Learning is Change

Question 58 of 365: How are local and crowdsourced opposing forces?

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The folks in my local network are amazing. They are the ones who will babysit for my children, or hang out after work with my family. They are the ones who seem to share a lot of the same values with me. After all, they moved close to where we live for a reason, right? They are really the ones that I should be turning to with my problems and with my questions.

But, they aren’t. In fact, there are so few local people that I turn to on a daily basis, that I am almost scared by it. Other than a few key people (my wife included), my local network is a wasteland of e-mail threads and empty projects. Whenever I have a new idea, I don’t put it out to the people that I work with on a daily basis. I send the idea out to anyone who cares to take a stab. And more often than not, the only people with that inclination are anything but local.

It is counterintuitive to think that people who do not share the same space and time with me (or even have a previous personal relationship with me) would be more likely to join in on a project than their local counterparts. In fact, it is almost unfathomable that my local network would be so silent on some of the issues that I seem to face all of the time.

My local network does not see the value in commenting back and forth. They do not see the value in Twitter or Buzz. They are not plugged into the conversation. They are not ready to avail themselves of crowdsourcing activities. And, I guess that is the difference.

The local is striving to stay local.

The crowd is striving to be a part of the crowd (or, at least, and individual in the crowd).

The only way to stay local is to be unplugged and uninformed. If you are engaging in conversations that are universal, you will become international, even cosmopolitan. If you are striving to connect, there is no choice but to connect with those outside of your local network.

While I would like to bring the local to meet the crowdsourced, the only way for that to happen would be for the people near me to adopt the methodology of the crowd. they must be more public with their work. They must strive to answer passionate questions. They must stop placing so much value on people that they can “have a beer with.”

Being a source for someone’s crowd is valuable because it means that they will be a source for you as well. There is a certain level of reciprocation that we can expect from the crowd, even if it is only a feeling about such things. Again, this is counterintuitive. It should be that the locality will produce more reciprocation because of proximity, but instead it breeds a lot more competition. If you are doing something of value, it will be noticed among the crowd and leveraged to everyone’s benefit.

If we are able to bring more people along from the local to the crowd, we may be able to change the very nature of what it means to be local. We may be able to change the expectations for how much participation is possible and what level of investment is guaranteed. We could change local to mean all kinds of connection, not just face to face.

While, I see a lot of drawbacks to crowdsourcing, when it comes to asking my own questions. I am directing them more toward people I don’t know than people I do. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the most interesting opportunities and people have always come from outside the local, and not from within. Is that a function of the web, or is that just the way that it always has been?

Question 57 of 365: Who is doing the asking?

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As I have been asking a lot of questions of late, I thought it was time for me to see who else is doing the same. I should have something in common with those other who are also looking for answers, right? A kind of community could be formed around this practice, and in time, we would be able to figure out what makes each of our questions important.

However, after quite a little bit of research, the community may have to wait. It seems as though each site that helps people ask and answer questions isn’t really trying to create a community of practice so much as they are trying to create a database of answers or a platform for connecting questions with answers rather than people together.

This somewhat disheartening notion came from these facts:

So, I guess I am just a little disappointed with the platforms currently available. More than that, though, I am disappointed that more people don’t seem to be noticing that they are connecting with a system rather than with people when they ask questions. I am surprised that they aren’t clamoring for a better community of practice, but perhaps they don’t know how.
Perhaps, the people doing the asking don’t know that they can ask for more. Perhaps, they don’t know that they can get an answer and a network. Perhaps they aren’t aware that the process of asking the question and iterating on that question to find a better one and debating honestly as people instead of avatars can be one of the most rewarding experiences online or offline.
So, who is doing the asking?
Well, right now it is those who have a need, but don’t see what that real need is. It is people who will may find an answer, but won’t find an experience. It is just individuals, and it will remain that way until something allows them to come together and find real solutions, rather than just words.
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Question 56 of 365: How can we make openness tangible?

