Learning is Change

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

 , , , , , , , ,

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

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

So, why do it?

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

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

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

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

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 32 of 365: What are the assumptions we make in signing up?

 , , , ,

It has almost become a default position that we will be signing up for a new web application or interesting looking web service nearly every week . While, it may have been more often during the Web 2.0 heyday of 2008, it has settled into a steady stream of new project management tools, screencasting software, and promising projects that we are sent by email, twitter and facebook. What I would like to explore is what the assumptions are, every time we decide to give in to the pressure to “sign up now.”

The first assumption I make is that I will have to give up some piece of personal information. I will either have to divulge my e-mail address, my Google username (for open ID), or my real name. While I could obscure all of these things so that they have very little to do with me, there really isn’t much reason to do so, especially if I am trying to create a web presence of any kind. I assume that this information will not be used against me (shared with third parties, sold, spammed, etc.) I assume that this information will get me closer to the intended benefit that the service is claiming to provide.

I happen to believe in having a single identity across all web services, but at this moment, it really isn’t an assumption that I will be able to take my information from one place to another. It would be great if that were the case, but I really don’t think that data portability is high on the priority list for many companies.

Another assumption I do make is that any new web service will have some kind of “share” button. What I mean is that any new service that I sign up for must have the ability to share what is going on in there with my social networks. While this isn’t really a type of data portability, it is a head nod in that direction. I assume this much because of the following statement: “If you want your product in the main stream, you had better let me put your product into MY stream.” These kinds of things matter because we do not need another Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Services may have niches, but any serious contender should have a way of working with those big three.

My last assumption for anything that I sign up for is that media or mobile will be involved. I honestly cannot think of a single service that I have signed up for in the last year that hasn’t been a part of sharing media or talking to mobile devices in one way or another. If one of those two requirements are not satisfied, I I can pretty much guarantee that my e-mail address will never make it to the Sign Up page. Visual and mobile representation are so important to the ways in which that I function, that they have become assumptions for what I am willing to put effort into.

So, why do these assumptions matter? Well, if I am assuming these things, I am setting myself up for a stagnation. Because no one has surprised me with an original take on these three assumptions as to challenge them at their core, I am free to keep blogging and tweeting away, oblivious. The fact that these assumptions exist for me is both good and bad. It means that we are starting to depend upon the online services to be mostly uniform, but it also means that I may miss something revolutionary because it doesn’t fit these assumptions.

At the end of the day, perhaps the old truism about assumptions still holds for the Web 2.0 world.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 31 of 365: How can we be "present" in spite of our digital presence? #educon

 , , , , ,
educon-poetry
Image by kjarrett via Flickr

[Video to come]

I found myself more present at Educon than I have been in months. I sat and talked to people and looked them in the eye and felt an underlying purpose for the connections I was making. I felt this last year, but I had all of this disjointed connectedness (twitter hashtag following, e-mail checking, blog posting, etc.) that distracted me from simply being held in a given time and space and letting that be enough. This year, I was able to sit with the people that I love and listen and think and wait for something to occur the I couldn’t predict at the outset of the day.

Perhaps I was just too egotistical to believe there was anything more I could learn from a face to face community that is random than the network of people that I had hand picked to follow on twitter. I am now engaged in the act of belief.

I believe more passionately and irrationally in the power of seeing someone, truly seeing them for all of the hope they have and all of the baggage that they carry. I have faith in the fact that something fantastic will occur if I do not allow my distractions to get in the way of my real purpose for having the conversation in the first place.

I find myself asking if this is something I can replicate away from these people and this place. Can I really wrap myself in the glow of intense thought, passionate observation, and authentic speech?

Yes.

I heard it last night from Chris Lehmann. Someone that he trusts once told him to never stop talking. Whatever he did, never stop thinking through the things he knows to be true and being a community of people who want to talk about those things and make them materialize. Another mentor of mine once said that “talking is the act of deciding your future.” Once you have said it, it comes into being.

So, to be present is to be talking. Not just with your mouth, but with your ears and your intention. Talking requires the will to be with someone and show them that you want to help them create the future.

And if you aren’t saying anything, then I have no use for you. If you aren’t someone who is really willing to “talk with me,” let me know that and I will find someone who will. I will be present in talking with anyone. There is something beautiful and perfect about talking with someone who will really talk back and push you and challenge you to create the future with them. I am here to do this, and I will never leave.

