Learning is Change

#BDNT January 2010

Here I am again at Boulder/Denver New Technology Night at CU Boulder. I am here with my new partner for SpeedGeek Learning, Ashton Honnecke. Tonight’s meeting might not have quite the level of excitement as December’s, but I am optimistic. Let’s see how it goes.

People who are hiring:

Questions from Students (from Startup):

  • The Perfect High Five
  • Find Your keys with your iPhone

Announcements:

Presentations:

  1. Liquid Scenarios – A single button to help people valuate a single company… This allows us to know exactly how much a company is worth. There is no liquid assets for a company that isn’t sold. [The Demo for this company was not working… couldn’t figure out how to work vista]
  2. Team Snap – Managing your team online. Everyone does teams and coaching management wrong… they do it right, apparently. I like the idea of managing logistics with software to concentrate on human interactions. “People pay for what we do” (that must be nice)
  3. CSIA – Should the Colorado Office of state planning and budgeting put a sales tax on software? A really fantastic speaker, truly knowledgeable about sales tax for physical objects vs. services and online purchases. 
  4. Easy Insight – Business Intelligence, there is an actual demo (Such a great change). Get your data from almost anywhere (Google Analytics, Basecamp, etc.) Yeah! Lets build reports. Cool visualization! 
  5. Ubisense – Precise Real Time Location Systems. Let’s track people indoors using sensors. They use Ultrawide Band for doing this tracking. And Cow detection. I’m not sure it gets any better than that.
  6. Gadgets – Nook, L5, Easy Pay (He is going to CES and bringing back many more toys)

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Question 5 of 365: How can you eliminate noise within your network?

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I am constantly reminded of just how many people are following one another. Daily I get messages from twitter telling me about someone new who is choosing me to follow along with 4000 other folks. While I don’t doubt that some people could have 4000 contacts, the regularity with which this occurs makes me think that there are more and more people who are living with an immense amount of noise within their network. So much noise that they probably have to tune out almost everyone and they use their network only for brief moments of consumption or creation.

Now, the easy answer to this question is that you can eliminate noise by simply following less people or having fewer “friends”. The brief explanation would include ideas of pruning back your contacts and really focusing on people that actively engage in the kind of thinking or discussion that you would most like to take part in. But, I am not interested in this answer because it doesn’t get at the bigger problem of having too much information to consume and too little time to consume it. What I am looking for are better filters. What I am after is a real way to channel all of the good things going on in my network and make it more usable than just turning on a fire-hose and pointing it directly at my mouth.

PostRank does a good job of saying which RSS feeds to pay attention to as well as which posts to read, Filttr lets you limit the number of tweets to words you want to hear, and things like Nambu and Tweetdeck allow us to create our own just-in-time searches, but the noise still exists. It is still the human process of eliminating waste from our networks.

So, what is the answer? Do we just wait while other people invent ways of pruning or should we remain vigilant and cut back our Reader accounts once a month? No. Instead, we must redefine the noise. We must take a look at the 4000 followers and really think about how it is that the network has changed what it means to “catch up.” The true noise of a network is in the things that actually “seem” important but are not. They are the things that take a lot of time to read and digest but in the end, they lead to no better solutions or ideas. I believe we are getting very good at being the filter for tweets about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So much so that this now only makes up the gentle background hum of the everyday network activity. What we need to take a closer look at are why we are in the network in the first place.

If you are using a network to broadcast your latest blog posts, your noise may come from comments or in tending all of the thing that you “could” write about. If you are using your network to check up on your family, your noise may come from the distractions of of “long lost friends”. If you are using your network to ask questions, your noise may come from the debate rather than the answering of those questions.

Whatever your noise, the only way to eliminate it is to adhere to why you are taking part in the network. Everything else stems from that. I believe that there are too many people who are traveling aimlessly through Facebook and Twitter. They follow and friend so many people because they lack a purpose for being there in the first place. They are there because others are there. So, the filter I am looking for is simply an understanding of purpose. If I stop to ask myself why often enough, I don’t find myself frustrated by the noise, I find it relaxing and invigorating. In fact, I find that I just might need to make some noise of my own.

If my network is a fire-hose, I plan on putting out some fires.

Question 4 of 365: Which is better: Scalability, Sustainability or Reframablity?

