Learning is Change

Question 48 of 365: How can we encourage shoe swapping?

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A pair of Class S3 Neskrid Cherokee II safety ...
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While this question may seem ridiculous on the surface, it is one that I have been considering for quite some time. I believe that we walk in our own shoes so long that we forget that there are any other types, sizes or styles. We may believe that walking in someone else’s shoes is beneficial, but when it comes to actually trying on those steel toed boots that don’t quite fit, we really don’t have the first clue about how to go about it.

Metaphors aside, the amount of conversations that we have that encourage an us vs. them mentality are staggering. Whether that is IT vs. teachers, VC vs. entrepreneurs, brick and mortar vs. online or any of the other versions of this unending meme; we are forced to pick a side and defend it. We haven’t been able to find a way of really empathizing with the other side. We haven’t figured out just how deep the connections go between those two sides. And it is mostly because it is just easier to not see things from another perspective. It is just simpler to believe that my thought process is right, even when I am staring in the face of contrary proof.

When people talk about scalability issues, I say bah humbug. When people talk about filtering in schools, I say phooey. When people talk about privacy concerns, I blow a big fat raspberry. And yet, all of those are valid if I can find a way to trade shoes with those people on the other end of the table. If I am forced to build the server from scratch, I know how hard it is to upgrade each individual linux package. If I have to be the one who figures out a policy that works for both 1st graders and 10 graders or one that works for techno-phobic and techno-centric teachers, I know that a delicate balance has to be made. If I am faced with real predator or cyber bullying behavior, privacy becomes much closer to my heart. These things start to matter to me, but only if I can trade shoes.

So, here is what I am proposing. I would like to start a shoe trading service. I would like to be able to go into my IT department and figure out from the ground up why they think their ideas are as important as they do. I want to live it and know what it means to have people calling about everything that they must fix and/or support immediately. I would like to trade shoes with a VC and see from their side of the table just how many people are vying for their attention. I would like to know what it is like to tell someone no who believes in their product enough to sink huge amounts of time, effort and money into it. I would like to walk in the shoes of someone who has experienced issues of privacy intrusion and learn from them what makes default public settings such a nightmare for them.

Anyone want to swap shoes for a day?

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Question 47 of 365: To whom are we beholden?

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I ask this question on the periphery of a lot of the questions that I pose. I would like to know just to whom we owe our talents and our learning. To whom are we beholden for our knowledge, for our engaged relationships and open-ended conversations. I believe that we are required to be beholden to one another simply by the structures that we create within our own environments. We construct a platform just so that we can rely on others for its use. We create steps forward that require us to use the hands of those that go before us in order to pull us up.

While this level of metaphor is nice, I would like to dig into the concrete. I believe that we are beholden to the people that offer us a taste. We must lean upon the people who give us the first introduction into an idea and then allow us to engage further. We are beholden to the early adopters, the fanboys and the mascots. We must believe in these people in order for them to give us their insights. These insights are non-negotiable fore us. We need them in order to survive. It allow us to not have to be on the bleeding edge all of the time.

We are beholden to the people who show us twitter, and how to use it in our own organizations. We are beholden to the people who show us how to screencast better. We ware beholden to those who show us how to remix (especially the ones who make us rethink our conceptions of what a remix can be… like creating a song-like discussion on Jamglue or do a remixed voiceover on a mathcast). We owe a lot to those who showed us how to not use bullet points in a slideshow. We are indebted to those who figured out backchannels before us.

We are beholden to these people because they have shown us what is possible. I want to contribute to this thinking. In fact, I want people to be beholden to me. I want them to look at me as a pioneer at something that will allow them to point a finger and say that I started them on the path toward better engagement or learning. While I don’t care why they point at me (even if it is to just laugh), for some reason I want that to be a part of something that can be an example of what to do next.

We are held together in a network and we are beholden to one another, but I think that we need to start working the tools and workflows back into their originators hands. We need to figure out just who the most important nodes of our network are and then work to figure out why they are so essential. We need to make ourselves that essential. We need to become those nodes. Those really hard questions about interdependence need to be had now, and we need to make sure that the answers we come up with do not take the relationship out of the picture. We need to be beholden to one another. We need to create the space for leaning on one another for what we need.

The real question is: Can I let myself be beholden? Today I would like to be beholden to @mwacker. I know that he will pick up where I leave off, but there is some part of me that still struggles because I can’t hand off the conversation and trust that there are other people who will take it up. I need to know that the people that I am going to put my faith in, will continue the work that I have started. But, I guess that is a part of being beholden. You don’t quite know what will come afterwards. You have to trust that the plans will be there. You have to trust that your engagement will be enough to draw out even the biggest skeptic. You have to engage in the process of coming together and learning from one another.

