Learning is Change

Question 21 of 365: What is "wrong" with Widgets and App Stores?

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There is a huge insurgence of applications that do a single thing and do it extremely well. They can be served up as a single embeddable object, a facebook app, or simply a standalone piece of software on the iPhone. Every one of them is attempting to find a niche of their own, attempting to carve out that special market that would allow them to be a necessity. And, according to the numbers of Apps downloaded or Mafia Wars games played, they are succeeding in exactly that.

The problem that I see, however, with this model of creation is that no one is trying to change the world anymore. It used to be that any new piece of software was trying to revolutionize the way in which we think about the technologies we use. Operating systems were designed to constantly introduce new ways of interacting with content and interfacing with information. Applications like word processors (and later blogs) helped to create an entire class of highly educated and highly published people. Video cameras revolutionized our ability to capture events and people. Recordable (and more importantly portable) music defines a society more fully than perhaps even its lawmakers might.

These technologies and applications shifted our understanding of what was possible. A widget cannot do this. An app generated for a single device cannot either. Now, some people might argue that live streaming from a cell phone via the Ustream.tv app is revolutionary in its own way. Or, that the Facebook connect widget is single-handedly simplifying our ability to login across the web, but these things are incremental, and some would say, inevitable steps forward.

That is why I have no problem with Google trying to digitize the world’s content or buying up power grids or competing with Microsoft directly for a collaborative office suite. They are literally trying to change the world with their products and policies. While they may make a Google Talk Gadget or a Google Maps Widget, their central goal is always in changing the ways in which we find information.

It really isn’t that Widgets or Apps aren’t useful. They really are quite good at helping us figure out which song is playing or to upload files to our cloud-based service. It is much more that they just can’t muster enough to reach for anything greater than that. When everything does one thing well, it may make for a very engaging overall experience, but those little innovations lack a greater purpose. That is why they are so expendable. That is why people can give up so easily any of the tools in the Web 2.0 graveyard.

So, what I would like to see from more Widget makers and App store developers is a reason why they believe that their idea will affect all others that come after them. I want products who are not limited by what is currently in development. I would like to see applications that do not deny that they have the ability to shift entire industries, that can cause teachers to change their methods, or that can lead people to think in new ways. I would hate to lose that, just because we have a way of monitizing the smallest increments of content now. I would hate to think that the era of “thinking big” is over just because everything that we use now is so small.

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Using a Google Talk Gadget for your Domain

I have found that I am increasingly relying on Google Talk to get things done quickly. It is like I have been thrust right back into my days with AIM (8th grade was a big year for me in that regard). I just wanted a way to only have Google Talk as an application for Google Apps. Google has an application for Windows, but I am using a single site browser in order to do it on a Mac.

Step 1: Download Fluid

Step 2: Create an application with the following URL (making sure to replace YOURDOMAIN with your domain): http://hostedtalkgadget.google.com/a/YOURDOMAIN/talkgadget/client

Viola! You have an Google Talk Application that connects specifically to your domain.

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Question 20 of 365: What should we relentlessly pursue?

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I have made the case for pursuing lots of things: happiness, authenticity, purpose, truth, scalability, integration, and I’ve probably contradicted myself a number of times in the process. However, the more that I have explored the reasons why I continue to remix, post and share; I believe that it is all in the pursuit of a single thing. It is the one thing that I believe every school, business, or individual should be striving for in a connected society.

We should all be relentlessly pursuing an audience.

We should pursue an audience of people who actually want to take our courses, who want to buy our products, who want to hear what we have to say. It is the audience that makes things possible for us to be elected, to be recommended for jobs, or to be supported in any way. The audience is the singular reason why hubris doesn’t work online, why the future of social networking can’t be predicted and why an individual voice matters more now than ever.

Too often we are pursuing our own vision of what should be, rather than testing out those ideas amongst an audience. We may garner a large group of listeners, but an engaged audience is something to cherish and hold on to. Cultivating even a few people who may want to help build what you have in mind is no small task, and yet we take it for granted that simply building it will cause people come. That cliche must be retired.

Building it is not enough, especially if you have built something that no one wants. All of the good will and hard work in the world will not help your product to garner the support it seeks if you are not pursuing an audience. Great User Interface, fantastic features, and plenty of research into competitors will simply lead to something shiny that you can hold up as your own. The audience, however, doesn’t care about that. If your audience could live without your product, none of that matters.