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I have thought a lot about how important scalability is for the success of a project, company, or idea. I have long held that unless a project is scalable to the Nth degree, it will soon die and it will not create a lasting change upon the environment from which it grew. I have said these things in the hopes of making myself obsolete and allowing me to move on from the projects I started.

I would now like to propose that there may be alternatives to scalability that might be worth exploring. Successful small pilots and intense open source communities have lead me to believe that, perhaps, scalability does not do everything that it needs to. Scalability allows a single idea to be pushed out to a large amount of people. It grows exponentially, and requires very little in the way of shift as it grows. The user experience is uniform and can be measured one against another quite easily. The sheer numbers of people using a product, adhering to a set of principles or simply working toward a common goal seem to outweigh any of the problems that a true scalability provides.

And yet, for the people in the small, unscalable pilot the experience is incredible. For the people in the open source community that will never be adopted by a major audience, the work is the reward. What they are after is less ambitious, but more authentic. What they are interested in is leaving the human element within the project. By definition, an unscalable school or business model is dependent upon the people who use it and keep it going. When they leave, the model could leave with them. They could try to package their materials and work toward making their models work for a widespread audience, but all they would be doing would be to try and squeeze their passion onto a page or try to give someone a play-by-play of what an experience should feel like.

So, perhaps  rather than scaling up our projects and trying to remove ourselves from the process, we should look for ways to sustain the gains we have made, to make them a part of the culture. Perhaps when we are trying to start a new venture, we should look at ways that other people could reframe it for their own purposes. If scalability insults the purpose that others have for what we do, then sustainability and reframability must be considered in order to allow the individual to find their place within the new idea.

After all, isn’t that what Twitter did?

Originally, twitter didn’t have hashtags or search. Originally, Twitter didn’t have automatic link shorteners. Originally, Twitter didn’t create lists of people to follow. It didn’t have archiving tools. Or a lot of other things. It was individual users who didn’t just want the product to scale (because we all know that Twitter didn’t scale all that well), they wanted it to change. They wanted to reframe exactly what the purpose of the product was and they wanted to sustain their use of it through all of the iterations and false starts, through API shifts and down time.

So, we must do the same. We must be able to sustain our work long enough for others to grab ahold of it and want it to be their own and then we have to let it truly be theirs. We must allow them to reframe our ideas and sustain those as well. We must see our new businesses, schools, and non-profits through to the point where we can no longer recognize them because others have taken the helm and reframed us out of the picture. That is the only way that we can walk away, that we can show something to be truly useful to others. That is the only way that we will be able to change the world around us.

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Question 3 of 365: Where are our mass shared experiences in a world of niches?

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There is something about the Mash finale or The Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that will never be replicated. They were mainstream media when that was the only kind of media to be. They were shared by over half of the American population at a single time. This will never occur again. When we have niche social networks, niche dating sites, niche news, and even niche microblogging platforms, we will never again find a way to share a single memory, to have a single version of the truth of what happened or didn’t.

Yet, we have our memes and our viral everything. Is that the closest that we will get to sharing a common experience again? Is it that we will have to experience the video version of on our own time to bond to one another? Is the long tail the same thing as sharing a moment with everyone you know?

No.

Our shared experience now is so categorized and split into sectors that we hardly can build any kind of common thread holding us all together. But, I believe that mass shared experience is going to make a comeback. I see a day when the machine of community that has created Twitter becomes so real-time as to coalesce into a single channel. I believe that if facebook (or its offspring) is the future of the platforms that we converse and create within, then there is hope for singular moments to occur.

One day in the not too distant future, our twittershpere (or the like) will be interrupted by the entire network retweeting a single moment about to take place, and we will have the capacity to watch that moment unfurl from multiple vantage points and talk about it while it occurs. We will have the entire world focused on their mobile devices as they watch the final moments of a presidency, see someone walking on Mars or merely take a moment to watch a singing sensation.

We came close during the Iranian Election last year, but we all reacted to news from every different channel. We watched as a woman died on the streets, but we were so far removed. Our future shared experience will put us as close to the event as possible, and we will all be changed by it happening. Once we have this moment from within our niches, we will realize just how artificial the boundaries of those niches are. We will start to work toward pulling the platforms together and once again having a single medium for finding out the things we want to know. But, this medium will be one we can control, one that we can take part in.

