Learning is Change

Question 187 of 365: What is our equation?

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I used to believe that everything equaled out in the end. That at some point, everyone would get the same amount of opportunity or talent. I used to think that we were all special in enough ways to allow for everyone to have the same chance of success. I don’t believe that anymore. 

I once was talking to a very good friend about our test scores over the phone. He told me about how good his math scores were. I saw that they were better than mine, and in my need to make everything even out, I proclaimed that I had very good english scores. As it turned out, I did have good scores. He just had better ones. In both English (which I cared a great deal about) and in Math (which I didn’t care all that much about) he was better. I couldn’t reconcile this disparity. I kept on looking for a silver lining, a way in which his life overall was worse than mine or that I could feel superior so that this defeat would hurt less. I still haven’t found a way to make those kinds of stings any less potent.

Instead, I now believe that instead of an equation with an a person on either side of the equal sign, it is most likely a greater than or less than sign. This is a crude judgement, but it is in fact a much more accurate representation of the way in which we experience all people. Somewhere within our heads, we do an estimation of greater than or less than. We look for links from one person or idea to another, but we are not looking for them to be the same. We are looking for ways to categorize, to prioritize and to put them into a hierarchy. We can’t help but be a part of this lopsided equation every moment. 

And yet, it is hard to tell which side of the equation we are on at times or what is really being compared. I may be really good at getting my ideas across, but utterly fail in having revolutionary ideas in the first place. These things are not equal. One is greater than the other, but it depends on who is setting up the equation. 

The point is:

The greater than or less than equation is a little agreement within ourselves to treat some things and people with more respect and attention than others. And in the interest of creating a more collaborative and sharing society, I believe we owe it to one another to state our equations as loudly as we possibly can. If all bias can be boiled down to an equation with a little arrow pointing one way or the other, we can actually identify what it is that moves us and what it is that we need help with. With that in mind, here are a few equations that I believe to be true.

My children > other people’s children

Open Source > Closed Source

Community > Isolation

Publishing > Notebooks

Notebooks > Not writing/drawing/reflecting

Independent > Corporate

Corporate > Undervalued

Revision > Final Draft

Trust > Suspicion

Hope > Tradition

Change > Success

Failure >= Success

Music >= Silence

Stress > Pressure

Lo-Fi > Hi-Def

Family > Career

There are lots more, but I do wonder what would happen if we all laid out our equations on the table and started talking about them. Would any of us change the directions of the arrows? Would we be able to generate our list of the most important things in our lives, our priorities of a lifetime rather than just of the moment. I feel as though that might be important.

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Question 186 of 365: How should we submit our work?

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I think a lot about the submit button. The process of taking something that you own and uploading it to someone else is an act of trust. I am trusting that everything that I submit to Flickr will be there when I look for it, without some crazy provisions or copyright license on it. I am trusting that the presentations I upload to Slideshare will be embeddable wherever I want them to be. Whenever I submit an assignment in an online course, I am trusting that it will be valued by the person on the other end and not just put into a virtual file cabinet to make one more check on a class checklist.

This trust isn’t something that we should take lightly or that we should let rest as it is. There is inherently a problem with turning over your work to something else via a button. The transaction method of turning things in is all wrong. When we have to turn over all authority of the things we have authored, we are no longer able to take responsibility for where they end up. And we should be able to do that. We should be always able to make decisions about our content, continuing to extend its existence wi every link and collaboration.

I want to start making Dropbox the standard for submitting. The very idea of dropping your content into a folder on your desktop and having that sync into a space that other people and services have access to is he future of sharing. Removing content or revising it updates the files everywhere that they are referenced, preserving your control and your ability to revise and continue to come back to where you have already been without recreating or storing every ne version on every different service that comes into existence.

I want to turn in assignments by dropping files onto my desktop and revise my answers with a simple save. I want to share them with everyone else who is in my class and have the facilitator see that sharing as well. I want to have photo sharing sites get access to my collection through a sync from my computer. I want to always maintain the copies but know that they exist and are accessible easily.

The possibilities for creating are simple and elegant when you remove the pressure of the submit button. When you no longer have to wait until something is good enough to start syncing it our to the world, collaboration has the ability to take hold of everything that you do. When you don’t have to be connected to the web in order to check in on what other people have contributed, we aren’t tethered to any device or service. Sharing ownership of our work and also being able to continue to expand its use is the next journey that we must attempt.

