HighTouch

New sites and Chrome extensions of interest

2010-07-25T06:45:00.000-05:00

I continue to be amazed at the amount of innovation still happening on the Web. I make a real effort to kick-the-tires on new sites, but like all people I get busy and comfortable and distracted and miss things. This weekend I've found three new sites that I have found interesting, and wanted to share them.

Miio

You say what you like. I say what I like. And Miio makes it easy for us to find, share and chat with each other about the stuff that interests us. That's it. That's Miio.

You may think this sounds like a lot of sites you're already using, and at its most basic level that is true. What is different is the way they handle filtering. It is filtering on steroids. This is an example of the kind of tool coming to help us deal with information overload. It's definitely worth watching.

Mendeley

Mendeley Web lets you access your research paper library from anywhere, share documents in closed groups, and collaborate on research projects online. It connects you to like-minded academics and puts the latest research trend statistics at your fingertips.

Most of what Mendeley does will be of no interest to you if you are not a researcher. So why am I mentioning it? It does one thing you have to see: research collections. This is an aggregation by discipline of research papers that other scientists find of interest. This is basically a trend-spotter. Ignore everything else at Mendely, but checkout the collections-- fascinating.

FeedSquares

FeedSquares provides a cool, entertaining way to read your favorite feeds.

As most of you know I'm a big fan of Feedly as an alternative interface to Google Reader. FeedSquares works in this same space and provides yet another alternative to the bland Reader native interface. You use it by installing a browser extension. I've been using FeedSquares a fair bit, and can definitely recommend it. I know many of you have told me that you just don't get Feedly. FeedSquares provides a slightly less filtered view of your feeds, and it just might feel a tad bit more comfortable. I'm not sure I'll completely make the switch to FeedSquares just yet, but it does have a Chrome app (Feedly does not) and that may be enough to make it my feed reader of choice.

How about you? Seen anything new and interesting of late you'd like to share?

Machinimas and copyright

2010-07-01T10:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday during my web session on copyright someone asked a question about machinimas, avatars, and permissions. The first thing I thought of were the various skins worn by avatars, and the artists who created them. These skins are created in a fixed and tangible medium, and to me would absolutely be protected by copyright.

This got me to looking around to see what others have said on this topic. I found this: Second Life Terms Of Service Changes:

Prior to TOS 2.0, many Machinimatographers felt that they were completely within their rights to film content they had purchased from creators. Things such as Animations, clothing, buildings or sets, props, hair, skin or attachments. In Linden Lab's new TOS 2.0, they explicitly state that it's okay to use their own content, but if you incorporate content from other users, you must obtain licensing or permissions from the creator before including said content in your production.

That the machinimatographers would assume they had permission strikes me as particularly naive. I'd think that not only would you need the written permission of the avatars, but also the artists who created each avatar's skin, the programmers who created the gestures, and on and on... Sounds impossible to manage.

To my thinking, the copyright laws render this entire new art form as illegal, or at best totally impractical to pursue. We could fix this ourselves if everyone would license their "stuff" using completely compatible open licenses; e.g. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution (with no other restrictions). That's not going to happen.

It makes me very sad.

You know you're going to fail...

2010-06-19T07:13:00.005-05:00

I was at a conference this week where the speaker was touting the organization's shiny new web site that would be rolled-out very soon. Of course, it was going to solve all of the problems the organization was having with people not working together. At the conference I was at the week-before-last I heard someone saying the same thing, "We're are totally revamping our Web site so that people will work together better." If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that some new tool was going to solve their collaboration problems, I could treat you all to a round of drinks.

I came across a great blog post this morning at Inkling Markets where Nate makes a great point-- Enterprise 2.0 - Tiger Woods would kick your ass with 3 golf clubs:

Tiger Woods could walk into Kmart, grab 3 clubs from the cheapest, shittiest bag of golf clubs in the store and still kick your ass on the course.

Why?

Because it's not about the tools.