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I have written about openness before in a more theoretical sense. I have talked about open as “the space between.” And yet, I never explored just what that idea of openness actually looks like and how we can strive for the balance of openness in our work every day. Defining what it means to be open, should exist in a context. It should be a part of the objects, situations, and people who are open.

So, I start with a story:

My introduction to anything like a blog was Karl’s Corner. Originally (in about 2000 or 2001), it was just a list of all of the happenings that the band Weezer were doing across the world. It spoke about how they were gearing up to record “the green album” and had lots of pictures and music to listen to. Karl updated the site nearly every day. He was incredibly transparent with almost all aspects of the way the band was progressing.

Karl is open. He shares the space between me (as a music fan) and the band (as the creators themselves). In many ways, I have tried to emulate Karl in my years of writing. I have tried to find the space between education and myself and explore that space. I have tried to ask the questions that will lead to figuring out the inner workings of that education, whether it is mine or someone else’s.

Another story:

A few weeks ago, I went to Nebraska to work with some teachers at an online school, ESU 13. I was being paid to come out and talk about what I always talk about: Authentic ways of teaching and learning. After the two 4 hour sessions in which we discussed Moodle, Google Apps, Screencasting, and the learning that happens after you ask the question but before you receive the answer via the submit button in Moodle; they said that they probably would want to continue working with me on these ideas. The principal of the school said that he would like to be able to pay me for doing work on an ongoing basis with the school.

For most people who do consulting full time, that isn’t a weird request. For me, it was incredibly odd. I was going to work with those teachers whether he paid me or not. I was going to keep the conversations going on Twitter, in Buzz, and in any other way that we wanted to continue them because the truth is that I am learning too. To me, the conversation has to be out in the open, if we are to advance in any way. Openness is the space between teacher and student. It is the space that we can both exist within and neither of us needs to be paid to exist in this space. If it happens that we are paid to be a student sometimes and a teacher others, then so be it. But, we must make contracts with ourselves and not some “third-party” so that we can learn and teach.

Last story:

I am applying to a startup incubator called Techstars. It is incredibly competitive and like over 700 applications will be sent in this year. I am planning my journey to apply out in the open. I am figuring out the itch that I want to scratch, and the itches that other people are interested in scratching too. No piece of information or idea is too small to be included in the journey. I want to always be able to see the iterations I have gone through (including changing names and directions completely).

So, this is the space between revisions. It is the space between now and the next now. It is the space that allows me to be wrong over and over again as I work toward being right, or at least right for someone. Doing this out in the open means that I will actually be able to use this data and not hold everything hostage until I finally can release version 1.0 of my idea. That is why open matters. It allows me to focus on being better with others, not being the best alone (because that will never happen).

We make openness tangible by giving others the space between creator and consumer, the space between teacher and student, and the space between this version and the next. If we can do these things for one another, we will be bringing about the most change for our ourselves, our schools, and our companies.

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Question 55 of 365: What is the unit of measurement for an idea?

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We measure  and rate everything.

We measure how much things weigh, how many calories we consume, what rating a movie should have based upon violence, how good a meal was, how long our batteries will last, and on and on. We even measure our measurements, like how often we take a poll or how correct our prediction of the weather may be. The only thing that I can figure out that we don’t have good way to measure is ideas.

We don’t know when an idea starts or when it ends. We don’t know where they come from or where they go. We have almost no way of telling with an objective rating system whether an idea is good or bad. Essentially, we have no unit of measure for an idea.

But, I would like to. I would like to know the value of an idea, at least in relative terms. I would like to know when a new idea is being formulated so that I can grab onto it and help to create it. I would like to be able to say that a certain document, or video, or audio recording has a definite number of ideas and then be able to enumerate them so that I can see their value.

I understand that this process may be taking some of the art out of idea making, but I believe that if we had a better way to measure an idea against another one, we could actually come up with better ideas on the whole. I believe that if we had a mechanism to break a piece of content up into idea chunks, we could advance those ideas and build greater things off of them without letting the superfluous ideas weigh down the ones with real potential.