This is the workflow I see:

Any file that is on your device is on the cloud is also shared with others and is found on other’s hard drives. The redundancy allows for backup after backup of our work. All of these drives and versions are networked and allow us to see as a work progresses because a visualization of all edits across the world will be a part of the metadata of the file itself. Each file will be editable on all devices either by a local program or a cloud based service. The file will not care which. Microsoft word and Google Docs will simply be the way we revise the much more powerful part of this process: the sharing. Each file will become linked and embeddable. And because of the way all of these hard drives are networked, the file will not be embedded just from the cloud service, but it will also be embedded from the original source (your device). This will mean that we will always be able to track where content has come from and where it goes to. The single source of truth will be the person that created it, and if they delete it, all that will be left will be the remixes and revisions that work under fair use.

None of this will happen if we keep on with the submit button as the only way to share (this button takes many forms, but it is the function that I think is going to hold us back). We need to move toward sharing responsibility for our files and our ideas. We need to submit by moving things around on our devices and not just on the services that seem to come and go every few weeks. We need share via a link that will always exist, instead of break with every whim of a few shareholders. The infrastructure isn’t what needs a tweak. It is us. We need to push what our own devices can do and what we are willing to pay for as well. We need to become our own data centers and wharehouses. We need to become our own cloud, all with the idea that Google or someone else will also have backups of our stuff too. Because you know they will.

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Question 185 of 365: What happens when you just watch?

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Firework
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I saw a twinkle of power and awe in my daughter tonight. She held her first sparkler and threw her first snappers (the little bits of explosives that are wrapped in paper). It created something within her that I hadn’t seen before. A kind of hope for creation and destruction and danger all rolled into one.

When I just stared at her and waited for that look to keep developing, I found that I wanted it to. I wanted her to know more danger and more uncertainty for how things would turn out
I wanted her to see the wonder of fireworks for the first time. And I wanted that wonder for myself too.

I think that watching what you have already seen throughout the eyes of someone who has not is the only way to gain genuine perspective. Sometimes I wish that I could bring my daughter into every meeting and brainstorming session so I can know what it means to be green again, to be unjaded by having seen bigger fireworks before.

If my daughter can be in awe of a sparkler, I can be in awe of my existence too. If she can be cautious about fire and throwing explosives, I can reflect on the risk involved in my every action. If she can be unafraid at trying something new, I can push the boundaries of what is possible.

I’m not sure I ever knew how much I would learn from a 3 year old.

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Question 184 of 365: When can we have patches?

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I was in the boy scouts for a total of a few months. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the things that happened there, I’m just not sure I ever figured out the idea of someone else giving you a badge when you have done something they deem worthy. Even from a very young age, I always wanted to be able to award myself for great accomplishments.

I was drawn to indie music for just such a reason. Every concert I went to, I purchased a patch or a button and I affixed it to my jacket as an award for being there. I would sew or tape or safety pin all of the things that meant something to me, and it felt as though there was nothing bigger that needed to present me with more.

I was always fascinated with wearing your interests and passions on your sleeve. I did this for many years, at least until it became inappropriate. I wore patches from those that represented who I was. When those things went away, I feel as though I lost a piece of my identity that I have never really been able to regain.

I think that those people I follow on Twitter and those I friend of facebook probably represent the best patches I could muster now. They are there for everyone to see, but they are so virtual that everyone else just looks at me as another young father in the local Safeway. There is nothing for people to react to or take interest in beyond my solid colored shirts and grey pants.

Others are trying to bring back the patches on foursquare and other social media games. And yet, these are ridiculous. There is nothing tangible about the swarm badge or being a mayor. There may be some connection being established as well as some bragging rights, but there isn’t any way to affix these badges in a unique way to represent who you are. There is no equivalent of safety pinning a Link 80 patch to a thrift store t-shirt. And there won’t be until we make the virtual fully tactile.

I envision a day when the places we have been and the people we know are no longer just in the online world. We will no longer have to write our Twitter handles on our name tags because people will know us when they see us by who we claim to be. This will happen when we augment our reality and tag ourselves, but it will also happen when we stop the absurdity of the and/or of technology.

Right now, you have the iPhone or you don’t. You either are on Twitter or you aren’t. You either make movies and post pictures or you don’t. In the near future those things won’t matter. Everyone will have a smart phone of some kind. Everyone will be on a social network. Everyone will be a photographer and movie maker. When this happens, the culture will not be about either/or. It will be about including these things in all daily life. We won’t have to wear “drastically digital” clothing because it won’t be important. Our bracelets that don’t do anything more than hang on our wrists will be about our digital lives as much as our analog existence. When everything online is the backdrop for what we do, we will once again be able to buy patches and own who we are.