The digital connectedness should lead us to these moments. If we never have them because our technology gets in the way, then we are further away from one another and not closer together. If the technology keeps us from this kind of “talking”, it is a falsehood that I can’t afford. If I am truly searching for the truth of these questions, we need to talk more and tweet less.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 30 of 365: What is my innovation in education and why does it matter? (Educon 2.2 Session)

 , , , , , , , ,
I dig down deep in the ground, finding a root of a living tree and pull at it like rope until I can hold it in my hand and see what it is that is helping the tree to grow. And then I do the same with another root, pulling and pulling until I can feel the rough texture and earthy smell. Then I tie the two roots together, tight and fast. I replant the two roots and watch as the trees start to intermingle, germinating new fruit, different then when they were alone.

They are better for having made the connection. They are better for having the ability required to expand into one another’s space, and better for being allowed time to find a single wish to inch up toward the sky. The trees soon are so intertwined that no one can tell the difference between them and their fruit is so delicious that people who eat it can hardly believe that they ever knew a world without. I eat the fruit too, but I also gather as much of it as I can and I share it with others. I gladly cut it up and serve it with fruit from other trees. I make whole meals with this fruit or allow everyone to simply help themselves to pick it right off the tree. And then I move on to another set of trees, where I must dig and pull and tie and watch, in the hopes of creating something new. I must find these roots, the essence of these towering wonders and join them together. It is my innovation, but perhaps not singularly mine.


While I know that this may not be illuminating for some, it is really the only way that I can express just how deeply important innovation is to me. I do feel as though there is something inherently life-giving about creating something new with your two hands. My innovation is in creating space. It is in creating the space and time to feel safe, learn and grow. It is in creating the space to be nourished by others.

My innovation is in looking for other innovators that mean something to me and pulling them together. I am not a universal connector, an individual who collects contacts or has the best networking abilities. But, I do know what it means to feel a part of something bigger than myself in Education. And that is what I try to create every day. I try to create something bigger, less flawed, and more intrinsically valuable than myself.
Which is why I am asking this question in the first place.  I am most interested in imagining just what is possible. I do not want to think in terms of only the stories we can recite by memory. The stories of a single teacher figuring out that using a google document to allow collaborative note-taking to occur is going to lead to better learning for the kids inside the classroom and the one that stayed home sick. The stories of the teacher who has their kids present and connect in a voicethread. These stores are what is possible and even probable in a school where people have access and inclination to change their practice. These are past stories of innovation. They are evidence of things seen.

I would like to imagine the hardest problems that we can possibly come up with in education and find ways to solve them. That is why I think that it is important to reach for what matters as well. It isn’t enough to share the story of how you can use technology for authentic learning in your district. It isn’t enough to be proud of the work that you are doing right now (although you absolutely should be proud of what you do). You must at all costs justify why it is that your innovation is worth continual pursuit.

And so, I would like to propose two definitions. The first is that innovation is the power for an idea to cause change within an individual or system. The second is to identify what matters as the lasting effect on an individual or system to be successful (I mean that in all of the weighty goodness of the word, from monetarily, to fulfillment, to connectedness).

Within these definitions, creating the types of spaces that I do is innovation because I am causing those who inhabit them to change the ways in which they work with one another. I am causing them to look one another in the eye and focus upon a single idea for long enough to think it through. And I believe that it matters because without a ripe environment within which to grow, all of us just become weeds. Without the rich soil and cross-pollination, entire populations of great ideas wither and die.

So, what really is the challenge of this question?

I believe that the true challenge is in the fact that not all ideas are innovative and not all ideas matter. Trying to figure out which ones are both is where I want to spend the majority of my time. In order to help, I have created two things.

Because my innovation is in creating spaces, I have created a space that is specifically for answering questions. While it may not be a perfect space yet, it is one that allows you to learn from one another within and one that believes in the power of collaboration to achieve a common goal. The space is called SpeedGeek Learning, and the link to this question is at http://speedgeeklearning.com/educon22.

The second thing I have created is an entrance into this question, one that I did not give to those who did a “Prenote” video. This scale allows you to place your own innovation somewhere in the playing field in order to see what it is that you truly value and what it is that you believe is really innovative. While we may all differ on where we would put a certain innovation, I feel as though it will lower the level of entry because anyone’s work is on the chart at some point, no matter how far they reach up into the top right quadrant.

With this space and entrance, I would like to take this conversation to its logical end. I see that being the act of sharing the stories about valuable innovations going on in schools and organizations everywhere so that we can make them matter to as many people as possible. If we can pinpoint what it is that we need to be focused on when we look toward the future, then we will have answered more than this question. We will have found a truth worth holding on to. We will have found a story worthy of telling.

Question 29 of 365: Why is location pretending to be content?

 , , , , ,

Location is the new content.

