of my life. Whether it was The Old Man and the Sea or The Stranger, I turned to that argument for describing my passion for teaching. I did that for years. Mostly, because it was easy.

I didn’t have to explain any other part of why teaching was so appealing. I didn’t have to go into the way that it made me feel when something I had done caused someone else to learn. I never had to retell each of the times that I had tried to teach someone else and learned something in the process. I could just say that the books were enough, and people wouldn’t go any further. They either totally agreed and really enjoyed the books they read in high school and therefore had no reason to doubt my sincerity, or they 100% disagreed and wanted to have nothing to do with a conversation about them.

And yet, the real answer was always more complicated than that. I worked as a teacher so that I could be happy. I am most fulfilled in my working life when I am helping other people to know more and be able to do more. I am most engaged when there is the ability for improvement. I am tuned in to any kind of revision available, especially within a human being. And reading books was just a shortcut to those moments. I could see the change within the characters and I could then help to create those same changing experiences for my students.

And yet, I don’t do that anymore either. I am willing to work for so much less now. I don’t see daily change within those around me. I am not part of translating characters and stories for others, but rather, I have become a transcriber of the same stories. I am trying to create the same outcomes across the board for adults, which was something that I never expected out of my students.

So, while I am paid more, I am willing to work for less.

This is also why I drink coffee so much now. It is why I go out to lunch. It is why meetings for me are no longer obligations, they are a source of sustenance for me (at least the ones I set up or willingly take part in).

I now take part in a ritualization of going to coffee shops to talk over big ideas with other people. I eat food in order to build out what is possible. I meet with others to prove that sanity is still possible without reading The Catcher in the Rye once a year.

And that is what I am working for now. I am working for a single refillable mug that I can keep on going back to the counter with and having them fill it up. I am working for a panini sandwich, pressed perfectly while I sit with the next interesting person that I can’t wait to collaborate with.

Because it isn’t enough to answer e-mail. It isn’t enough just to finish a project and have someone say good job. It isn’t enough to launch a space that others will use or be “visionary” about your planning. Mentoring and being mentored is what I am willing to work for. Nothing else is good enough when I am not in the classroom. Everything that takes me away from sitting down with someone else over coffee or a meal seems to be wasted time.

Even if I am getting work done by answering e-mail or by sending out tweets or by responding to discussions that are going on in online classrooms, I’m not willing to work for those things alone. I am not willing to work for a piece of technology or a system that can’t see the value in two people sitting across a table from one another and hashing out the world’s problems.

So, here is to hoping that our next paychecks have a lot more mentorship and a lot less e-mail attached to them. Here is to hoping that our work isn’t defined in how busy we are, but in how much we made time to go out to eat with others. Here is to hoping that for every meeting that gets called on a regular basis, you have many more that are held in just one time and space and that give lasting value to the things that are discussed.

That is what I am willing to work for.

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Question 83 of 365: What does it mean to be device free?

We are dependent upon our computers for our livelihoods and our entertainment. We are dependent upon our cell phones for communication and connection. We are dependent upon dozens of technologies in our daily lives but if we were more accurate with this dependency, we are dependent upon specific devices. The computer that you use is yours, it is an extension of you to a great extent. So it isn’t just a computer, but rather YOUR computer. And the cell phone, is your blackberry or iPhone or Android device. You have tricked these things out just the way you like them, and it matters that you have done this because it makes you feel ownership over them. It makes them feel like they have been watched over and cultivated for your personal use rather than just anyone who can pick them up.

If you lost those particular devices, you might feel a sense of loss that is strange and compelling. It might feel like your right arm is gone or that you have lost a part of your history because of what was on that device. It is this weird notion that we are that connected to our technology, but I would like to make the case that this type of attachment may be ending.

Even as we are heading into the world of amazingly tactile electronics and personal experiences with those devices, I believe that our goal should be to achieve total device freedom. We should stop seeing our devices as the personalized entities that are capable of bringing us joy and agony through the process of creating with those tools. It is my belief that we need to be looking for any way that we can to achieve a total lack of ownership from any given device that we may have purchased or been gifted.