I will go into a store and the goods will not be real or virtual. They will just be goods. The money will not be physical or online. It will just be. The nutrition facts on the side of my milk will not be available only while I am looking directly at the side of the carton. They will be a unique attribute of the milk itself. The tagging and metadata will make everything a subset of everything else.

While this may sound utopian (or dystopian to some). I look forward to the day when we do not begrudge physical objects because they aren’t high tech enough and we don’t discriminate against virtual objects because they aren’t real. At that point I think I will regain some of my identity that was lost. Then I will be able to wear my patches with pride.

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Question 183 of 365: Are we possible?

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I have plans. Brainstorms and Mind Maps, too. I write out lists and sketch out wireframes. I see folder structures and hashtags, creating them with a few touches on the big glass screen in front of me. And then I step back from all of it, looking to see if what I have created is feasible. I want to know if what I am breathing into being is something that others might be able to take part in. Is my creation just an academic exercise or is it the next step in learning. I wonder if all of my vision is yet again going to come crashing down according to the reality of what we are capable.

I cower at the idea that everything I believe isn’t really possible given the constraints of other people and of the institutions that currently exist. It makes me shudder in disbelief that I could be that disconnected from reality. Existential crisis aside, am I a figment of my imagination? Are the things that I would like to co-create only available to those who have experienced all that I have? I hope as a teacher and thinker, I would be able to make my vision real by just framing it correctly and working with others. But, when  I see the distance between what is currently available and what I truly want, I wonder if I am just a bridge too far.

I want all that I do to sync with others.

Does this sync?

  • Learning is co-created
  • Sharing is essential
  • Tools are multi-use

They aren’t revolutionary in themselves, but they are against everything that I see in the business, education, and personal world.

Sure, I see social networks being leveraged for connections with others and I see people using shared documents to keep up on the latest version. But, in officially sanctioned work, learning is singular because it has to be possessed by someone. Because it requires a grade or a promotion, there is no incentive whatsoever to pull off a massive collaboration. Who will take the credit then?

Sharing has become the background for nearly everything that happens online, but the value of sharing is greatly depreciated because nearly all institutionalized sharing is internal, blocked off to the value of the open web. Facebook isn’t open. A link (without logging in to access it) is open.

A rock isn’t single use. Neither is a lego. Somehow, though, everything that we professional develop about has set limits for what is possible. Multi-use is about not accepting what is laid out in a manual.

I guess I’m not as interested as I once was in having everything perfectly laid out. I’m more interested in pushing what is messy, what is overly hopeful. While others may say that hope is not a strategy, I believe that it is the only thing that allows what we believe ourselves to be to be possible.

I leave you with this children’s poem:

Well they said I was impossible
Yes, they said I was impossible
And that someone who behaved like me
Couldn’t be, couldn’t be

But I knew that I was possible
Not completely unbelievable
And the one they said could never be
It was me, it was me

But there’s something else they didn’t know:
You can change your shape and you can grow
Out of nothing into something new
Something made up into something true

Though it happens quite impossibly
The impossible turns out to be
Possibly

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Question 182 of 365: What is the benefit of an extreme position?

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Carnivals were a common occurrence during my childhood. The Blossom time parade and carnival over memorial day was perhaps the most memorable. Every year it meant something else. For a while, it meant games and prizes. For one year (before I realized that roller coasters made me feel quite ill), it meant rides. For a couple of years it meant finding a date to go and hold hands while walking through the grounds. And later on, it meant singing the Battle Hymm of the Republic with my choir at the cemetary after the parade was all over. This carnival changed many times for me, but all of the elements stayed the same. It never got any bigger or smaller. It was just a fixture of a single weekend every year.

Less of a fixture were the other carnivals in the towns surrounding Chagrin Falls. I would sometimes venture to the Holloween carnival in West Geauga or the 4th of July festivities out by one of the local lakes. These events never were set in my mind as having a single purpose for any given year. They were always about something other than what was completely comfortable for me. The haunted houses were never my idea, nor were the 4H style animal areas of many of these fairs.