Or, so would nearly every viral iPhone and web app I have seen recently have you believe. From becoming mayor of Café Macchiato, to allowing everyone to know where you are in Google Latitude, or even just checking in at any of the different locations found on Gowalla; Location has become so important to the fabric of the mobile web that it has found a way to become content. It has started showing up in status messages and blog posts. It has created its own platforms for sharing. Location has become so content heavy that pictures and live streaming of your location is easy for anyone who cares to share the information. It has become an automatic part of every day life for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users.

So, why do I say “pretending” if so many people find this information engaging enough to want to “check in” multiple times an hour as they bar hop? I believe that location in and of itself is useful, even playful, but it is not a substitute for discussion, creation or collaboration. Location is now being used as a means to simultaneously advertise to you and through your own posts about places you go, advertise through you. Every time you check in at a Starbucks, you are advertising that you are there, and every time that you are near a Starbucks, you can become a target for an online coupon. This cycle doesn’t exactly sound like you are able to ask the right questions.

On Twitter, you are able to ping specific people about what is going on and where they are, but more importantly, you are able to contextualize the content in any way at all. You can be devoid of location and still have something to say. While your location matters, it isn’t who you are or what value you have. In a blog post, you can make sweeping accusations or link to an enormous amount of information and do high-minded research (or, low-brow comedy). The ability to create your own set of rules for your own content is stunted when everything becomes about where you happen to be standing when you check in.

I get why location is so attractive. It is so easy to produce a feed from. It is easy to follow someone (virtually) and then somewhat voyeuristically, meet up with them. The “content” that comes from location-based services is going to become a massive amount of our daily diet of information. Yet, how is that going to change the way that we fundamentally ask questions or interact with other human beings. Knowing that you exist somewhere in a given time and space may make me feel a bit more connected, especially if I have existed in that exact time and space previously. However, if that is the only connection I am making, if there is no probing deeper, the way you might with a blog post or collaborating in an EtherPad, then I’m not sure that it qualifies at content worthy of our time.

That is not to say that Location can’t be a part of the equation. And, perhaps I give blogs a little too much credit for being about thinking and belief, but I just don’t want to see our rich connected world become a series of tweets about having a great sandwich in a local restaurant. If that is where we are headed, everyone who told us we were crazy to join up in the first place will have been right.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 28 of 365: Are we responsible for the Web 2.0 graveyard?

 , , , , , , ,

As I look around the web, I see the shells of formerly great web services. I see the Flowgrams that could have been. I see the Google Notebooks that wallow in disuse. I see the missing Jumpcuts that provided me with so much hope and pleasure. I have spoken about these web applications vanishing from the face of Web 2.0, but I kind of always blamed the companies themselves for going out of business. I mean, it is their fault that they gave away their products and then had no way of making money, right?

I am coming to the conclusion more and more that we share a lot of the blame for Free being the standard pricing for all of the things that we want on the web. I think that the culture of “free music” and “ad-supported” services have lead us to believe that any new service that comes along should offer a huge chunk of their functionality for free, especially to schools and non-profits. This is what we have been demanding by presenting on topics like “Free Web 2.0 sites to engage your students” and “How to leverage free social networks for marketing and engagement.”

Other people have written much better about what the price of “Free” really is, but I think that it is time we stop looking to others for what we have created. We have created an unsustainable model of ownership. By craving the products that make our life easier but asking them to be free is making sure that we will never be able to hold on to them for very long. We will be forced to make the choice, either pony up and start providing funding for the resources that we need or let the web become a wasteland of good intentioned companies.

(To be sure, there are many web services that I would never pay for and that should not have been funded as a company, but there are things that I would pay for and I just wish someone would ask me to.)

Advertising can’t be the wave of the future, even as much as those who are in charge of Augmented Reality are pushing for it. There really has to be a point at which that we take the helm and start owning access again. I would feel better about cloud computing, cloud storage, and cloud applications if I could pay a monthly fee or buy the product up front.

We are our own worst enemy in the race to find the next “big thing”. When we spread the word virally about a new service, we shouldn’t be putting in the “but it costs” as a detrimental part of our pitch to others. We really should be extolling the virtues of a good business model. We should be saying: “Come check this out. It is exactly what I need, and guess what? It costs money! I actually can pay for access to it so I know it won’t be going anywhere soon. Come and pay money with me so that we can collaborate together and not lose this service.”

Essentially, if everything is free, then everything is equally expendable. It really doesn’t have “value” if we won’t pay for it in some way or another.

Question 27 of 365: What happens if we are wrong?

 , , , , , , , , ,

We seek truth. As much as we seek to be right, we must seek truth. If we are unable to see when we are wrong, then there is very little chance that we will ever be able to see a truth when it presents itself.