While it may not come from the likes of CBS, we can be certain that the web will have a moment like TV did, when it truly comes of age.

Question 2 of 365: What is the critical mass of a community?

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I could give a concrete answer based upon the psudo-science of online community building, or an enigmatic answer that really doesn’t reveal a whole lot. Instead of either of those choices, I would rather answer this question by finding the different ways that people have found significance in this question.

Some people want to know if Social Networking is reaching a critical mass? They want to be able to use their anecdotes as evidence for why Facebook is the most popular network or why Twitter has become the default conversation platform for conferences. I believe that a Social Network reaches a critical mass if people find it useful, if it becomes a place for relationships to be more than just connections. This is easy to quantify. If your network causes you to daily learn more about the people you hold dear, it has reached a critical mass for you. That is why Diigo has reached critical mass for some. That is why Plurk has reached critical mass for others. The relationships are meaningful, it is just the technology and the ease of use that gets in the way of widespread adoption.

Some people want to know if open source has reached critical mass? They are intent on looking for a way to support the software that maintains a community of users and creators who are one in the same. They want to say that they saw the tipping point when Linux became a real alternative to Windows or when Moodle became a real alternative for Blackboard. Open source has reached a critical mass because people use it without thinking about it. Apache and mySQL are the backbone for entire worlds online, and they aren’t given a second thought. This question is relevant only in the idea that the communities required to create this critical mass are essential. An open source project reaches critical mass when the leaders of the project can leave or change and the project still continues to grow. I believe that Moodle will critical mass when Martin Dougiamas is no longer shepherding along.

Some people are much more analytical. They want to know just how you reach the numbers of to create critical mass within a community? They are interested in just how many data points are needed in order to say that a site is a success. They will give the percentages of people who will contribute to a social site, the percentage of lurkers, and the percentage of people who will sign up and never return. This question is important, but it is false to assume that any community is the same as any other community.I don’t believe that a pattern works all of the time, nor do I think that it is too important to pay attention to the people who say that a community lives and dies with numbers of posts or with the amount of traffic. I believe in the power of a single idea to spark an entire community and to sustain it. I also believe that any community can reinvent itself with every iteration. Critical mass is achieved when people believe that there is a thread that binds all of the people to the community itself. If it is a single question, and single person, or a single function: A community will thrive when people find a connection to IT and not just the people in it.

Then of course, there are people who just want to know what it takes to reach critical mass on a single tool, like what does critical mass look like on a wiki? They are attempting to weigh in on exactly when a niche wiki can sustain itself with new edits on a regular basis. They see the wiki as the community and the information as the currency within it. I happen to agree that Critical Mass on a wiki is very difficult and it is something that few wikis ever achieve. However, I take a different stance on it, I think. I believe that there are very few reasons to attempt critical mass within a wiki. Wikis are meant to gather information and chronicle evolving ideas. There are very few ideas or projects that are ever-evolving or that can sustain the attention span of any group of individuals indefinitely. I believe that critical mass is an illusion within a wiki. Wikis are born, are used when they are useful, and die when they are not. While the information may continue to be referenced, continuing to expand it or build out new branches simply does not make sense. To put it simply: When you have answered the question you were asking, you do not continue to ask it.

So, there you have it. Critical Mass in a community is individualistic, improbable with the original people who wanted it, elusive because the community is alive, and false because no community is infinitely valuable.

Question 1 of 365: Why is Augmented Reality Important?

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I have been thinking about this question a lot lately, especially because so many others are pointing to it as the next big thing. What I really want to know, though, is why Augmented Reality applications deserve our time, effort, and more than anything else, our data.

For those of you who have not seen the video on Google Goggles or looked into iPhone applications like Realski, TAT, or Layar; Augmented Reality is the ability to give individual objects in the real world metadata or tagged properties. This means that anything from a table to a baseball card can have images, information, or even interaction built into it by simply viewing it through a camera or some other type of device. While, this gets pretty heavily into the science fiction stuff that people have put into movies for years, taking a look at something like Realski, you can actually see how useful having data about your surroundings could be.

