Learning is Change

Question 173 of 365: What should an interview be?

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An animated cut-away cross-section of the 24-cell.
Image via Wikipedia

I am on a panel to help choose the next Director of Online Learning at the Colorado Department of Education. The panel itself is an cross-section of interests, from higher education to non-profits to multi-district online programs, each of the people who are interviewing the candidates is looking for something  different. And, truly, that is the way it should be. If we were all looking for the same thing, there probably wouldn’t be any need for an interview at all. We could just decide based upon the resumes alone.

The interviews commenced today and all 9 of us were able to ask our predetermined questions. We listened as this candidate answered to the best of his ability, and we feverishly scribbled notes on the official document, our own personal notepad, or (in my case) typed in a few thoughts on a brainstorming app on the iPad. The hour it took to hear all of what this person had to offer was not an undaunting task for either side. I’m sure that he struggled in some of the questions more than he let on and I’m sure that there was some struggle on our part to really see how well we could get to know him in the short time we were allotted.

The more that I thought about the process we underwent and the process that happens in so many conference rooms every day is incredibly strange. We sit together and grill someone on questions that will ultimately decide their fate, but are incredibly inadequate to determining if they would actually do a good job in the position for which they have applied. The questions we asked, about vision and communication and specific data and standards, all of them were in an attempt to paint a picture of who this person is. But, what we really want to know (or at least what we should want to know) is who this person would be in this position. Because we had no crystal ball today (neither the candidate or the interviewers), no one could really see what it would be like to have him leading the department.

Even though we do not have such a gift of seeing into the future and predicting the fit that a particular person would have within a given position, I think that we have the tools for which we could create a much better process for getting the right person for the job. Here is what I have in mind:

  • Day in the life: I would like the candidates to take us through a day in the life of what he or she is doing currently, showing us concrete situations that cater to their strengths. The easiest way to do this would be to collect some objects that are of significance to their work (reports, documents, presentations, etc.) and show off their workflow within them in a synchronous format (live or in a virtual setting0. I would also like to demonstrate a day in the life of the position they are applying for. This would allow them to get a feel for exactly what they are getting themselves into. I think the easiest way to do this would be to take a snapshot of the director’s computer screen every few minutes and then do a time lapse of activities. I could also see this working for the candidate’s demonstration as well.
  • Real problems: Rather than asking generic questions, I would really love to see how a candidate would solve an issue that is concerning the current stakeholders. I think that the products from this type of collaborative work to solve a single issue would provide a much better comparison of applicants than simply asking them about a problem they have solved in the past.
  • Learning Network: I would like to know more about who these people turn to for advice and learning. I would like to see who their learning network consists of. To me, each of these candidates should have to demonstrate just how they go about dealing with a question that they don’t know the answer to. I would actually like to watch them put in a request to their learning network and see how long it takes to get a series of responses. A decent set of responses in a short amount of time would say to me that this person actually has set up a system of support that will be of value to the whole organization. It says that we are not only hiring this person but also all of the people that she or he knows.

While these may be a radical shift away from current interviewing practices, I actually believe that an emphasis on these three things is going to allow us to compare apples to apples. It will also show just how hard it is to fake your way through actual work, rather than just being able to interview well. It will show exactly what we value as well, which I think is important in any economic climate, regardless of how desperately the candidate is for the position or how desperate we are to fill it. In the end, our values are what will cause someone to stay with a job long enough to create lasting change and sustained growth. Let’s make sure they match up.

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Question 172 of 365: Who is our fairy godmother?

I have been reading a lot of children’s stories, as might be expected
with a soon to be two and four year old in the house. Many of these
stories have incredibly vague morals about finding happiness, or a
singular figure who seems to have everything figure it out. This
figure is often a fairy or mentor of some kind who is able to see into
the future or know what is going to be better for the characters than
they themselves can see.