So,stated simply, we to figure out who the hubs are in our networks, become the hubs ourselves, and engage one another in the process of reliance and collaboration. We need to create networks where everyone is needed. We need to create spaces that actually have space for users. We need to have the facilitators spaces, and we need to have the back-channeling expert. We need to share far and wide about these spaces and who we need in those spaces to make them complete. We need to be beholden to others, but we need to pic who those “others” are.

Question 46 of 365: How do users become customers?

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I don’t usually use these terms, but I have continued to use them after reading a really interesting white paper on why Freemium models don’t work. I believe that we are all users of lots of products, services, schools, and ideas. We are much more selective as to what we become customers or consumers of. While this means that we are definitely more discerning when things cost us money, that is not the only kind of customer I am talking about becoming. I believe that if we invest ourselves into a product or service, we are a customer. If we offer something in exchange for the use of that service, whether that is our input, our content, or our network.

In that sense, I believe that I am a customer of Slideshare, even if I don’t pay for a premium service. I have invested enough into it that I upload my slide decks to it on a regular basis. I would be happy to pay for the service if they asked me to (and that is one of the major points of the Freemium paper, more companies should ask you to pay them for their service. i.e., more freeMIUM and less FREEmium.), but the simple fact that the service could be set up to accept my content as payment is something that I am ready to invest in. I would happily give over more rights to my content if I knew that the service could be free for a longer amount of time. I would be happy to let Slideshare use my slides for their own purposes (so long as they continue to attribute according to their TOS). They provide value to me. Why shouldn’t I provide value back.

The problem is that there isn’t enough consideration of bartering and payment in the groups, organizations and companies that we exist in. We do not see schools as a simple 1:1 relationship between teacher and student, or school and student. Because public schools are paid for by the public, there is very little individual incentive for a particular student to feel that they owe the teacher/school something and there is also very little to make the teacher feel beholden to an individual student for a paycheck. I’m not saying that all students should pay for their schooling because that sounds a lot like charter craziness or privatization. What I am talking about is making the transaction between student and teacher much more tangible for both. We need to actually talk through what the “business model” or learning equation is for our schools. What is it that the student is truly responsible for giving the school, and what is the school responsible for giving the student? This must be a two way street.

The only way that we will turn our kids from users of eduction to consumers of education is if they are fully invested in their own learning. If they see some direct benefit, they will pay for it, with effort and with creating portfolios of learning processes and products. When students no longer see schools as operating on a Freemium model (the majority of it is free, but you have to pay to be a part of the interesting clubs or sports or to get ahead with AP tests), they will start to take it seriously. Too often the method of “payment” is a grade. While this may work for a while (take the foursquare badges as an example), there must be a more permanent way to make the transaction of learning more concrete for everyone involved.

The world of business has been turned on its head so much by the whole idea of Freemium, the value of information, and massive user bases that it really has no way to think through just what kinds of transactions are taking place. Because Google can make money from advertising and offer useful products for nothing to the average user, we no longer see the transfer of funds for our time and our loyalty.

My contention is that we need to make the contract with companies and with individuals much clearer. We must state what is at stake for the consumer and the provider every time that we create an account. People must stop being so flabbergasted when Facebook changes their privacy settings because they don’t pay for the service in the first place. If the contract were easier; if we paid for the ideas up front, we wouldn’t have to worry about them “changing” the rules in the middle of the game. We should either give our content to Facebook in exchange for using the service, or we should pay for the service and be done with it.

That is why I propose that there are three different kinds of social contracts that we make with online services:

  1. Money for service
  2. Content for service
  3. Service for service

Money for service would be the easiest to understand and the one that perhaps the fewest people would immediately consider. It is the one that takes money out of your pocket and puts it directly into the pocket of the company that provides the service you are using. The second idea is that you should be able to provide your content to the provider as the fee for using the service. That would be like my Slideshare example above or the idea that Twitter is a content company and not a microblogging platform. The third type of payment is really much more akin to what Aardvark asks its customers to do. By asking its customers to pay their own way into the Q&A system by answering other’s questions, they are charging you an access fee that really only consists of you engaging in the process of providing service to others. Now, I do think that they could make it even more concrete by stating that until a user answers questions she cannot ask them. This is a tit for tat mentality that our online world is severely missing.

While I do not believe that this kind of concrete contracting is anything new, I do believe it is something that we need to consider desperately. If we are to survive economic and intellectual crisis, we need to be able to figure out just what we are paying for. And why.

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Question 45 of 365: What is the most important data?

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A bouncing ball captured with a stroboscopic f...
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This kind of question requires a lot of energy. Energy that I don’t have right now.

But it is a question that haunts me, mostly because I don’t know the answer.

I want to know what is most valuable, what I need to be paying attention to. I want to be able to see everything for what it really is.