I have been looking at a lot of the Audience/Customer Development culture that Eric Ries and Steve Blank have pushed out. Essentially, I have boiled down this pursuit of audience to answering the following question:

How would you feel if you could no longer use [insert your school, business, or individual resources here]?

If your audience could answer that question with anything but something like “I would feel like a part of me is missing”, then I don’t see your venture really working out in the long run. I would like to say that most of our schools garner this reaction, but they don’t. Yet, I know a lot of folks who would say that about Facebook or Twitter. I know a lot of folks who could even say that about their iPhones. Yet, the things that we say that we value in our society do not achieve this level of audience because these social constructs do not pursue an audience in the way that Facebook, Twitter or Apple does.

Learning from your audience and figuring out why they could live without your service is something that we should be doing daily. Now, I am not advocating that we simply give in to our audience and bow to any whim that they may have. We should not try to pursue our audience simply by what they say that they want more or less of. We should pursue audience as a way of testing out whether or not our theories are working to reach the very people we say are important. While people may not love what email does for/to them, they would feel empty (or perhaps a little less emotional than that) if it were gone. They need it in order to function in the world, in order to communicate.

I doubt that many people would feel empty if they didn’t have the school (read: academic) experience that they could have at the average high school today. I doubt that many people would feel empty if my blog ended its run. And, I doubt that many people would feel empty if a single mall closed down. This lack of emptiness (could we call that fullness) is a function of our failure to pursue our audience. I believe in this pursuit, but I am only now finding out just how important it is.

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Question 19 of 365: Is Social Media trying to turn your life into a movie?

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I hope this question is not too flippant or ridiculous as to simply be cast to the side because I think it may be an important one. As I was working my way through this metaphor, I came to the conclusion that social media is constructing the soundtrack, the voice over, and the script to your life.

The soundtrack is being constructed by last.fm and Pandora. It is taking the mood you are in, your searches and your interests and providing you with an appropriate tone and atmosphere. These services are social to the point that everyone you know is building a collective song list, a universal memory of who listened to what and whether we liked it or not. The soundtrack to our lives is no longer a figure of speech. It is a reality for those of us who share music videos on facebook or upload photos of concerts. We have theme music for ideas and we raise and lower the tempo of our discourse depending on what music is pumping through our  ever-present earbuds.

The voiceover is a tried and true method of advancing the plot, establishing an alibi or just giving some added voice to a flat character. Twitter has done this for our lives. It has become the voiceover actor that makes small reflections about daily events, trying to put everything together as if it were a giant puzzle. We tweet about the ways that certain events make us feel or something that we want to remember. It is all just a way to create a sense that there is some greater purpose to the chicken sandwich we ate or the monotonous meetings on a topic we couldn’t care less about. It provides the voice that we wish were just layered on top of the event and read by someone like Morgan Freeman.

The script is laid out quite easily by our Google Calendars that are shared with family and friends. It is made by our blog posts and Google Docs that spread the word of what we are up to. It is crafted by our project plans and wikis that propose new and better ideas of what should be. It is wrapped up in the ebb and flow of 24 hour news that gets more worthwhile commentary in Disqus posts than on television. It is the retweeting and revising of our own words as they seem important to do so, reframing knowledge for our own purposes, thus creating the lines that we want to say.

We even act out what we are supposed to say. We put together the presentations and share them on Docstoc and Slideshare. The backchannel is a hum of voiceover artists all vying for their turn to speak. The soundtrack is gently suggesting what would go along with this occasion. The relationships we make on social networks are just as fleeting as those felt in a movie; they only seem real while they are on screen. Afterwards, they simply fade into the background.

Now, it is not to say that any of this is bad. It just is a fact of the way I live my life now. I am a part of the Ben Wilkoff movie, and as it seems that the movie isn’t a snoozefest or anything, I think I’ll stick around to see what happens next.

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Question 18 of 365: Why is there such intense competition to manage your projects?

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It seems like every single day I run across another new way to do project management or collaboration with a team. It seems as though everyone really wants me to be on time or communicate effectively. They really are interested in saving me time and having me use the networks I already know and love. They want to track my issues (of which, there are many) and provide all of my stakeholders with updates on my progress. They want to prioritize my life, achieve milestones and generally just get things done. They can do it in many flavors of open source, or many “enterprise” solutions. And they just keep coming on in droves.