What I am interested in with this question, though, is why we need to invest our time and effort into making Augmented Reality a part of our lives, why it is truly important to the future of education and the future of literacy. It is for the same reasons that I described in a podcast almost exactly two years ago.  Augmented Reality is important because it creates context for everything. Anyone who knows me will attest to my need for context in reading, writing and any other creative pursuit. In the aforementioned podcast I described a virtual world where each object would be a collaborative one, where each story would be co-written by everyone who viewed the objects within the story. The apple on the detective’s desk could have its own story with a tragic worm. The window shade that saw the murder could tell the tale from its perspective. With Augmented Reality, we can write the history directly onto the objects. No longer will we have to utter the phrase, “If these walls could talk.” They will. But, only if we tag them correctly.

I feel as though it is our responsibility to start capturing the world around us and telling the story that we want to be told for our children, for ourselves. If life becomes one living allegory, if everything is a symbol for something else, then what does literature and literacy become? If our world around us becomes hyperlinked, we can learn to make connections and think critically about we consume, manipulate, and produce from any stage of the game.

While this may be a ways off, I’m not sure that thinking through what is possible is ever a waste of our time.

As I think about the objects in our daily lives, I want to believe that we will start to see their true potential.

  • The science materials that have the experiment embedded into them.
  • The meeting room table that can be changed to have different sets of documents attached to it, depending on the meeting at hand.
  • The foods that tell you exactly how many calories are within, and where they were grown, and how long they have been sitting on the shelf.
  • The gifts that are sent with pictures of the loved ones who sent them, just hovering over them whenever our children start to play once more.

Measuring a year…

While I do not really believe that my year has been a sum of the following things, I really needed to take a moment and look back on all of the blog posts, tweets, and tagged links. I think I needed to see some impact as this year dwindles to a close. I could go ahead and make this into one of those Mastercard “Priceless” commercials, but I think that cheapens the contributions I have made. While these numbers are by no means impressive, they do represent where I am in my thinking and in my digital footprint.

I have thought a lot about all of the different things that I could measure this year with and against. At the beginning of this year, I set a goal of blogging every day. Somewhere around April, I decided that there were other priorities that required my attention, so I fell about 200 blog posts short. While I consider my goals for the coming year, I would still like to make numbers a part of my strategy, but a smaller part. Instead of writing a year in review that measures the number of blog posts I wrote, I would like to measure the number of conversations I started or the number of questions that I asked or answered. That, to me, will feel much more real and satisfying than numbers of words typed or tweets sent. Any ideas on how to do that?

Number of Learning is Change Blog Posts:
151

Number of Visits to Learning is Change:
13,849 (According to Google Analytics)

Number of Pageviews:
21,097 (According to Google Analytics)

Number of Tweets:
1176 (According to Tweetake)

Number of websites tagged:
489 (according to delicious)

Number of links pointing to “Learning is Change” found within the last 12 months:
612 (according to Google Webmaster’s Tools)

Number of Google Docs Created (not included others’ docs):
348 (according to a filter in Google Docs)

Presentations/Sessions from 2009:

And now, a Poem for my future.

I don’t often write poetry on this blog (or much at all since I left college), but here is what I wrote today:

I’m playing with fire for a reason.
I’m learning to ask and to answer.
I’m reading between the lines, and finding passion there.
I’m treading water with relish.
I’m walking into oncoming traffic and finding that I’m not the only one here.
I’m raiding the refrigerator, leaving only the ketchup.
I’m harvesting my own organs, not exactly sure where they should go.
I’m making sure that everything is rusting around me.
I’m stuff pillows with whole sheep.
I’m roughing it.
I’m starting to inch my way out the door. At least, I think it’s a door.
I’m french kissing disaster, foreplay with potential.
I’m opening my coat and letting the cold breeze fill up my sleeves.
I’m laying in a bed and breakfast, waiting for the morning paper.

I’m still here, despite all my posturing.
I’m still thinking, despite all my action.
I’m still waiting, despite knowing the direction and location and result that I want.

Yes.
I’m still waiting.

Educon 2.2 Prenote: What is your innovation?