If you're having trouble getting people to work together no tool is going to fix that. People who are truly motivated to work together will find a way to get it done no matter the tool. If your groups are not working together now they're never going to work together unless you solve your people problems first. Before you spend a ton of time and money on technology-- invest a lot of time in conversation.

Who will win the College World Series?

2010-06-18T18:20:00.000-05:00

Please jump into the prediction market:

Open Education: University of Michigan shows how it is done

2010-06-11T07:08:00.002-05:00

What a great initiative coming from the University of Michigan: open.michigan

Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community.

That this effort isn't being initiated by Michigan's land-grant university is sad. When the history is written, that the nation's land-grant universities were so slow to get on the right side of the open education movement is going to be seen as a blunder of epic proportion. The open education movement should have been an idea birthed and totally embraced by the land-grants. Instead we've seen it resisted. It's very very sad to see such an opportunity to have gone totally missed.

BTW, I have written Michigan State University twice now asking for an explanation for the copyright statement attached to their OpenCourseWare site. Compare Michigan State's all-rights-reserved licensing to the Creative Commons statement found at the University of Michigan. Shameful!

Opting-out of Google Analytics

2010-05-30T22:20:00.005-05:00

Google has released a new browser extension that will stop your browsing information from being sent to Google Analytics. I hope this takes off, and gets Web site owners to stop thinking about meaningless metrics like pageviews.

You can get the extension here: Google Analytics opt-out extension

Good stuff Google!

HighTouch Book Club: Update

2010-05-30T09:27:00.006-05:00

I've finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. I will work on getting my book notes put up in the next couple of days. If you haven't read this book I highly recommend it.

I have no other new book club reads in the queue at the moment. Your suggestions are most welcome.

I am stepping back in the interim to enjoy a couple of older books sent to me by @ethnobot (Thank you so much!) These are: The Pursuit of Wow! by Tom Peters, and Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Richardo Semler.

Regular book club reads will continue when I have finished these two books.

A great movie and example of flow experience

2010-05-29T21:13:00.009-05:00

We watched The Hurt Locker last night on PPV. What a great movie! I'm so glad we saw it yesterday, because if we'd waited just one more day, I'm pretty sure this news would have seen me exercising a personal boycott of the film: Creators Must Move Beyond Suing the Audience

The file-sharing public faces yet another wave of predatory litigation, this time from the so-called US Copyright Group ("USCG"), which is suing BitTorrent users on behalf of various independent filmmakers. The Hollywood Reporter reports that more than 20,000 individuals have been sued, with more suits to come, and the producers of the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker have also signed up with the USCG to go after BitTorrent users.

That said, the character played by Jeremy Renner in the movie was simply incredible. I've been reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. You couldn't ask for a better example of living in the flow than Sergeant First Class William James. This character had all the elements: immersion, mastery, a distortion of time, a suspension of self-consciousness, clear goals-- you make a mistake you die, and a desire to continuously push the boundaries of performance. It's worth seeing The Hurt Locker for no other reason than to study this character.

You can achieve flow states in all walks of life and in every type of job. You don't have to go looking for highly dangerous situations, e.g. bombs to defuse. You just have to push your personal everyday boundaries in ways heretofore unimagined.

Can you Trojan Horse cultural change?

2010-05-28T04:33:00.000-05:00

We all know the tale of the Trojan Horse. I was thinking of it again this week while listening to Byron Reeves (Total Engagement, Harvard Business Press, 2009) speak at a conference about the potential for gaming technologies to transform the work environment. Byron talked about the values baked-in to games that support the larger organizational trends toward greater transparency, openness, collaboration, and flatter more democratic work environments.