I come to this conclusion out of necessity, I suppose. Yesterday, my computer crashed. It was an absolute failure, not something that could be fixed by any amount of hacking or troubleshooting. The operating system just refused to move beyond the first 30 lines of operation in the command line view. It is what you might call a dead computer.

And I felt nothing. While I wasn’t super thrilled about having to use a different machine while this one goes into the shop, I really didn’t feel that I had lost anything too important. In fact, I felt free. I felt as though anything that I could get in my hands would allow me to continue the work that I had started that morning when my computer was working just fine.

I realized in that moment that there is literally nothing I can’t do in the cloud.

My photos are on Flickr. My movies are on Youtube. My files are on Google Docs. My contacts are in Gmail and Gist. My audio and image editing are on Aviary. My ideas are in WordPress. My music is on Last.fm. My community is in Twitter. My bookmarks are on Delicious.

Hyperlinks are my hard-drive.

While some would claim that this isn’t good, that I am just asking for one of these services to go under and then I would feel the loss that I should have felt without my computer, but I believe that these services too are inconsequential. I can move from one to another without thinking twice. I can import and export. I can backup and restore. But, true freedom is in knowing that no single device holds “me” within it.

In fact, the only thing that holds all of these services together is my identity. And that isn’t wrapped up in any single device. While I like my Macbook Pro, I don’t need it to have my identity with me. While gmail is my happy home for most of my official communication, I could filter and funnel and work around any slippage of that service.

There was a time when my devices owned me, but that is no longer the case. It is thanks to the cloud, a better understanding of how to store things for better access and simply knowing myself well enough to believe recreating the world around me every day is possible.

So, I think that we should strive for this type of freedom. We should be free to have things break, free to lose huge chunks of data from those formerly important devices, and free to reimagine how we interact with those things that we interact with.

I am not my computer, and that is kind of nice.

Question 33 of 365: Why should we jump off a cliff?

My experiences attending the Boulder/Denver new technology meetings, and more recently Educon 2.2, have really gotten me thinking about just how much benefit there is in jumping off of a cliff. Let me clarify. The most inspiring people at these events are ones that have stopped working for others’ ideas and started working for their own. The most interesting conversations are about ways in which individuals have found to risk a large portion of themselves in the hopes of creating something that exists nowhere else. Chris Lehmann has done this at the Science Leadership Academy. Natty Zola has done this at Everlater. They took what expertise they had and they decided that pretty much any day of the week spent in a freefall toward their ideal life is better than the best vacation from the ordinary.

And yet, seeing these examples of people who have jumped off of a cliff really doesn’t make it that much more inciting to do so yourself. There is still the chance that there will be no parachute in that backpack of yours. It is also pretty likely that no one will be jumping with you. You will probably have to navigate to a safe landing without GPS guidance or the help of friends who are holding on and trying to help you beat the wind resistance.

So, why do it?

You may feel a sense of happiness, accomplishment or ownership if it works out, but there are so many more reasons to not leave your current work. Each part of you that craves stability and uniformity calls to you and tells you no. The timing is always wrong. The environment just isn’t right. Other people are going to beat you to it or going to take the credit. You won’t get any sleep and your waking hours you do have will be filled with nothing but the crushing G-forces that are pressing down on your body as you fall toward the unknown.

The stress is just too much, and yet that is the reason why you must jump.

You must jump because everything is telling you not to. You must jump because your instincts are wrong. You must jump because even the sensation of going “splat” on the ground is fantastic. It is the scraping you off of the earth that is the painful part. There are plenty of people to do that for you, though. People really do want to see you try again. They want to see you whizz by them at 100 miles an hour, even if they know you will be the same pancake at the end of the dive. It is a morbid fascination that everyone has in wanting to see people do the things that they can’t. And yet, you can do this. You must.

I will jump off of the cliff soon. Not because I think that there is some virtue in it or because I know that the parachute will open; I will jump off because there is no alternative for me. There isn’t anything else to do once I have climbed up and seen everything that there is to see. I have looked along the route and gathered the information I need at the top. It is beautiful at the precipice, but there isn’t much to do up there. The only way for me to see something new is to jump. I want to find the perspective that will lead me to my next climb. What I will be going after when I leap is still up for grabs, however. Let me know if you have any ideas.