I have been thinking a lot about my session at Educon 2.2, and I think that I have finally figured out just what kind of conversation I would like to have. Originally, I thought that I would really be working with presenting ideas in context, with meaning, and for perspective. I thought that this would produce a lot of really good conversation and help everyone taking part to build their own context or meaning for their own innovations. While, I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad way to go, I think it is really just too uninspiring to create any lasting change. And, I decided a couple of days ago that if I let a chance to be in the same room with the smartest people I know go by without changing myself, them, or the way that we do things in education for the better then I might as well not even go.

With that said, here is the plan:

I would like to pose to anyone who would like to take part in this session (you can be attending Educon 2.2 or not) the following question: “What is your innovation in education, and why does it matter?”

The reason why I want to answer this question is because I believe that innovation is the only thing that will save modern public education. I believe that somewhere out there is an innovative idea that is being executed extremely well, but is not fully explored by our network. I believe that we are all engaged in disrupting the current crop of educational theory with our own successful practice, and we need to tell that story. I believe that if we do not take the opportunity to stand up and say why it is that our ideas matter, no one will take them seriously.

So, this is a shout out to anyone who would like to do a “Prenote”.

To me, this term means that we all do the presentation before we get to Educon so that we can get on with the conversation without being hampered by that facade. We do the prenote so that our biases, passion, and ideas can be gathered into one spot before we set foot inside SLA. It is a way of preserving a snapshot of what we were like before Educon 2.2, because I believe that with a little work, we can all come away changed from such an event.

So, here are the logistics:

  • Answer the above question using one of the following methods:
  • http://www.youtube.com/my_webcam – Record yourself with just your voice and your face answering the question
  • Create an ignite-style presentation (see Chris Lehmann’s here) and then upload it to youtube
  • Enter the link into the following Google Form:
  • Loading…

Make sure you tag your YouTube video with #educon22 and #educonnovation (I will be using the second tag for my session, and yes, I do know it is ridiculous)

After the first 5 or so people do this (I hope we get at least 5), I will set up a SpeedGeek Learning session to organize the videos and create a backchannel conversation and collaborative documents around all of them. The idea is that during my session at Educon 2.2, we will be able to collaborate on the best or most inspiring innovations in our midst and come up with some concrete plans for executing them to a greater scale. Because for me, putting together these answers to the question will be nothing if we do not act on their challenge to become better educators, learners, and humans.

Any takers?

Boulder Denver New Technology

I finally decided to see what kind of community there was out there for startups and entrepreneurs within the local area. I guess there is something to be said for a local network as well as a twitter network (or for even having those two things having more overlap).

Some Links:

  1. Silicon Flatirons
  2. The twitter list I am creating for this event
  3. Gnip
  4. Foundary Group – A way to fund startups from entrepreneurs.
  5. Simple Geo
  6. Ever Later
  7. Let’s Swap – Beta of a way to swap products offline but organize online
  8. Next Big Sound – Interesting way to track what is going on in the musicsphere.
  9. The Blog Frog – Mommy bloggers and many other types of blogs that are being turned into communities. My question – How is this different than Friend Connect that google does? Really interesting lessons learned. “Get a board of directors for your life.”
  10. Unreasonable institute – Very interesting way to fund social entrepreneurs. Good presentation style. Trying to create a mecca for social change in Boulder. Such a cool idea for the Unreasonable village fund.
  11. Equity Compensation for the Start-Up: Letitia Pleis – Some good advice for sharing capital. If you give someone a share of your company, they will have to pay tax on that value as soon as they get that percentage. Look into Sec 83b or Phantom options: Access to future profits without actually giving them shares… However, if your company has no value, it isn’t as much of an issue.
  12. HasselBlad – 50-150 megapixel camera
  13. Buckyball Magnets – Very cool adult toy
  14. Nikon s1000pj – Picture and projector
  15. Sonos S5 – Home Theatre stuff
  16. Public Earth – “Maps filled with hidded treasures.” Connecting people to places that they love. I like the idea of putting a map on top of a wiki. Not a great sales pitch, however. People are going in and “cleaning up their communities”. Very interesting.
  17. CU New Venture Challenge –  Interesting challenge and incubator for CU people. 
  18. Real Ski – Doesn’t have a whole bunch of info online, but the video is ridiculously awesome. It is an “augmented reality” app. It doesn’t have to use 3g or any connectivity potentially. Just Wow!