I know there is something to be said for not knowing what is coming
next, but if someone around me could figure it out, that sure would be
nice. I’m not saying that I need to be in a storybook, but I want a
mentor who can see the things I can’t and perhaps sing me a song about
what I need to do. Yeah, that would be swell.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 171 of 365: When is the old stuff just as good as the new stuff?

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iPod vs Archos Jukebox
Image by ibookpaul via Flickr

I owned one of the first hard-drive based mp3 players, the Archos Jukebox 6000. It has a full 6 gigabyte hard drive and the most hideous blue bumpers on the four corners. The firmware it was released with played the same “random” order of your songs every time. After this player kicked the bucket (horrible clicking sound for a hard drive is never a good call, especially after dropping it from a moving bike in the park), I got a Creative Jukebox Zen, which was one of the first 20 gigabyte hard drive players at the time. This one was much improved, no longer requiring that playlists be made using text files and then uploaded like the Archos had. No, this player I would take with me to my sets as a college radio DJ, where I would plunder the promo discs looking for brand new music that none of my friends had ever heard before. By the end of school, I had only filled up about 14 gigs worth (which may sound like a lot, but when you factor in the huge amount of file sharing that happens on most dorm networks, it really isn’t). The vast majority of the music I listened to was still purchased as a CD and then ripped to my player. I didn’t have some major ethical stance against not working with the solid media type because of the inherent unfairness to the artist, but I did get a lot of that out of my system in high school. By the time I had upgraded to the 20 gig player, I wasn’t sure if I actually needed that much space.

I’m still weighing that one over. Recently, I uncovered the player from the spot it was occupying in my garage. All of the music is still there, and it still holds a charge quite nicely. When I plugged in my full headphones (instead of the ubiquitous white earbuds I typically use), I was taken back to a time and place without children or a mortgage. I went jogging for the first time in a year with the player and the over-large headphones. It was like no time had passed at all.

The pretensions about owning the right music player or having the right set of earphones slid right off me as I kept listening to Clarity by Jimmy Eat World, an album that I became infatuated with while playing a Crash Bandicoot version of Mario Kart for the original playstation.

And I was just trying to figure out if it was the music or the player that was letting me have such a string response to the experience. After narrowing down all of the variables, I believe that my brick of a music player holds more importance to me than I had ever given it credit for. The songs on it don’t matter nearly as much in some ways because I have listened to them on other players as well. It is the act of holding something that feels terrible in my hand with a cord that is way to long for jogging wrapped around it that let’s me see who I was then and how far I have come.

So, as I scroll through the hierarchical menu system and choose my next songs from the person I was a few years ago, I can’t help but think that the things we are pushing aside are the ones that tie us to who we are.

In the rush to get a new iPad, are we going to brush aside the machines that knew us better? In the hurry to throw away any single-use item, are we going to lose our digital cameras and voice recorders? Progress is good, and it should be always forward, but there comes a time when we need to be able to pull out all of our old gadgets and ideas and look at them for when we were in these moments.

If our digital past is littered with electronic artifacts, I think it is my job to go and pick them up align the way. Every once in a great while, they should be dusted off and given another chance to impress us with the anecdote or the understanding of what we have learned and what we still have yet to even guess is coming.

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Question 170 of 365: What is the benefit of rubber handled safety scissors?

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two scissors for Left-hand and Right-hand. Cle...
Image via Wikipedia

The inconsequential saved my daughter a lot of pain today. It probably saved us a trip to the hospital. It definitely saved us finding out the hard way if electrocution is possible using nothing more than a pair of scissors. Frankly, that is not something I ever care to know, at least not first hand.

Today, my daughter cut the power cord on a lamp that was plugged in.

As I rushed to her to figure out why she and her brother were being so quiet behind the chair, I saw her make the snip and I watched as a spark and a cloud of smoke immediately came off of the metal. She knew something was wrong, that she had really provoked a response from the environment around her. But until she saw my face, she didn’t flip out.