For example: If we were able to separate out every idea within the Health Care bills that are proposed to congress and weigh each one carefully, we would have a mechanism for separating out the very good ideas from the very bad ones. Obviously, what is a very good idea to one person might be a bad idea to another, and yet, when they are all wrapped up into one document, there is simply no way to tell where people stand on any given concept. It is my contention that with enough participation and collaboration on identifying valuable ideas, a lot of the subjectivity will go away. Mostly because the ideas that get the most debate are probably the ones that are the best ideas. The ideas that no one is debating probably can either be passed through or killed on the spot. Those ideas don’t require our focus, the ones that are contentious and will produce a reaction, are the ones that we really need to solve.

And yet, if we have no unit of measurement for ideas, how can we go about this process?

So, here is what I am proposing: What if every video that was produced could be split up into idea chunks and then rating on an individual basis. What if every document that was created could be highlighted according to the same idea chunks and rated on a scale that makes sense. What if every piece of media could be broken down so as to provide data about that object.

If we started there, what would the ratings system be? What is the scale that we could measure an idea against? Perhaps the relevance scale, or the passion scale, or even the understandable scale.

Clearly my answer here is the start of a much bigger conversation, but perhaps it is time to consider just how we are having our conversations about the most important issues of our day. Perhaps we need to be thinking about how we can at least agree on the measuring stick by which all ideas can by rated. Because as it stands right now, we either look at things on the whole which doesn’t allow for much analysis or we are all using different terms which only let’s us claim victory according to those terms.

As I think through this, I wonder about this video. For all of the ideas that he talks about in his Open Letter to Educators, I know that some are good. I know that some are inconsequential. How can I talk about one without talking about the others?How can I give his entire work 5 stars while I know that only a few of the ideas are really going to bring about real change?

If I could break things up or boil them down, I would have a better chance of figuring things out.

Question 54 of 365: Why are we digital amnesiacs?

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Diagram showing overview of cloud computing in...
Image via Wikipedia

I was going to say that we may be digital goldfish, but then I did a little bit of research and it looks like goldfish have a lot longer memory than we have ever given them credit for (about 3 months for colors and other things). My point actually is that we seem to keep on having the same conversations in new contexts and think that we are making real progress every time. It is like we believe that everything that has come before this particular moment in time doesn’t matter. The problems that we run into and unique, and our solutions are novel.

We state that we are reinventing something, but we frame it in terms of the old thing.

Take cloud computing: We are putting huge amounts of information online for access anywhere. We are accessing web platforms and programs in the cloud that used be housed on our hard drives. We are putting so much together onto the servers belonging to great companies, and we are paying for the right to access it.

We are amnesiacs if we can’t recognize that we are now reliving the days of mainframe computers. We are storing everything on a server in a room somewhere, and we are accessing it via a terminal. Essentially, we are time-sharing (great documentary at MIT labs in 1963)  our files and processing power, and sometimes (see The Fail Whale) not even for as much reliability.

Take “collaborative tools”: We have been talking about participatory culture and the read/write web for a few years now, and in many ways completely oblivious to the fact that collaboration is not something new. We claim that it is a 21st century skill, but people have collaborated beautifully without the need for such a label.

Whiteboards work. Post-it notes work. And the best collaborative tool is a really good conversation. We conveniently forget these are options when we design spaces online.

Take Social Search: This latest version of search is masquerading as something new. We are ready to crown it as the next big thing in vetted information and resources. By simply applying a social process to videos, links, and question asking in general, Social Search is aiming to become the officially sanctioned “Google-killer”.

And yet, people have always been the best vetting mechanism. A person who has the experience to pull resources from everywhere and know which ones will matter most to an individual is always going to do a better job than an algorithm or leveraging a crowd that has no personal investment in the individual seeking knowledge. Truly, the librarian is the original Social Search.