Being right is one thing I tend to think I am a lot. It isn’t that I am overly arrogant about being right, it just happens that I set myself up to be right. I make little tests for myself, hypothesize about what is going to happen and then when it does, I pat myself on the back. I do this constantly in the online school that I helped to create. When students are having a problem, I look at what they have written about it. It is usually something like “I can’t see this video” or “my login doesn’t work”. I sit for a moment and come up with what I think is the root cause. After a very simple investigation of about three clicks of the mouse, I am very often proved right. I am proved right because the stakes aren’t very high. I am proved right because I have experienced many of these issues and figured out the common denominators. In effect, I have all of the data and I can act on it.

But, why is it that I am equally certain about things like Authentic Learning (learning with a real purpose and for a real audience) and using a collaborative and social networks to get things done. Why is that I believe I am right when I say that being connected to knowledge is much better than memorizing it. I have a small amount of data to support this. I have seen it work in my own experience and I have read the work of people who agree with me on this topic. Yet, there are an equal number of people who are convinced that using technology instead of your memory is detrimental to the learning process. There are entire cadres of people who are researching and working so that the curriculum is well-defined and does not include my passion for collaboration and co-authorship. Do they have more data? Have they gone through this more times than I have and so they can make better predictions about what will happen to students?

I don’t know any way other than to write and think what I believe to be true, but there is always this gnawing suspicion in the back of my head that I could be wrong. Perhaps open source isn’t as good as proprietary software. Perhaps hybrid courses will really destroy our system of learning. Perhaps all companies do need to have a formal business plan. Perhaps we should keep following through on a mass-production way of life.

If I (or more importantly, we) are wrong about our hypotheses for all of this then we are clearly going to be leading a whole lot of people down a rabbit hole after us. We may be looking at the data completely wrong, or it is entirely possible that we don’t have the right data. Perhaps all of the things that people will create within this hyper-collaborative vein will lead to the downfall of society as we know it.

While that sounds pretty dire, it is something that keeps me trying to justify every move that I make. It keeps me pivoting at every crossroads I come to, reassessing my direction with all of the available data. Because if I am wrong, especially about the big stuff, I’m not sure how I would live with the consequences of  not preparing my kids, my students, my employees, or my society for what they face today and will continue to face unless they pick up what I have not been able to give them as a result of my hair-brained hypotheses.

I’m just glad no one has called me on it yet.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 26 of 365: Is treading water dangerous?

 , , , , , , , , , , ,
Students of the Marine Combat Instructor Water...
Image via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 25 of 365: Where do privacy and regret collide?

 , , , , , , , , ,

Facebook has recently changed their privacy settings and it has hit a huge nerve with nearly everyone that uses the ubiquitous social network. It has been reported in mainstream media, which has lead to people talking about it even away from their computers. Right now, the best discussion of internet privacy in the last 5 years is going on and the context is pretty lame. We are trying to decide whether or not to allow status messages to be read by everyone or to allow pictures to be posted for the world to see. The real debate is all about how a “company” can switch a default setting to be more public without the users permission. It is a debate about trust… which is good, but it is also kind a whiney way of thinking through just what privacy means in a social network (i.e., They did this to “us.” Can you believe it? I am just shocked.).

The debate I would like to be having is where personal regret comes into the equation. While some people put privacy and public safety at odds, I would set up privacy and regret as opposing forces in an online world. I believe that regret and privacy collide twice as the level of privacy continues to rise. The first collision is when the privacy is so low that people know everything about you and can manipulate those items at their will. This is the situation where Identity Theft is ripe. It is the situation where people are fired over their posts. It is also the situation that leads to the terrifying realization that a lifestream (chronicling every events via video, pictures, audio and text) is just another way of not engaging fully with the people directly in front of you. (The time it takes to comment on what is going on is time away from what is actually going on.) While this collision of privacy and regret is often discussed, it is not the only one that occurs.

The second collision of privacy and regret is when privacy settings are the highest. In this collision, the regret is truly for opportunities lost. When our privacy settings are too high (meaning that we don’t put out anything online or create a digital footprint at all), there is no way for a potential employer to contact us on LinkedIn. When our privacy level is too high, people with a genuine need to get in touch with us cannot. When we keep our digital pictures on our hard drives, our daily happenings in our memories, and our thoughts inside our heads, the legacy that we leave is anything but rich. This collision does not get attention on news channels, and it is not one that will ever cause an uproar. This is mostly due to the fact that there is nothing to measure. You can’t measure the thousands of dollars you lose because you didn’t get a new job offer. You can’t measure the lack of great ideas you have because you do not exist in a community. You also can’t measure the friends you don’t make because of your stunted social network. Yet, we do know that these opportunities exist for those who share. We know because it happens to me on a weekly basis. People I don’t know e-mail me and ask me to come speak, help with a new project or simply to help me flesh out one of my ideas. These are opportunities I can measure because I do have my privacy settings much lower. I have positioned myself directly between the two collisions.