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Question 26 of 365: Is treading water dangerous?

As far as metaphors go, there are no greater cliches than using treading water to represent staying in one given place in your personal or professional life. However, every once in a while, the metaphor is warranted, so I hope you will not begrudge me using it. I use it now not to describe whether or not treading water is lame or counterproductive. I think that it is fairly obvious that not having a direction or reaching for something is a universally panned activity. At the very least, we pay lip service to trying to find your passion, and swimming against the current as if they were they were virtuous in their own right.

My invocation of this metaphor is much more centered on the idea that treading water is quite probably dangerous in addition to generally being a bad tactic for achieving what you want in your life.

Imagine for a moment that there are two people in an office. This office has a number of IT professionals, trainers/teachers, management, and support staff. It is generally a high functioning office in that people show up to meetings on time, everyone seems to like each other enough to be civil, and people get paid on time. The first person in this office does not blog, tweet, podcast, post status updates on facebook or connect with anyone on LinkedIn in a professional capacity. The second person does have this kind of connected online presence. Both get a decent amount of work done within their teams and they have been reviewed well in the past few years. Up until this point, there is very little difference between the two of them.

I would like to make the case that the person who does not have an online presence is treading water. While he may be advancing his career, there is no record outside of the office that this is the case. His general direction is measured based upon exactly what the company’s general direction is. So, while the company may be moving forward (perhaps even as a result of his efforts), he is still really in the exact same spot within the company. The ocean waves are moving, not him.

I would also like to make the case that the second person has a direction. Through her daily tweets and weekly blog posts, she is reflecting on what has transpired within her job. She is asking questions and finding answers for what is going on within her profession. Her forward momentum always outpaces that of the company. Even when the company has a major setback, her network keeps her legs churning and her arms moving through the water with intense energy.

So, why is the first person dangerous for treading water?

This first person is dangerous because you can’t tread water forever. Eventually you have to reach solid ground or you will drown. This person is even more dangerous because he will drown others while he is trying to stay afloat.

If you have no external voice through a modern network, you are easily outsourced. If your company doesn’t know that losing you will have the effect of losing all of the experts that go along with you, you are sunk. If your work stays within the confines of the company, credit is easily obfuscated.

Treading water isn’t a strategy for the future, it is simply a method of keeping your head above water. The danger of not posting or preparing a presence online is that you cannot represent yourself or your company to the people that need to see it. You cannot be an advocate for the things that your school district needs in order to to keep on working. In essence, if you are not sharing what it is that is important to you and your office, you are going to bring it down. If you have other competitors (and you are kidding yourself if you think you don’t), they will win. If you can’t place yourself into the great evaluative system that is the web, there is little chance for people to see that you have any value.

While this metaphor may be wearing quite thin at this point, I think it bears repeating. If you are treading water in your job or in your life, you are a danger to yourself and others.

Question 15 of 365: How do we form our Digital Habits?

I’m sure that many of our digital habits would qualify as addictions. Whether that is tweeting, texting, googling, emailing, or simply youtubing; each of us has developed a series of habits related to digital content. We are drawn to do these things on a daily basis without being asked to do so. For many, the habits are probably more productive than those of smoking, drinking, or commuting. But, no doubt, there are some not so great results of our digital habits.

We may be more withdrawn from our experience because of Digital habits, or perhaps we are more plugged in to them. Our documentation of them with status updates and posted pictures is certainly improving our ability to remember some pretty important events. I can personally verify that I only remember my children’s birth as well as I do because I have the “minutes” recorded as tweets. Those experiences were captured by my digital habits. I only wish I could have done the same for my wedding (we also should have had people doing video all over the place). Right now  it is just this whirlwind of experience that I loved, but can’t really remember because it is such a blur.

As to the question at hand, we can just make the assumption that these Digital Habits are a reality and one that we must face head on. So, we probably need to think through how our Digital Habits are forming in the first place. Again, I must start from my own experience.