After I started to look her all over for signs of burns or brain damage, she started to wail. I snatched her up and held her as close as I have ever held another human. As I consoled her, I looked at the scissors. They were blackened and a bit had broken off. She had just enough time to cut through the cord without me seeing that it was her intention to do so. She would have been injured if it were not for the rubber handles on her scissors. The purple grips that I found cute when we bought them turned out to be a rather important feature.

I feels it is something they should put on the packaging, actually:

“If your child cuts a power cord clean through, she will not get electrocuted. Guaranteed.”

That, for me, is going to be the key feature on every pair of scissors I buy in the future. I won’t even look at metal only or plastic handle scissors. Those won’t keep my children from this particular tragedy. No. The only scissors for me are the ones within which I can feel their electricity diffusing power. And, as I look at the burns on the metal, where my daughter made her cut, I can feel nothing but grateful that I unwittingly made that choice.

And it is always that way. The feature that seems inconsequential becomes essential.

When camera phones came out, I thought that they were a ripoff. I couldn’t imagine any reason why someone would want a subpar camera in their phone and pay a premium for the privilege. Now, though, they the extension of our brains. They capture what we can’t text. They grab bar codes and do searches. They Evernote the world and do video conferencing. They have probably saved a few lives too, simply by being a witness when everyone else isn’t around.

It is our responsibility to find the things that don’t mean anything at first and then take on life giving qualities. It is up to us to seek out the features that provide hope to desperate circumstances. These are the ones that go unnoticed for years but take on massive importance just as soon as someone figures them out.

I am a feature that is in need of finding too. At some point, I hope to save lives like the rubber handles. I may end up with some scars in the process like the metal blades, but at least I will be of use. I will be essential then, and everyone will know that I have been built this way for a purpose. That I work on what I should day in and day out in the hopes that someone will choose me rather than someone else, someone less prepared for the risky tasks. I’m not looking to be a martyr, but I would step in the way if I knew that someone or some idea I loved was going to be hurt.

I fight to be in the tool drawer for when I am needed. I just hope the people that pick me will be as discerning as we were with our choice of scissors.

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Question 169 of 365: What should we do in the hour before?

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alarm clock, bought from IKEA
Image via Wikipedia

In the middle of the sixth grade, I realized that I didn’t care much for doing my math homework. Instead of waking up early to figure out the “Advanced Applications” that were assigned to me (which was the name of the class I was taking), I would go to class empty handed. Well, almost empty handed.

I would get out my binder, which I was systematically removing all of the stitching from, and rummage through it each day looking for the homework that didn’t exist just so I had something to do while everyone else “checked their answers.” This ritual worked for quite some time until my teacher finally caught on and decided that my little one act play I performed each day wasn’t getting any better. She closed down that production permenently.

Half-way through the year I stoped trying entirely. I didn’t do the homework that was assigned and I didn’t try to prove to others that I had. It was a kind of truce that the teacher and I had established. She didn’t ask for my homework and I didn’t offer excuses. In some ways, it was my first introduction to the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to fail, but I just wasn’t seeing the benefit and the path wasn’t laid out for me so that I could.

I have always gotten up early to work on things. After the day was done just wasn’t a suitible time for me to process more things that I had no interest in. So, whatever time I had in the hour before I took my shower, I would work. Early on it was math, but as I started to realize just how long it was taking me to do the math homework and just how little I was enjoying it, I stopped that practice altogether. In fact, I stopped bringing the book home. It was just easier to leave it in my locker, knowing full well that I had more than enough stuff to during my hour long ritual.

My hour before the day started was to become a life-long habit. Doing math homework did not. I have consistently gotten out of bed before anyone else did for at least 15 years now. I have consistently not worked on equations or other work without connection to my life during this time. I think that makes sense, but I don’t think that it is that easy.

The hour before the sunrise or the children waking up or the world starting to scream their needs at me is meant for “real applications” only. As “Advanced” as the applications that my math teacher had in her textbook, I didn’t find the relevant. I couldn’t see how they gave meaning to an isolating experience that is adolescence.