Yet, the second collision is where the real debate should be. We should be trying to figure out what information makes sense to put out to the world to be indexed by Google or have ads placed next to it on Facebook. We should see the opportunities of opening up our world to what other people might remix or build upon. This is the way in which we will preserve true competition. If others are using the immense amount of data to help their projects and ideas get off of the ground and you aren’t, you have almost no chance of keeping up. If your privacy settings are so high that they limit your ability to work with others then you are the one that loses out in the end.

While I am absolutely terrible at creating diagrams, here is one that I think represents these two collisions quite well. The regret curve is parabola and your privacy settings are a straight ascending line. The two connect at the collision points (although this diagram does describe a situation that could be worse than the initial collision point, which is to have no privacy at all and your level of regret is just as high as if you had a really high privacy setting). I hope this all makes sense:

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Question 24 of 365: When should you fire your community?

 , , , , , , , ,

Cultivating a rich and supportive community is one of the hardest and most worthwhile things you can do with your online presence. It is something that usually requires endlessly making contacts and leaving comments. It requires a consistent voice and a steadfast level of interaction. Most of all, a good community requires time. They are not made overnight and anyone who believes that they have found a shortcut to a great community is taking the term “friend” way too seriously.

So, if all of these things are true, why in the world would anyone want to fire the community that they have cultivated and start fresh with a different set of people? Many are afraid of starting over, afraid of making connections with a whole new set of people. This is one of the reasons why people stay in jobs they don’t like or frequent bars that no longer serve a social purpose. We are creatures of habit. And because of this, we are members of habitual communities.

Habitual communities are like legacy software. It is the same thing that we have done for so long that we can’t remember life without it, and it did seem to get us to the right answers and solutions when we picked it originally. We use legacy software because it is easier than making an enormous change, even though it may fit our needs better or revolutionize our learning and working processes. We stay in our community because it has, at one point or another, been “there for us.” It has gotten us through some hard times and it has kept us going on the path that we set out on.

Yet, I would like to make the case that we should be willing to fire our communities every once in a while. We should look at those people providing comments and theories in topics we care about. We should look at them and see if they are really the ones that will guide us into our future. We should look at them and see if they are holding us back.

This is exactly why I am not sure finding old friends on Facebook is a good idea. While it may be fantastic to make contact with people from your past, you are reconstituting a community that you fired at one point or another. You are surrounding yourself with people who may no longer yield any new benefit for where you are headed. They are people that made sense for a given time and space. Trying to recreate that time and space is counterproductive for the one you exist in now.

However, I do not take this process lightly. Firing my community is not something I would be so willing to do without first knowing that there is another community that might take me in. I know that I need the social interaction of other community members on a daily basis to become a better person (both online and in real life). I need them in order to make better decisions and have innovative ideas. But, the people that I follow right now may not hold the keys to where I am headed. They may not continue to nourish all that I can be.

But, where will the new community come from? Who are those people who will, once again, be willing to put in the time and effort with me to create a community together. Perhaps I need to construct a personal ad for my community (in the least creepy way possible), and perhaps I need to craft a Dear John letter to my current community.

Personal Ad for my new community: I am seeking a community of people who are interested in building new things no matter what sector of the world they may exist in. I am interested in open source, lean startups, educational technology, and asking lots and lots of questions. I am looking for people who are interested in communicating about ideas that will change the world. If you are looking for a person who never gets tired of learning something new or creating an interesting workflow out of many diverse ideas and tools, pleas contact me about your community. Thank you.

Dear John letter for my current community: I am so sorry, but things just aren’t working out. I thought that I was interested in learning about the newest and best podcasting, blogging and presentation tools for the classroom, but I no longer have much interest in tagging those for later reference. I now find that many of your links and recommended readings are somewhat recursive and never really seem to provide the case study analysis that would move the conversation along. If you are a person in my current community who is also interested in building new technologies, learning platforms and ideas; I think there may be a place for you in my new community. However, if you are still only interested in having conversations about how to use Google Docs in the classroom, I think it may be a good time to part ways. While I still want to know that people are putting the technology to practice in high schools around the country. I am just not satisfied with the stories of teachers learning about Delicious or RSS for the first time. My community can’t be about wondering what the next big thing will be. It must be centered around actually building the next big thing.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]