My need for direction dictates a need for data. My learning requires aggregation of information. My passion necessitates statistical significance.

Is it too much to ask for precognition. Is it too far fetched to wish myself forward?

The data I want is the truth.

I want to make decisions. I want legitimate answers.

Is there data for that?

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Question 44 of 365: What parts of us are fragile, perpetual and renewable?

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We Are All We Need

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We would rather be: Skeptical, Wise, Steadfast, and Stable.
But we aren’t.
We Lack:
The vision to be stable.
The certainty to be steadfast.
The reflection to be wise.
The experience to be skeptical.
And, that isn’t all bad.
We are fragile because:
We let people in.
We wonder outloud.
We fail. A lot.
We are perpetual because:
We can’t stop what we set in motion.
Our reach knows no bounds.
We are never done creating.
We are renewable because:
We surprise ourselves with possibilities.
Each day starts without our permission.
We wade in.
We are all that we need.
Even if skepticism would serve us better.
Even if steadfast is convenient.
Even if wise is an illusion.
Even if stable never comes.
We are all that we need.

Question 43 of 365: What is the true nature of spam?

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Google Buzz has brought this back for me in a big way, but I have always been concerned with just how Spam has made its grand entrance into our collective consciousness. I have considered this topic as the noise and distraction in our lives, but spam is a much bigger problem because it works against your natural instinct to talk about something that matters. You are authentic to your content. Everything that comes into your inbox that doesn’t concern your authenticity is spam. This sometimes includes family that sends you jokes. This sometimes includes e-mails from Barrack Obama. This also sometimes includes solicitations for collaboration that you don’t have time to do.

While some people think that there is a distinction between being implored to engage with colleagues and being implored to buy Viagra. I don’t think that we can make that distinction. Workflow is king. Anything that makes the workflow longer or less valuable to us, is spam. It is the extra. The stuff that you just don’t want, but are forced to accept in some way. This is not news. Spam has been around for as long as there has been e-mail or twitter or blog comments.

What is new is Google Buzz, which introduces yet another way to interact with your network. While many have called it a privacy timebomb or a simple diversionary activity, it is not spam to me. Buzz, and more importantly the concepts behind it, are about making public the things that I want to introduce to the public and keeping private the things that should remain private. True, it sometimes confuses the too. But, it does a much better job of taking conversations that have no business simply existing in people’s inboxes and putting them out in the open for others to comment on. It pulls in a thread that would normally get lost on twitter. And most importantly, it allows our network to change.

Real people are not spam, and neither are conversations with people who you have never connected with before. The true nature of spam can only be found when you have decided what your true purpose is for engaging in the first place. My purpose for engaging in status messages, sharing of ideas, and creating feeds for everything I do is so that I can become better at what I do and to explore conversations that lead me to that goal. With that in mind, it is not a flaw to accept conversations from people who cannot be heard on twitter because the threads get lost or I am not following them. I follow a very small (and not all that fluid) group of people on twitter. Roughly the same 200 have been in my list for over 2 years. Buzz has shaken that up. By defaulting everything to be both public and searchable, Google has built a way for newbies and veterans to engage with one another.

Spam is evil. It sucks us away from where we need to concentrate our time. But, learning from one another and focusing that learning on new connections is not a Spam. It is the way in which we keep our network alive. It is the way that we expand and grow. While Buzz may not be the savior of our network. There will come a day when we all realize that without an influx of new blood into our network (and that means validating people who also choose not to use twitter because of how elitist it can be sometimes) we will become the spam for one another. We will become this spam because we will continue to have the same conversations and engage in the same types of collaboration repeatedly. Repetition is spam. ReTweeting is spam (if you don’t add anything). The massive amount of updates that get no reaction from the network is also spam.

So, we must do a better job of being our own spam filters. We must seek out new voices. We must seek to engage in threads and not just use the @ symbol as our unwieldy tool. We must become better at learning to collect and co-create our authenticity. We must re-invent our network, every day.

Here are some good buzzes to get you going:

  1. One
  2. Two
  3. Three
  4. Four
  5. Five
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KC TechNet Keynote Presentation and Live Stream

I am honored to the keynote for the KC TechNet conference this year, which happens to be in a very cool high school in Liberty, MO.

I am presenting on Authentic Learning and here is my deck (the links should be live):

KC Technet Keynote: The Case for Authentic Learning

View more presentations from bhwilkoff.

Here is the live feed for the presentation, but I can’t guarantee how good the sound or picture will be:
Live TV by Ustream

Question 42 of 365: How can you frame a question so that it actually gets answered?