In order to measure my hour, I would keep my fathers old travel alarm clock underneath my pillow. I positioned it just right so that the ticking wouldn’t keep me up, but also so that the alarm was close enough to turn it off before it woke up anyone else. I timeboxed the hour way before I knew about timeboxing. I made official and sometimes very direct statements to myself about getting up and getting to work on the things that were most important and most relevant to doing the things I wanted to over the weekend (there were obviously some consequences for me not doing the work that didn’t spark my interest).

Even to this day, each time I wake up early, I believe that the world is wide open to me. I believe that I can accomplish almost anything in the hour that is mine. As the hour draws to a close, however, I start to panic. I get anxious about every impending deadline and just how I am going fit everything in the last 15 minutes. Most days in my current life, I hope for my children to sleep just a few minutes longer, which they never do.

And yet, the time is still there. It has traveled further and further into the am, but it is still the same feeling of total optimism after I awake and dread as the hour comes to a close. In this hour, I read blogs. In this time, I write. I do the easy emails and check off things that don’t require me to do a lot of research. The hour before is not for projects, it is for single acts. It is for getting ahead where I want to and leaving the places that mean nothing to me far behind. It is a time to brew coffee and wash dishes. It is a time to pick up some toys off of the ground and listen to long forgotten music on headphones.

Most of all, though, the hour before is about convincing myself that everything is just a little bit better than it looked the previous evening. It is the act of pushing all of the burdens to the side and simply biting off a little bit to chew. I don’t solve world hunger in this hour, but I do feed my appetite for believing in what I am and have become. It is about pushing the math book aside and reading the Dark Frigate becuase the book report is due today and I actually like reading books.

Generic productivity can take a back seat for an hour. In this hour, I am only productive for myself. I am only pressured by the constraint of time itself. Not a minor constraint, certainly, but one that has very consistent parameters and a language that I have been speaking for a very long time. One minute of this hour is sometimes better because I can bend it to my will instead of having others bend “other” time to do their bidding. This time is mine.

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Question 168 of 365: When are we ready to fulfill our promises?

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Una webcam
Image via Wikipedia

Making promises is one of the easiest things that I have ever done. They just roll off my tongue after a while. In fact, so long as I am talking to someone that is interesting enough, I will continue to make promises just to keep the conversation going. So long as I can believe in the moment that whatever I am selling is in some way connected to reality, I can justify my promises.

I have promised that Open Spokes would be a platform for answering questions and collaboration. I have promised that we will be able to record webcam video on the fly. I have promised an engaging display and ratings system for the question pages.

I have promised all of these things in the hopes that if I said them enough, theree would be some hope of them becoming true. It is as if I wanted to wish them into being. And as it turns out, I mostly have.

Somehow, thorough all of my high hopes, the system started to work. It started to perform the way that I always knew it could. And yet, I still held it back. I have a working product, one that I think has a huge amount of potential, and I am holding it back for fear that it will be judged too harshly. I have not written about it because I have been worried about people finding out that I am a fraud, that my promises weren’t everything that they were cracked up to be.

I delayed the launch and the testing phase because I wanted things to be perfect. I wanted to avoid the appearance that we are just toting with the idea of what is possible. I have been keeping things under tight wraps, holding on the simple piece of information that Open Spokes is open as of today.

While I am still maintaining that this is a soft open, you can go in and register for an account here. You can then go in and ask your questions and record your reflections. You can share your questions on any social media platform you wish and seek to get responses from others who sign up for an account.

While that may sound nice and technical, it is nothing short of terrifying for me to say those words. The idea I am encouraging people to start actively trying to play in the playground that I have created (co-created with my partner, actually) is so freeing and damning at the same time.

I think my biggest fear isn’t that people won’t like it, but that supporting and developing it will become all consuming. My fear is that it will become something that people actually rely upon.