And the only reason I can figure out why more and more companies seem to really believe that they have project management figured out better than anyone else, is that there seems to be so little satisfaction with how projects are being managed in the mainstream. In fact, it seems that these companies and services keep cropping up simply because so many people dislike the ways meetings are run, projects are tracked, or teams are managed. We have a corporate culture that continually makes fun of inept managers and people without the ability to get things done, while still keeping the structures in place that allow it to happen.

So, when someone comes up with a way of doing things differently, there really isn’t a whole lot of reason not to try. After all, anything would be better than the status quo. Whether this is in poorly run department meetings at a high school or inefficient development collaboration in a big software firm, people are simply desperate for something different. And everyone sees the potential of this market. If any single product could inspire change enough to allow different relationships to form between coworkers or change the way we go through the process of checking things off of a list, then it would truly shift the ways that we think about work.

Project management, to a large extent,  is really a code word for “fixing the people on my team with technology”. It is a means to try and correct bad habits, allow for the communication that should be an expectation and allow the progress that most people just feel to be visible. I’m not saying that this isn’t noble work. In fact, I am using a number of productivity and project management tools right now (Pivotal tracker, Google Apps, Google Voice), but I believe that the problem that all of these Project management tools are trying to solve is a human one. They are all trying to make “any team” into the perfect team and “any project” into the perfect one.

I believe that there are only some teams that are truly great and only some projects worth doing. While there may be a lot of money to be made in trying to make the “average” projects into something more than that, there isn’t enough money in the world that would make me want to work on them. I want to be working with people who are truly inspired and on ideas that are filled with purpose. I don’t want to use any of these tools because of something that the people in my life lack. If I use these tools, I want my team to only be lacking time. Because sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to write the best kinds of e-mails, blog posts, tweets, Gantt charts, reports, or user stories.

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Question 17 of 365: Which questions can't Google answer?

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Google wants to chronicle all of the known information in the world. In fact, it is one of their stated goals that they are always going to look and archive more information (look at number 7). It makes sense for them to continue on a relentless pace to tag and index all of the world’s knowledge. This will help people to find what they are really looking for. And yet, there are definitely times when I don’t find what I am looking for. There are times, in fact, that no search engine is of use. I type in quoted terms, questions, and specific keywords. I use Boolean operators, look into different filetypes, and even scan my social networks and RSS feeds for answers. Eventually, I realize that if the answer doesn’t exist in any kind of way that I am looking for, I may as well create it. Which is much of what happens when I blog or podcast. I am searching for an answer that doesn’t yet exist.

And those are the kinds of questions that Google can’t answer. The ones that haven’t been indexed yet. The ones that are so personal and idiosyncratic that Google’s ability to find information is hampered by the fact that it is a company collecting knowledge and not a person who is reacting directly to my needs.

For all of the attempts that Google has made to get to know me in recent days (Google Profiles, Google Web History, Google bookmarks, etc.), when I go and type in search terms, it starts from scratch. It assumes that I know nothing about the topic at hand, and it points me to the most obvious places to start looking for information. Another assumption it is making is that I am simply a consumer of information. It provides a simple method for gaining access to that information, but it certainly does not allow me to present an alternative idea. Lastly, Google (or any search engine, really) will not let you test out a hypothesis. While it may prove or disprove a fact, it is incapable of providing feedback on an idea that you have about anything from lobster ravioli to the next version of your new software package.

The questions that google can’t answer are ones that place you at the center of creating an answer, ones that require the intimate knowledge of many diverse points of information, and ones for which you already have an answer and you are trying to garner feedback enough to see if you are right.

In the end, Google is not a collaborative platform (for as much as SideWiki, SearchWiki and many SEO firms would have you believe otherwise), nor is it a place that can take all of your needs into account and point you to a real resolution. Nor is it a place for vindication. It may answer nearly all of your questions, but the ones that are the most important. The ones that you really need an answer for, Google falls flat. So, perhaps we need a different platform for those kinds of questions. Perhaps we need something more human, more collaborative, and more feedback-oriented. I think creating that platform would be a lot of fun.