When I read Byran's book, and again this week while listening to his talk, I couldn't help but think of the Wizard of Oz. That behind every enterprise gaming curtain will be some little man micro-managing the worker's every move. I've talked about this before when discussing the dangers of workstreaming:

Workstreaming is one of those things that causes me a great deal of angst. It worries me so much that I have been reluctant to write this post. Its potential to be misused by micro-managers and control-freaks is huge. The logs track a worker's every action, through syndication feeds that data is exposed, through aggregation it is combined, and through filtering it is synthesized. Used improperly, it has the potential to lead to work-group hell. You could very easily create a workplace that no one would want to work. Think time-cards, dot-boards, seat-time, and otherwise irrelevant metrics on steroids. Giving these tools to old-school managers would be something akin to Sheriff Taylor letting Deputy Fife put real bullets in his service revolver.

I'm totally in the camp that says these technologies, when deployed in the right organizational setting, will be incredibly powerful and transformative. I'm left wondering, however, what happens when you introduce these tools into situations where they are at strong odds with an organization's predominant culture? Do the trojan-horsed values have the power to change the culture? Or, are organizational cultures so strongly entrenched that they will eventually displace the values embedded in this new breed of software?

We're headed for a classic battle once people begin to realize what's hidden inside that big wooden horse called code. I don't have a crystal ball, and I have no idea how it will play out. My gut tells me that most organizations will attempt to drive the embedded values out of the code. In the end, I suspect their attempts will fail, but it's going to be a long battle. Changing organizational cultures is a tricky business.

Freeranging Chapter 2: The Science

2010-05-17T05:57:00.006-05:00

This is the synopsis for chapter two lifted directly from the book proposal. I'm currently working on this chapter-- it's been much tougher to write than I anticipated. It's hard to take things directly from research and make them interesting and also relevant. I'm trying...

Chapter 2: The Science

Just as Taylor's Scientific Principles of Management changed the culture of the 20th century, there is new science to support a different way of working for the 21st Century. How do we optimize our working environments to support creativity? This chapter will discuss the science of freeranging. In particular recent scientific advances in these areas will be detailed. These advances will be contrasted with specific principles of Taylorism, and its modern day descendant Sixth Sigma. It will illustrate how the management practices from the last century are harming ideation and creative work. Each example from the science will be accompanied by testimonials from freerangers describing how they work, and detailing how their experiences are supported by the science.

Creativity and Innovation - open innovation
The biological basis of work-- circadian rhythms and working the way nature intended
Social network analysis-- what sociology and anthropology tells us about our connectedness
Multitasking-- how it promotes ideation
Working in the flow-- people's abilities to adapt and make sense of massive amounts of information
Complex Adaptive Systems theory-- work environments optimized to deal with complex and chaotic problems

As before, your thoughts and ideas are most welcome.

OpenCourseWare Consortium and Copyright

2010-05-16T16:14:00.004-05:00

I've visited a couple of OpenCourseWare sites of late and have been baffled at the lack of clear information concerning the copyright applied to their educational materials. My curiosity led me to write them to ask what was up. Here are the copyright rules for the OCW consortium:

OCW course materials are made available to the public under a license that:
Grants users the right to use and distribute the materials either as-is, or in a modified form:
Allows users to create derivative works:
Edit
Translate
Reformat
Add to, combine with, or incorporate into other materials
Obliges users to meet certain requirements as a condition of use:
Use must be non-commercial (optional)
Materials must be attributed to [Your Institution] and to original author/contributor
Publication or distribution of original or derivative materials must be offered freely to others under identical terms (“share alike”) (optional).

That seems pretty clear. One of the entities I wrote responded to my inquiry this morning. I'd asked back in March:

Dear Kevin

Thank you for your email. We are in process of placing CC and copyright information on our website.

Best Regards

Okay, that's something. The other university, a major midwest public school still hasn't responded to my questions, and continues to sport an all-rights-reserved copyright notice on all their pages.

So what gives with OCW? Is this something people can just slap on their site, and no one bothers to check that the conditions of membership are actually being met? Inquiring minds want to know.

Freeranging Chapter 1: A More Natural Way of Working

2010-05-15T20:12:00.001-05:00

Over the next few weeks I'm going to begin to share the chapter summaries from my Freeranging book proposal. The first chapter has actually been written, but I'd still appreciate your feedback.