We conveniently forget just how much has already been done and thought. We don’t realize the other iterations of an idea, and we don’t seek them out either. We are happy with our Digital Amnesia because it helps us to consider ourselves as original, even innovative. However, when we are blind to the analog and only care about the digital, we will only be able to make small gains in our organizations and companies. If we can’t truly learn from the past and stand on the shoulders of giants, of what use are we?

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Question 53 of 365: Who are our board of directors?

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All organizations have a Board to govern them. They check in on what the org is doing and they have a unique perspective to see the whole rather than having to worry about the everyday. Board of Educations guide policy for school districts and Board of Directors guide companies and non-profits. In many cases, Boards are looked down upon as meddling in the affairs of an institution or issuing directives that are absurd or counterproductive. Often decisions that must be “run by the Board” are ones that we agonize over. The Board has the power to kill our projects of passion or redirect our efforts with their ability to fund or unfund at will.

However, this is not the kind of Board that I am trying to invoke. What I am talking about here is a form of mentorship that you can’t get without actually stating who your mentors are. You can have friends and family and you can get advice from them, but if they don’t know that they hold a pivotal role in helping you to envision a direction and a future, there is a lot of unfocused pushes toward nothing.

As I have embarked on answering questions and figure out the next steps for my career and my life, I have enlisted my Board of Directors because they are the people who I want to share my future with.

Here is how I chose my Board:

I looked for the people who have a passion for getting things right, those who are not satisfied with a first attempt. I chose those who will not let me be an expert for too long. I chose people who have something to teach me, or who will let me learn with them.

My Board is all older than me. While this isn’t essential, I mention it because I think that people who have the experience to put things into context for me are essential. I looked for those who take pictures. I watched for people who could express themselves, and express frustration well.

(An aside: Frustration has to be the hardest emotion to express well. We mostly give off noises to show it. The people that can really do this well, however, are capable of getting genuinely mad in the face, describing their frustration and letting it flow through them as they work out their next action. They never put their hands up in the air and then never write someone off. They see opportunities for frustration and pursue them in order to alleviate other’s frustrations. They express frustration with steady pressure and focused fanaticism for the way things should be.)

The people that I wanted to elect to my Board do not have everything figured out. They are failures sometimes. They are disinterested at others. They are honest about both.

What I wanted were wrecking balls for my thoughts.

I wanted writers. I wanted people who go out for coffee. I wanted people who use pens and paper.

And that is what I found. I found mentors who I talk to on a regular basis and whose conversations I cherish, save and come back to quite often. My mentors change my perspective on a regular basis. They make me better at asking questions and finding answers. And, they are the reason why I learn.

Finding people to push you to learn is the best thing you can ever do, no matter the workflow, tool or job at hand. It is the people that will prevail, no matter what.

(And perhaps, that is why so many organizations struggle. Their Boards don’t push them to learn, just to work harder.)

Question 52 of 365: How do we unfollow in the physical world?

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We have embarked on exploded the word “friend” with many new online connotations as well as redefined the word “space” to mean anything we want it to. We have made completely altered the concept of characters (as in 140) and manipulated “a conversation” so much that is almost unrecognizable in some of the ways we use it. In all of this, we are taking things from the physical world and bringing them into the virtual world in order to play around with them. We are taking what is that we know and making it apply to the unknown. This process changes our ideas and expands what is possible. On the whole, I quite like it.

However, going the other way has not had as good of a track record. Trying to take the concepts of networked learning and make them applicable without the online component falls kind of flat. If you are in a room with people and you are not accessing your wider network (or even the internet), those people are the resources you have at your disposal. And to a certain extent, the people in the room will always matter more, even if you do have access to your larger network.

The people in the room are the ones who can literally grab you (and intellectually get hold of you as well) and bring you to where they want you to go. The people in the room get to dictate the protocols, the time spent, the level of awkwardness, and the amount of competition. The people in the room are the ones who will bore and engage, inform or dilute, attack or join in.