It is so much easier to believe that you can shut down your project or company at any point and not have any further ramifications outside of yourself. After you have actual users, though, it isn’t yours any more. It is theirs.

That may be the one thing that we miss most in developing new spaces. We miss the fact that simply launching them and having others make them a part of their lives is hugely vulnerable. So, we may try to secretly sabotage our work so that we can go and slink away from it if necessary. With one foot always out the door, it is safer.

Safer, but not as spectacular. Standing beside your creation proudly and proclaiming that it is good is the only way to insure that it actually is good. I guess that is what I am doing. I’m stating for the record that some of the biggest promises I have made in the last 9 months are actually coming true.

Please, go and see for yourself.

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Question 167 of 365: When does the game change?

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Image representing Flowr as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

I wrestled for 2 years when I was in elementary school. I was never all that good at it, but I did manage to win a few matches. Mostly, I only remember trying to sit against a wall in an invisible chair.

We were supposed to put our backs up against the wall and bend our legs into the sitting position and hold it for as long as we could. We would line up by age along the wall, with the youngest by the water fountains in the cafeteria. We could only hold out for a minute or so, and we would complain the whole time. Our muscles just weren’t ready for that kind of stress. The middle schoolers, though, could take it for upwards of five minutes and they didn’t make a sound. Somehow, the invisible chairs that they were sitting on held them up much better than ours did.

That was the game, though. Sitting in an invisible chair with our matching wrestling uniforms on. The chairs were pretend, as were most of the grunts and grimaces because we knew that we were going to give up at the first sign of real pain. We knew that there wasn’t any real point to powering through because there was no winning. The chairs would always be fake and we would always lose the game. It would always be more work than it was worth.

That is kind of the way that I feel about social networking within an organization. I can see the huge benefits to sharing information around an institution, allowing everyone to feed off of the smartest ideas and the most efficient workflow. The value of communication and collaboration is clear whenever an important document is created or a new feature is floated. And yet, it just feels like sitting in an invisible chair to try and get people to share information or collaborate with one another. It feels as though it is more trouble than it is worth, like I am exercising a muscle that I am never going to actually get to use.

At least it did, until today. Today, I saw a glimpse of what institutional social networking really could be if it was done right. This afternoon, I realized that lowering the barrier to entry was possible. I could be talking about Google Buzz or Wave coming to Google Apps or I could be talking about Facebook or LinkedIn really branching out into the business space. I could also be referencing Yammer or Ning or some other well known piece of social software. Instead, I am talking about a product that hasn’t been out more than a month and has none of the press of these much larger players.

I am talking about Flowr.

More accurately, though, I am talking about the fact that Flowr just created Google Apps integration with its social networking package. The software on its own, allows users to share status updates, ideas, polls, files, and events. Couple with the system that many institutions are already using for e-mail and collaboration equals WIN. It is mind-boggling that I will be able to login to a single space and share information with everyone in the institution via a social stream and then share different information specifically with groups that can then connect that information to Google Docs or Google Calendar Events. It is as if someone pushed a really comfy chair underneath me while I was trying yet again to lean against the wall with my knees bent.

I’m not saying its the holy grail, nor could any web application deserve that moniker. What I do mean to say is that by making such a vital part of connection in modern life that much easier, I believe that institutions may actually start to focus on what will actually cause them to succeed: valuing their humanity. By this I mean that companies will finally see that it is people sharing information and that the people are the ones that will add to the understanding and institutional knowledge and culture. While their is great lip service paid to this idea, it really is only when faced directly with the possibility of searching through (via a great search bar in Flowr) or filtering out (via tags) all of the contributions of an organization that people come to their senses about what is truly worthy of pursuit.

So, the game changes when the things that we thought were impossible become possible. When things that were once invisible become things you can depend upon. It is when you now need things that formerly didn’t exist. This will happen with enterprise social networking, but I think that it probably isn’t the biggest invisible thing that we will come to rely upon in the next few years.