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Question 16 of 365: Can we Open Source our way out of a tragedy?

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As I continue to hear more and more stories from Haiti in the aftermath of the worst earthquake in over two centuries, I realize that more people will inevitably die. Not from the earthquake itself, but from the staggering loss of infrastructure and the inability to acquire the basic necessities of life. This particular problem is one that is the most incomprehensible for me. The logic goes, “If I have access to the essentials, why is it so difficult for others to have that same access.” I can literally see the cups I could drink fresh water out of and the roof directly over my head right now. How is it these things are not available to all? (Clearly, this line of thinking is callous, but I believe that it is the primary reason that more isn’t done by those who have for those who do not.)

So, as I am thinking about this unspeakable tragedy, I keep on wondering what would happen to the people of Haiti if they could “make” their essentials out of the rubble, if they could literally turn waste into water. Would the mass of people who are not donating to non-profits like the one a colleague of mine set up, think twice about helping if they knew that the technologies existed for sustainable relief. I guess the second part of the question is, “Would America be more likely to give a handout,if  it knew that the handout would beget much more than a single meal, but rather a change in situation?”

While this line of thinking seems perhaps almost ludicrous, I think that the only way to build infrastructure quickly is to re-imagine what infrastructure can look like after a tragedy.

So, what if we took the Open Source Hardware projects to Haiti and had them start developing their own ready to use flashlights or DC Electric Motors out of the plastic waste left behind.

Or, if we scaled the Open Source water purification set to as many folks as possible. While you can make these systems using heavy production, the majority of the systems made are made of ceramic pottery that can be manufactured locally quite easily, even after a tragedy like the Earthquake.

Open Source housing or the SHRIMP project could be a reality for many of those who are without a home. After all, providing a way to make the same concrete structures that fell over in the first place, doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

While some people may be offended by the notion that the Open Source movement could solve the problems of natural disasters, and they may point to things like the One Laptop Per Child projects as examples of Open Source forcing other cultures to take part in a Western technologies and thinking. I believe that if Open Source is done correctly, all of the feedback from those who are requesting aid could change those very projects to fit the needs of the people left with nothing.

While Open Source doesn’t have all of the answers, neither does a few ready-to-eat meals that get on the ground 2 days too late.

Question 15 of 365: How do we form our Digital Habits?

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I’m sure that many of our digital habits would qualify as addictions. Whether that is tweeting, texting, googling, emailing, or simply youtubing; each of us has developed a series of habits related to digital content. We are drawn to do these things on a daily basis without being asked to do so. For many, the habits are probably more productive than those of smoking, drinking, or commuting. But, no doubt, there are some not so great results of our digital habits.

We may be more withdrawn from our experience because of Digital habits, or perhaps we are more plugged in to them. Our documentation of them with status updates and posted pictures is certainly improving our ability to remember some pretty important events. I can personally verify that I only remember my children’s birth as well as I do because I have the “minutes” recorded as tweets. Those experiences were captured by my digital habits. I only wish I could have done the same for my wedding (we also should have had people doing video all over the place). Right now  it is just this whirlwind of experience that I loved, but can’t really remember because it is such a blur.

As to the question at hand, we can just make the assumption that these Digital Habits are a reality and one that we must face head on. So, we probably need to think through how our Digital Habits are forming in the first place. Again, I must start from my own experience.

On Tuesday, the 20th of March, 2007, I sent my first tweet. While I had been aware of twitter for quite some time before that, I first gave it a real shot by stating: “I’m figuring out how twitter can be used in middle school.”

I didn’t tweet another thing until May of the same year. The very next tweet was something more auspicious in nature: “I’m finding out that twitter can increase your blog readership.” Clearly I saw some benefit, and so the tweets started to pick up. I tweeted a total of 8 times that May, including a totally existential posting thanking a “steve”: “Thanking Steve for the link to the 6.99 microphone deal: http://tinyurl.com/2ttmll” Clearly without the capacity to use the @ symbol, I didn’t really get the conversational aspects of Twitter. My first use of that symbol was not until June 10th.

Then, I started trying to add twitter into my every day speach, even making up words in some cases “The twaiter[?] was just for me, although you can make a dentist appointment for yourself as well.” It turns out that I was sending that with Jott, a voice recognition software for cell phones, so I can’t really take credit for that one (but, I was trying to say “the twitter”, which was clearly before “tweet” came into popular usage.)