And yet, we haven’t figured out a way to unfollow the people in the room. We have created this function perfectly well in the online world: when someone says something that we don’t like or when they stop being relevant to us, we unfollow them. Why is it that I can’t unfollow someone in a meeting? Why is it that I can’t engage with only the people who will push me to think farther and better and ignore the rest of the people that just happen to occupy the same space as I do?

The ultimate unfollow would be at a conference. If we were able to permanently break up into a small group of people that were interested in figuring something out without exposing ourselves to distractions and efforts that don’t lead to further reflection or solution, I think we would be better off for the process. If we were able to unfollow in real life, we would be better equipped to engage in acts of creation and specificity.

Now, I do not mean that we should attempt to only hear the voices that agree with us or have conversations only with our friends. Rather, I would like to have a protocol where I can scoop up all of the conversations that are relevant, both for and against my viewpoint, and just filter out the ones that are clutter. It also isn’t that there is information overload, either. In face to face communication it is very hard for me to get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff being thrown at me. Instead, it is about the amount of time and effort it takes to be mentally present with every possible idea offered within a conference or meeting.

While this may not be a radical notion, I do believe it holds true for me: Some ideas are not worth being present for.

So, I am suggesting a signal of sorts when you would like to unfollow someone in real life. I suggest that we make it something as inoffensive as possible. I suggest that we try to approximate the level of loss that comes from not following someone on twitter anymore (while we may not have the benefit of their witticism anymore, we also don’t have to hear their blather). It isn’t that you need to be “saved” from the situation and you need to have someone come over and take you away from the conversation. I would just like a way to break up with the people in the meeting that are no longer providing value to your thought process.

Something like a reverse handshake, perhaps.

Something that says: “It is no longer nice to meet you.” But, a little less mean.

I believe in the power of good conversation to change practice, and so I guess I have to believe in the opposite as well. The power of bad conversations is ever present and it is how we find ourselves doing things that we aren’t passionate about. It is also how we end up with unfocused and confused workflows. It is how we end up with a lot of regret for the things we can’t get done.

And yet, this sentiment is incredibly selfish. Telling people that they are no longer interesting, engaging or purposeful in our lives is something that isn’t easily done. We will be considered elitist. We will be considered jerks. Indeed, we will be those things.

So, unfollowing is not without a sense of peril in the real world. Being rude, of course, is never the right way to go about engaging with others. The unfollow process, though, is not about being rude. It is about making sure that we are constantly assessing our ability to engage. If we feel as though we can’t be a part of the collaboration as it is currently constituted, we reserve the right to excuse ourselves.

So, the next time that the conversation takes a turn toward distraction or irrelevance, I reserve the right to unfollow you. Without too much absurdity, I will stand up, unshake your hand and leave the conversation behind. I hope that it will be implied that anyone else can come with, and I do not need to be followed to be validated.

This is hard in application, but if enough people adopt the in-person unfollow, the stigma of engaging only in conversations that matter will slowly go away. Or perhaps this idea is just as ridiculous as any other way of bringing what makes sense online and forcing it to make sense in the physical world.

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Question 51 of 365: What do we model in our networks?

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I believe that I am not modeling the uses of my network that I actually use my network for. If I have created my network, I have done it wrong. Let me clarify further…


I model the link dump quite often by connecting my delicious feed to twitter. What I actually want is conversation about those resources. I model the connection of all spaces, when I actually only want to connect with an individual. I model the information overload that I actually seek to stop it. This is not okay.


Mostly, it is not okay because I am not being a good steward of my network. I am not “being the change” in the way that so many of us talk about doing it. This is not okay.


If I am a node of my network and if I am responsible for the connecting of other nodes to myself, and the further facilitation of the other nodes that need to be connected. I must make the effort to establish connections that are not based upon what I think will happen in the future. I need to stop making those connections based upon how it is that I want the conversation to occur after my link dump happens or after my thought travels through the tubes I have created for it. It is simply not okay that I have created a network that I don’t want to be a part of sometimes. I am what is wrong with my network.