More likely, our invisible chairs and muscle strains will become clearer with age. Just as the middle schoolers could hold it longer than we could in early elementary, we will start to realize just how valuable those chairs are going to be just as we need them to support the weight of our work.

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Question 166 of 365: How can we scrape better?

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A social network diagram
Image via Wikipedia

I guess I might as well go on the record for stating that the future of networks is in scraping. I know that some people are calling it the social graph and the power of the connections and links and liking and all of that, but I think that it is much better to just call it scraping. Turn on the full twitter or facebook firehose if you have access, but it doesn’t mean anything unless one person sees significance in the data that is being scraped and served up to them.

Just so I am clear, scraping is something that is done with the links part of sharing. It is done with the location part of publishing, the metadata about all of the things that we are passing around. It is in the description of the thing rather than the thing itself.

The benefit of such a thing was made real to me by a single product called DejaPlay. This video pretty much sums up its features:

Suffice it to say, though, this iPad app makes my network real again. I can sit back and watch the things that all of my friends and colleagues have been talking about and I can finally engage in the process of catching up on the inspiration that everyone around me has been calling upon. This app simply scrapes all of the youtube and other video links from your facebook friends and twitter followers and then creates a video playlist for you to enjoy. It does this one thing incredibly well. So well, in fact, that it makes me never want to click on a link again without it being served up to me in a better format.

Twitter Times does this as well with text-based links (as does Google Reader and Delicious to a lesser extent). It creates a fully functioning newsletter for all of the links that have come through your twitter feed, but I am afraid that this just isn’t enough after watching DejaPlay work its magic. I don’t want a list anymore. I want a tactile exploration through what is going on within my network. I want to explore and have it autopopulate as new information becomes available. I want to dig deeper into what people are reading and watching and see the context for everything that they are sharing. I want to know who the people are that are creating the work I am consuming, and more than that, I want an elegant interface that shows me the path that I have taken down the rabbit hole. While DejaPlay doesn’t currently let me retweet the videos I am watching, I have received direct correspondence from them that it is coming in the next major release. In doing so, the experience would be complete: Network, Scrape, Consume, Contribute.

That is what the process should always be, not to put to fine a point on it. We network to create a space worthy of inhabiting. We find people who are a part of the conversations that we wish to be involved in. We connect to them and start thinking through the problems that we want to solve with their help. We scrape (or should start scraping, anyway) because we know that the value of their contributions is not simply in having them close at hand, but rather in knowing that they are carefully curating our library of knowledge. We have selected them in the networking phase and they are providing us with dividends simply by choosing them. Then we must consume, ravenously, everything that we can from our network. We know that it is good and so we must read and watch and absorb all of the good things that others have to offer us. This type of consumption, unlike our daily bodily intake, never leaves us feeling full. The more that we consume, the more we want to take more in. We make the connections that were always there waiting for us to make them real. Our final step is to contribute back to the network. We curate and add to other people’s libraries. But, now we need to make sure that we are remixing and recontextualizing. Here is where the future is going to come in handy.

Our stuff must get more scrape-able. When we share things, we must share them knowing full well that their contexts must be shifted a hundred times for our network. We must realize that the lists and posts that we have conjured up are meaningless without the ability to dissect them.

Here is what I want:

I would like the ability to see all of the people that I have carefully chosen as a part of my network and I would like to be able to choose what kind of media I would like to scrape from their various shared places. I would then like to be able to flick from their profiles (using my hands, of course) their videos into one corner of my screen. I would like to be able to choose certain people in my network and flick their blog posts into another corner. Then I want to flick the podcasts of those who I know to be quite eloquent with the spoken word (or have an ear for it anyway) into a third corner. The fourth corner I will save for images of those who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding the best arguments through pictures.

I want to be able to play a podcast while looking at the images and then comment on each one directly as I go through. I want to be able to watch a video and then step into the twitter conversation that it sparked. I want to be able to see the blog posts highlighted with everyone’s annotations and then copy and paste my favorite parts with a few of the images that I found and link it together with the videos that are going around in the network as well.