On Tuesday, the 20th of March, 2007, I sent my first tweet. While I had been aware of twitter for quite some time before that, I first gave it a real shot by stating: “I’m figuring out how twitter can be used in middle school.”

I didn’t tweet another thing until May of the same year. The very next tweet was something more auspicious in nature: “I’m finding out that twitter can increase your blog readership.” Clearly I saw some benefit, and so the tweets started to pick up. I tweeted a total of 8 times that May, including a totally existential posting thanking a “steve”: “Thanking Steve for the link to the 6.99 microphone deal: http://tinyurl.com/2ttmll” Clearly without the capacity to use the @ symbol, I didn’t really get the conversational aspects of Twitter. My first use of that symbol was not until June 10th.

Then, I started trying to add twitter into my every day speach, even making up words in some cases “The twaiter[?] was just for me, although you can make a dentist appointment for yourself as well.” It turns out that I was sending that with Jott, a voice recognition software for cell phones, so I can’t really take credit for that one (but, I was trying to say “the twitter”, which was clearly before “tweet” came into popular usage.)

I then started to link to my podcast and blog frequently for a few months, but in August, September and October of 2007 I sent out only 6 tweets in total. What happened during those months? And then, 78 tweets in November. This was an absolute explosion of content. What happened during that month too? It was during this month that Twitter became a digital Habit. It became the place that I asked the majority of my questions. It became the way that I collected contact information and the way that I collaborated with those new found contacts. November of 2007 was when I “got” twitter.

It took me 9 months and a few dozen tweets before I could call it a habit. Before that, it was just something I checked in with a few times a month. The habit happened because of this tweet: “New blog post: 101 Tools and Resources for Authentic Learning… http://tinyurl.com/2c7uca” (which was the first one on November 1st). When I released that single tweet, I realized that I wanted to start sharing pretty much everything that I was thinking about and asking with the people that I resourced in creating the 101 Tools and Resources. I figured out that it wasn’t enough just to share the big “information”, I had to share the small stuff too. I had to work with others in order to create more meaning.

So, I guess I formed this digital habit out of necessity. I needed to share and be shared with. I needed to find connection. I needed to @ as many people as possible (the ratio of regular tweets to @ tweets shifted from 15:1 to about 1:2, which is the clearest definition of this change). That is how I formed my digital habit, and I think that is how we form most of them. When we start talking to other people more than just talking to hear ourselves. That is when we truly see the benefit. When we know someone is listening and will respond, we find that it becomes an essential part of our daily activities. For better or worse, we need these digital habits to bring meaning into our modern lives.

(Also, if you are wondering how I looked back easily at those long forgotten tweets, I used tweetbook, which is a fantastic service)

Response to Paul (on PD must be better)

This post is in response to a comment on my last post which went something like this:

As I read your list I went back and forth agreeing with you.

Do you ever question if it is not how we do PD but the audience that we have hired and put into the “seats?”

Do you think we could stop “doing PD” if we simply hired a different caliber of professionals?

Do you worry that we have to “give(!!!) context, meaning and perspective” to teachers?

Here is my response:

I do think that it has to do with who we are talking to and what messages they will accept. However, I really do believe that if given enough reason to change, everyone will. I believe in the power of people to see something great and to become a part of it.

I also think that we could stop “doing PD” once people start thinking about networks as PD, but I still think we need to give people time away from their classroom responsibilities to actually create that network and to do their learning. We are passionate about learning what is “new”, but not everyone is. Others have to be given the time to do so, even if they are able to be a networked learner. They need to have the space to network.

All learners need to be given a space that has context, meaning and perspective. While I may create a lot of the context for what I do, I live it every day. I cannot expect people who do not blog to understand the context of blogging. I cannot expect people who do not use twitter to understand the context and meaning of a twitter conversation. And, I cannot expect people who do not use wikis and revision history to create a perspective to gain that perspective by doing anything other than actually using wikis and looking at revision histories.

When I say give, I believe that I am giving an experience. The experience is what matters to me. It is what will allow them to start creating context, meaning and perspective. Nothing else will do this and expecting them to create that experience on their own is just a little to harsh for me.

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