The connections I have made are too important to squander them. They are too valuable to waste on what doesn’t matter. For those people who want to connect to my delicious, let them do that there. For those who want to follow my questions and conversations, let them do that on my blog and through twitter.


My network has been hijacked by advertising for things that don’t give life to my network. They may lead to the ReTweet, but they certainly don’t lead to a novel idea that will change my practice. Knowing that more things exist doesn’t make my network better. Knowing who people are and why they are passionate and what kinds of questions they are answering… that is what leads to a better network. I am my network and my network is me.

Question 50 of 365: How do we know when we are safe?

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Safety is something that we can feel. We know when it is present and when it isn’t. We can feel when others feel safe too. Those around us share their safety. We project it when we talk with one another and we receive it as we hear words of vulnerability and need. In those moments of held emotion, when we know that we are with people who love us, we can’t help but feel safe. We can’t help but be ourselves and consistently reveal more about our understanding of the world. We are hopelessly fulfilled when we feel safe. We risk, and we find hope. We wrestle with big ideas and we don’t feel self-conscious about believing in one another.

Yet, how is this replicated online? How is it that we can ever be this vulnerable and courageous online? How will we look one another in the eye and know that our shared identity actually meshes and means something?

The reciprocity of emotion in an online space is hard to measure, yet it isn’t something that can be overlooked. We must come together in a place that makes us believe it is an extension of us. If we believe that we are a part of the space, we will work to make it safe. Our shared stories within the space will create a type of comfort that breeds progressively more personal stories, more reasons to engage.

This safe place is one that I would like to create. I would like to be a part of generating the energy within an environment that allows for people to be themselves. I would like to spark people to create this space on their own as well. We will know when we find it. We will know because it will be ours. It will be the thing that we all gravitate towards because it will be the one place that we don’t have to play any games, be sarcastic or complain about what we can’t do.

If we all see that it is possible, if we all know what we are looking for, let us pursue safety and uncertainty and passionate connection with one another. Just as I believe it matters to have these spaces in the physical world, I believe that it is just as valuable to create them within the “other” space that we all inhabit, the one that will increasingly influence our lives and livelihoods.

Question 49 of 365: Is there space for us?

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Beautiful Phoenix
Image by Cyprien via Flickr

I was just in Nebraska working with some online teachers at one of the best facilities I have ever experienced. From the offices that had defined areas, but no doors to the classrooms with polycom systems for distance learning, mobile laptop carts, and the ability to record entire lessons (with video capture, screen capture, audio capture and doc camera capture all rolled into one). This place had it all. Flexible learning spaces with comfortable chairs and movable tables. Rooms for robotics, rooms for networking instruction, rooms for nurse training, and an enormous area built for taking apart locomotives. This building was the space that I would love to call my learning space, my office space or any other type of space that they would let me use it for. It immediately made me think that I would like to get together with some very smart people and just let the space grow our creativity.

While I do believe that everyone should move in with the folks at ESU 13, my question literally is asking is there a space like that for everyone who wants one. Is there a space that is flexible for different types of projects? Is there a space for us to congregate and think through every struggle we have? Is there a space for us to try new things and to fail miserably, to get back up and fail again?

West Side Story aside, I would like to find those spaces that really are required by things that I want to do.

I will not be satisfied by the spaces that have been given to me. I will create the spaces that I would like to see. I will move chairs and tables. I will not sit in spaces that only allow for a certain type of meeting to take place. I will request the tools that I need to draw and to change what is on the screen. I will hang art and infographics. I will have both digital and analog interactive elements within my space. I will have huge whiteboard walls, if I have walls at all. I will move around and cause others to move around. I will have music. I will allow for privacy and transparency, glass, cameras and shades. I will light from the floor up and the walls in. I will allow for plugging in anywhere and projecting on anything. The front of the space will never be static, and the corners will have as much life as the middle. I will make this space because it doesn’t exist yet. I will make this space because that is where there is space for me. I hope that after I build it, you will come too.

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