The most uncomfortable situation at one of these “other events” was when a friend of mine wanted to go up to one of the religious tables and have folks give her tracts and preach directly at her. I waited a few paces off while the man attempted to save her all over again. When he was finished with his prepared speech and had handed over at least 5 different pamphlets, she we left the oversized barn. My friend told me that it was like going to summer camp, church, and a retreat all rolled into 10 minutes. She was transformed, at least for a few minutes, by the extreme position and unbridled passion that the man exhibited. It was then that I realized the power of fanaticism.

While I relied on my standard issue carnival every year, it was only at this significantly different event that my friend could be changed. It wasn’t that she went in looking to be changed, but afterwards she felt as though there wasn’t any other purpose that mattered. That carnival would now always be about the table in the barn with the man holding out his tracts and spitting his absolute truth, for both of us. I couldn’t make it be about something else because of the way my friend looked and how uncomfortable it made me feel.

And perhaps, that is why the events that cause us to feel transformed are not the ones that we would want to look back fondly about as if they were the backdrop for all that we are. They are not the events that stayed with us, year in and year out. They are not the moments that we can make into whatever we want because there was something that reached out and grabbed our attention and bent it toward a single purpose. Sometimes these transformations are good, and sometimes they are hideously bad.

I guess that is why I don’t think that going to the same conference or event every year will bring about real change. I don’t believe that people are ever going to create something divergent if they don’t seek out opportunities to find fanatics or be fanatics without the need to temper their opinions for a wider audience. Sometimes, we need a specific purpose without having to explain how it relates to all of the other work that we are doing. Sometimes we need to get caught up in the moment without worrying about how it looks or the implications of what it might mean for the future. Sometimes, we need to let ourselves be changed.

So, what are those divergent events? Who are those people that will leave me feeling so energized by their obsessions that I can’t possibly ignore them? More recently I have seen the gradual expansion of the same ideas. I have noticed the evolution of what has come before. I wan’t someone to make me feel uncomfortable, to approach me with tract in hand and challenge me to look away.

Right now there is too much backdrop. There is too much yearly festival and not enough fanatics. The soap boxes have been shaved down to almost nothings so that everyone just looks like a carnival employee trying to get you to try the latest game or ride.

I’m not looking for pure excitement. Instead, what I am after is simply something different enough to change what I think. I’m tired of what I think. I’m tired of following these ideas to their logical conclusion. If they really matter, they will be sharpened by a fanatical change. If they don’t matter, they will go away and I will start working toward something else.

The benefit of an extreme position is that we remember them. Always.

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Question 181 of 365: What is a vendor? #iste10

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A company becomes a vendor when they have clients. Or when they provide services to a specific subset or field. It is when they believe they have a solution no one else posesses, yet somehow they can exist within a crowded trade show with many fellow vendors showing off similar wares.

I have purchased things from vendors, conversed with vendors, and demanded things of vendors. And yet, through the entire process, they stayed vendors. They didn’t become companies or individuals, they were just the vendors who were providing us the service, whether that was online curriculum, a content management system or simply a few books.

Being a vendor is easy for some and much harder for others. Losing your personhood and becoming simply an arm of the entity you work for can be debilitating. It can make you not feel as though you can be part of any conversation. It can also make others feel as though you have nothing of value to add. You are simply there to provide a service, not an idea.

In education and non-profits especially, distrust for vendors is high. There is the sense that the folks who work with kids and other valuable stakeholders know exactly what they need and the vendors are just trying to sell them things that are superfluous. And for the most part, looking out at the floor of major conferences, that distrust is well placed. The gadgets and curriculum that are pushed are not tranformational, but are sold as if they were. The space is set up so that you can learn more about the products of a given vendor, but the line between learning and propaganda is razor thin.

And yet, vendors are people too. They go after what they perceive the needs to be with something that they believe will help. And we cut them off from being a part of the conversation because we don’t want to be sold on anything. When they host cloud computing symposiums for mostly vendors to take part in, there isn’t any of the snakiness that you might find in a practitioner only summit. They are looking for solutions. They don’t hide their self-interest, and maybe that is the difference between those on the ground and those who are willing to brand their ideas and sell them to others.

In all of the social networking, self-publishing, and collaborating, we tend to obscure our self-interest. We tend to forget about the fact that we are helping ourselves to whatever results we are after. We also forget the worth of the connections we make. We obscure that many of the contacts we have may at some point have monitary value. This isn’t new. We self-promote up until the point that we could be consider selling our ideas, and no further. Unless of course, someone is buying. If someone is offering to come on board or to consult or to collaborate for a price, then we take on those roles. Yet, we still don’t want to be a vendor.