I then started to link to my podcast and blog frequently for a few months, but in August, September and October of 2007 I sent out only 6 tweets in total. What happened during those months? And then, 78 tweets in November. This was an absolute explosion of content. What happened during that month too? It was during this month that Twitter became a digital Habit. It became the place that I asked the majority of my questions. It became the way that I collected contact information and the way that I collaborated with those new found contacts. November of 2007 was when I “got” twitter.

It took me 9 months and a few dozen tweets before I could call it a habit. Before that, it was just something I checked in with a few times a month. The habit happened because of this tweet: “New blog post: 101 Tools and Resources for Authentic Learning… http://tinyurl.com/2c7uca” (which was the first one on November 1st). When I released that single tweet, I realized that I wanted to start sharing pretty much everything that I was thinking about and asking with the people that I resourced in creating the 101 Tools and Resources. I figured out that it wasn’t enough just to share the big “information”, I had to share the small stuff too. I had to work with others in order to create more meaning.

So, I guess I formed this digital habit out of necessity. I needed to share and be shared with. I needed to find connection. I needed to @ as many people as possible (the ratio of regular tweets to @ tweets shifted from 15:1 to about 1:2, which is the clearest definition of this change). That is how I formed my digital habit, and I think that is how we form most of them. When we start talking to other people more than just talking to hear ourselves. That is when we truly see the benefit. When we know someone is listening and will respond, we find that it becomes an essential part of our daily activities. For better or worse, we need these digital habits to bring meaning into our modern lives.

(Also, if you are wondering how I looked back easily at those long forgotten tweets, I used tweetbook, which is a fantastic service)

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Question 14 of 365: What is the future of outsourcing?

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I do not claim to be an expert in outsourcing, nor do I claim to know all of the terrible (and good) things that have come from an acceptance of outsourcing as a reality. What I am claiming by my attempt to answer this question is that I think I may know where it is going. It may be quite arrogant to claim that you know where something is going without really understanding where it has been, but I feel as though it may be important to take this stab in the dark.

The future of outsourcing is personal. It is within your own daily workflow. It is within the stuff that you always wish you didn’t have to put up with, and now you don’t. And, I am not simply talking about the Roomba. I am, instead, referring to the idea that all of the monotonous aspects of your daily existence will be put up for bid. And, if anyone is willing to do them, they will be outsourced. I think the only real way to prove this point is to look at examples.

Prefinery and UTest allows you to outsource your beta testing. No longer will you have to figure out exactly who your users should be. You can rely on the crowd and a company to do it for you.

Smart Thinking allows you to outsource your stack of papers to grade. You can have someone else give your feedback for you. Isn’t “peer” review and writer’s workshop just another form of this kind of outsourcing?

SendGrid gives you the ability to outsource your personal responses to e-mail. We can now scale what used to be a human reaction to having completed steps or done something with an organization, business, or school.

Seed will let you outsource photography, writing, or other creative (but time consuming) work. The question is, how low will the network of creatives go?

Do my Stuff will let you basically put any task you have to do up for auction. Even cleaning bathrooms is up for grabs.

LivePerson will give you life advice and possibly outsource how you should act in your love life.

So, why does this all matter? Why is it that these services are worth even looking at, even as I make fun of the idea of how our future will look when faced with these realities?

Outsourcing (and some people call this version, enlightened outsourcing) in general lets us focus our attention. If it doesn’t do those things, then the future doesn’t look good. If we are outsourcing what is essential to our happiness, then we need to take a step back. But, on the other hand, if we are outsourcing the non-essential then we are streamlining our own existence.

I believe in that part. I’m just not sure if some of this is the answer. While it may be the future of outsourcing, I’m not sure it is a future that all of us can buy into. There may be a huge backlash coming where people take great joy in cleaning their bathrooms and doing their taxes and working with students and users directly. So, what will that be called? Self-sourcing? Unsourcing? Besourcing?

Whatever it is called, I would like to find a balance if I can. I would like to do what I can to be human and involved in the daily events of my life, all the while, not getting bogged down by the things that I have no interest in attempting. That doesn’t have to be a part of a movement. That part can just be for me.

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