This is what scraping will do for us in the not so distant future. We will be able to remix any type of content into a new one with as few steps in between as possible.

We will know we have reached the point of truly enlightened scraping when we no longer have to care where things are posted (facebook, twitter, buzz, flickr, etc.). We will simply see the people in our network and we will be able to literally grab ahold of what they have shared and put it to our own uses. This will be the future, and this will be now, too.

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Question 165 of 365: What do we squander?

Money, time and opportunity.

That is the short answer.

The slightly longer answer is that we squander pretty much anything
that we can get our hands on. I squandered a great deal of my life
hoping that time would allow me to opt out of boredom and uselessness.
It did, a bit. Mostly, though, I just came to my senses.

Whenever I think about adolescence and childhood in general I think
about squandering time.

Childhood is the time when our responsibilities are less and our free
time is more. It is the one time that worry lacks potency, that
problems loom large only because most problems haven’t been discovered
yet. Now, I know not all childhood is like this. But, I have to
believe that at some point, everyone is treated as though they are a
child, and this means that people don’t expect them to spend the vast
majority of their time on others. Childhood is selfish. And we
squander that selfishness.

I wish that someone would have told me that I could do anything as a
child and not have to wait until adulthood. I wish someone would have
told me that the free time of a child is not the same as that of an
adult. I know now that the limits on what is possible before you hit
18 are self-imposed and not dictated by laws, the way that most public
institutions would have you believe. Squandering time on non-creative
pursuits is the single greatest regret I have for children. All
children.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 164 of 365: What is the power of undo?

I think that the single greatest innovation in the history of creative
work was the undo button. The ability to go back to what was before
and not have to look at the mess you have made of what you started is
just beautiful. Just as some people believe code is poetry, I believe
that undo is prose. The sheer amount of things that you can undo is
incredible. Entire ideas and images can be undone. Meetings can be
unscheduled and networks can be unlinked. At least, in theory.

The last few years have seen the diminished use of the undo button.
Deleting things off of the web is all but impossible. Social networks
keep all connections and are difficult to undo. Even email has turned
into an archiving machine instead of way to move beyond what has
already been done. Everything is in the cloud, syncing desktops with
phones with laptops with tablets. Undo is an approximation now. We
backup and we restore. We don’t undo anymore.

I remember writing one of my first papers on the computer and I
accidentally hit the insert button. I didn’t know that such a button
existed, but when I tried to go back and edit a misspelled word, I
started writing over what was already there. For an hour my mother and
I tried to type the same sentence over and over again and all the
while, we were losing more and more of the essay. Not only did we not
know about the insert key, we didn’t know that all we had to do was
click that simple undo button and magically things were back to
normal. It took my father coming home and showing me the magical
button for the full effect to take hold.

Now, I wonder if that realization will even matter. Because everything
saves automatically every few seconds, what does it matter if things
get messed up? We publish and then question. We tweet and then think.
The undo isn’t as virtuous as it once was. It is an afterthought, a
feature without a future.

Well, I for one want the undo button to make a comeback. I would like
to see beside each “share this” button, a huge undo button that would
allow the viewer to get back to whatever we were supposed to be doing
before we went down the rabbit hole that is the web. It isn’t a back
button. It is an undo for distraction, an undo for being public all of
the time, and an undo from being hopelessly tied to the network for
all information and understanding.

The undo button, if it is to survive, will allow us to be an
individual again. Because every undo is a singular act. It isn’t
collaborative to get rid of what is already there, but it is freeing
to be able to do it anyway. Undo is what we wish we could do in real
life with nearly every act, but if we can no longer do it online, we
will have lost something truly special about the digital world.

Undo is the way in which we can live without regret online. It is the
way that we can actually forget what we have done, and sometimes that
is really important. At least it is to me.

Posted via email from The Throughput