Vendors are unafraid to be called on their desire to make money. They have plans and contracts for that expressed purpose. We give away our content because we think that there is more value in the conversation than the transaction. But, the conversation is a transaction. We are exchanging information and ideas and building something new. And we should be able to quantify the value we create. If for no other reason than to say to the vendors in our lives that we are vendors too, and that we should be taken seriously.

Just like some vendors won’t listen to a teacher because they don’t hold influence. We don’t listen to vendors because they hold too much. There is something wrong with this equation, and here is what I would like to see to make it better (and not just in education, either):

  • Vendors need to become a part of the conversation and their plans and intentions need to be well stated. They need to make their needs known of their customers and they need to listen and react to what it is that their users are creating on their own. Vendors should start releasing their wares in the open and letting their users co-create the next versions.
  • Creators need to let vendors in because their perspective is valuable. We need to take their information with as much of a grain of salt as we would a fellow creator that we didn’t know well. We need to see their contributions to the community as valuable because they have a value affixed to them. But, we should also start affixing value to all of the contributions that we make, whether or not we are “selling” anything.

    • For the record, the things that I have learned and created with others in the last few days are worth $1500. They weren’t revolutionary, but the evolution of certain connections and ideas was at least worth that much. And anyone who isn’t willing to put a price on their learning should affix some other value that others will be able to understand. I’m not sure there is any other value that will let all stakeholders come to the table and compare apples to apples, but I am open to suggestions.

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    Question 180 of 365: Are we selfish?

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    I have never liked cavorting. I find the nimble act of careless frolicking to be unnerving. Done within the snow is even more scary. You have to dress for the occasion and know that the people you are with will not laugh at you. The mood is almost never right for frolicking. I can’t have just settled down with a book or ready to go to work. I certainly can’t be half-asleep when it starts to snow and be asked to frolic by my girlfriend in college and feel an amazing need to leave our dorm room with heavy clothes on to go and cavort at two in the morning.

    Surely, no one could say that this was selfish. Hopefully, you see that cavorting under the circumstances was not my first choice. How dare she ask me to do that when all I wanted to was sleep. Her understanding of my needs was lacking, which was much of the reason that we broke up after about 7 months of dating. And yet, this was the moment that I realized that I was inherently selfish. That my own needs were above those of people that I loved.

    In everything that has happened since, I have been trying to unravel what it is that would cause me to get up and cavort like I want to do it as much as the one I’m with. And more than that, what would cause me to stop doing whatever I am doing and start working with those that I love toward their priorities.

    Last night I went out and spent money. Money my family doesn’t have at the moment, at least not for going out without my family. I felt selfish in the act, and even worse in the aftermath. Explaining away the expenditure seems to be as painful as realizing that I didn’t want to frolic with my ex-girlfriend. I realized that my priorities are not the same in that moment as what my wife wants and what my family needs.

    That kind of selfishness is excusable sometimes, but I can’t say that it ever feels okay. I may have needed last night, but it was at the expense of what the rest of me (my family) needed. How can I justify that? How can I allow myself to be separated from who I am to simply go after what I want?

    I know I will work it out, but if I am honest with myself, I know that I made the wrong decision last night. I’m okay with being wrong, but this is a bad wrong. I can and will learn from it, but why couldn’t I see it before the fact? I saw the separation, but somehow I thought it was justified. It isn’t.

    And it makes me wonder about all of the things that we deny and separate out so that we can be selfish for a moment. Keeping in sync with the people that mean more to me than anything else is the only thing that matters. The conference, the meeting, the blog post, and the unending grind of the public sphere is designed to separate us out into our interests and capacities.

    The get together will boil us down to our most selfish interests. We network because we want more than we have, even if that is just a good conversation. We meet to advance the things who will become while cutting of a little bit of who we are. We mask the worst of ourselves much of the time because we are envious of this version of ourselves that doesn’t really exist. And that may be healthy for some, but not for me. At least not after last night.

    I am selfish, and I know what it costs. It costs me cavorting and frolicking and enjoying the company of the people that will feed my passion. And this is how I know:

    Last night was exhausting. Going out for happy hour with my wife gives me energy. That is the kind of cavorting that I need. Those moments that keep me energized are the ways that I know I am not being selfish because I am completely in sync with the other person’s needs. I want to be in sync with my family because they give me the energy to live. And I want to live, without being too selfish.

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