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Participation matters. Above all else, if you expect people to come to your blog, read your feed, follow your buzz or engage in your web application; you must look for a level of participation that really doesn’t have a whole lot of modeling in the real world. The blogosphere had to institute a delurking day so that people would start commenting on blogs and letting us know that they existed. Even worse, it is almost inconceivable when starting up a new wiki that you will be able to break free from the 90-10 problem (10 percent of the people provide the content, 90 percent consume it).

So, as I have ventured into the realm of asking questions, one of my biggest concerns is that of participation. How is it that I can frame a question as to evoke the power of participation within my audience, and how can others do the same of their audiences?

It is my contention that there are three reasons that people listen to an answer and/or want to engage in a conversation about answering a question:

  1. Someone you know and trust directly asks you to answer the question. This is why evites are so popular and widely used. People you believe add value to your life are asking you the simple question of: Will you come to my party? If you feel any kind of lasting connection to this person, you will respond. It is the same way for bigger questions. If someone you love pulls you aside and asks you for advice on what their next career move should be (even if this aside is in an e-mail), you will most likely participate and answer that question. It is the personal connection that solidifies participation.
  2. An expert engages you with an intriguing and provocative solution. While you may not know this person directly, their status and experience in working with the question you have proposed propels you into engaging in the conversation. If Will Richardson comments on my blog or links to me on his blog, I am much more likely (as are other people who read this blog) to comment and engage in the conversation. His status as an expert in classroom blogging and learning networks means that people listen to what he has to say. They engage because he has engaged.
  3. Data is also compelling. The data about a solution can sometimes be much more engaging than even the solution itself. When people see that there is a great groundswell behind a single idea, they are much more likely to engage, even if it is only a few data points to suggest that the groundswell exists. It is the mere suggestion of data that gets people ready for a debate. They are just as likely to agree with a statistic as they are to dispute it. They fuel fires and vote in polls. This is one of the easiest ways to find engagement. There is very little that people have to do in order to weigh in when you have it boiled down to a good or bad type of equation. They just have to push buttons, and if that get’s them to engage further, I am all for it.

So, I guess that what I am trying to accomplish with these questions and answers has a lot to do with trying to find a way to incorporate all three into my frames. What I would really like, though, would be for all questions that get asked to be framed by those who ask them. I would really like to see a single video companion to every question that exists explaining who the asker is and why their question is important. This would allow people to start investing themselves in the question and get a personal relationship with the asker. Framing the question would also be a way to ask for experts to come in, almost a challenge for an expert to help answer the question too. As for the data, I think that everyone should be able to see the merits of the frame and rate what they thinks makes sense to pursue. In effect, each answer becomes a new data point that will cause others to engage.

My hope is that by framing the question correctly, participation will be the rule and not the exception.

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Question 41 of 365: When is vigilante infrastructure justified?

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Being a vigilante in any organization creates a reputation. You are known for being on the cutting edge but also for being a lone wolf. You are known for pushing the envelope but also for pushing an agenda. Mostly, you are known for doing things that no one else has the will to do, and that sword cuts both ways. If you are right, everyone will see you as a visionary, and if you are wrong, everyone will see you as a lunatic.

While it is possible to be a vigilante in any aspect, I propose that the most dangerous type of vigilante is the one that sets up infrastructure for other vigilantism. The type of vigilante I am referring to does screencasts of how to set up Google Apps for your Domain for every part of your organization without involving the IT department. The infrastructure vigilante will set up twitter accounts and hash tags for organizations that they do not control. They will request backchannels for every PD session. They will take notes collaboratively with everyone attending the meeting without asking the head of the meeting’s permission.

In short, an infrastructure vigilante is someone who doesn’t believe that she needs an invitation to collaborate, create, or add value. She is actively looking for ways in which her own workflow can be leveraged for the good of everyone she deals with on a daily basis. She is a walking hyperlink, subverting hierarchy everywhere she goes.

And yet, she isn’t able to work in groups the ways in which they are fashioned. She doesn’t work well with others when she can’t actually use her network and her collaborative tools. When she is bound to the piece of paper in front of her and the rigid agenda, she retreats. When her values of co-creation are not valued, she has a hard time relating to the process.

There are even some people who hate her kind of vigilantism. There are people who seek to get her in trouble because she won’t use the applications that “everyone else is using”. These people are looking for any reason to catch her in living too close to the edge. They bring up privacy concerns and IP infringement arguments. They talk about her being the one who makes everyone else feel like they have to catch up. They want her to know her place and stop trying to “help” everyone.

So, when is her vigilantism justified? Whenever there are people who want to help kids to learn and need a path to do so. Whenever coworkers want to learn from one another. Whenever a a group has an artificial hierarchy. Whenever teaching someone to fish actually causes them to teach others to fish. That is when infrastructure vigilantism is justified. That is when it makes sense to ignore the protocols and pursue a different course.

So, set up systems. Pursue workflow. Buzz. Tweet. Link.

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