Chapter 1: A More Natural Way of Working

This chapter sets the stage for the entire book, and introduces the major concepts. It starts with a story of a working environment enjoyed by a freerange worker that is dramatically different than that experienced by the overwhelming majority of today's workforce. It discusses work from an historical perspective. It touches on the predominant ideologies that have defined our working environments over the last 150 years. It visits Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, and how these have been misapplied in the network economy, and how information technologies are being misused to create an always-on culture and a workplace hell.

The chapter concludes with the progressive use of technologies to free workers, and to create a workplace optimized for greater innovation and creativity. We touch on The Rise of the Creative Class, and how social networking is making this new form of working a possibility for a larger percentage of the workforce. It concludes with the values and principles driving the freerange enterprise, and delineates the goals of the book.

I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG

2010-05-14T14:49:00.000-05:00

Dear Friend,

I have 48 hours to help LIVESTRONG raise $75,000 for the global fight against cancer. I need your help – RIGHT NOW!

LIVESTRONG Action just launched I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG, a virtual version of the Tour of California. The Tour is the biggest cycling event in the United States, and Lance Armstrong and Team RadioShack will be riding in it later this week. They’re dedicating their ride to survivors and caregivers and raising awareness about the worldwide fight against cancer. You can do the same by creating your own virtual bike and dedicating it to someone in your life--a survivor or caregiver who has inspired you.

I just dedicated my ride, but I need your help – cheer me on! The more cheers I get, the faster I ride:

http://www.livestrongaction.org/bike/kevin-rides-for-research

Now, more than ever, we need to talk about the global cancer crisis – this year, cancer has become the leading cause of death worldwide. And if something doesn’t change, one in two people will be fighting cancer by 2030.

We have to fight back, push our leaders to act and dedicate resources to realize a world without cancer. Every single story and rider strengthens our cause and helps to make our voices heard. That’s why I RIDE FOR LIVESTRONG – will you cheer me on?

http://www.livestrongaction.org/bike/kevin-rides-for-research

LIVESTRONG,
Kevin

Freeranging the Book: Table of Contents

2010-05-12T06:10:00.001-05:00

Below is the Table of Contents for the Freeranging book. In subsequent posts I will share more details about each chapter. So far, I've only written the first chapter and part of the second. I do have brief descriptions for each chapter written, however. I will share those short pieces over the next few weeks, and then go into more detailed discussions of each chapter as the writing progresses.

Contents

Preface

A More Natural Way of Working

The Science

The Culture

The Environment

The Technology

Workstreaming

New Work Metrics

The Imperative

Making the Transition

Coda

Notes and Further Reading

Any thoughts? I know you are seeing this with none of the details but hopefully from having read this blog in the past you have some idea as to how each chapter might unfold. The order? Anything missing? Anything that should be removed?

In subsequent posts I will provide brief descriptions of my thinking as to what will go in each chapter. Your feedback is most welcome.

Freeranging synopsis...

2010-05-09T21:00:00.005-05:00

I've been meaning to start sharing some of the stuff I've been working on from the Freeranging book. Being that I've reached a bit of a writer's empasse I thought maybe now would be a good time to start. Conversation on these items would be most welcome.

What follows is the synopsis from the book proposal. Does it sound to you like there's a book here? What should I emphasize/de-emphasize? Your feedback is most welcome.

Synopsis: Creating work environments that foster greater innovation and creativity is a twenty-first century organizational imperative. Our economies have evolved to ones based on knowledge and information as the primary drivers of wealth creation. We are witnessing the growth of what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has termed the “weightless economy”— an economy in which knowledge and technical capacity are contributing an ever greater share to GDP. Fully 40% of today's workers in advanced economies are involved in knowledge and other forms of creative work. Less than 10% are engaged in manufacturing, and yet we manage these knowledge workers as if they were still working on the factory floor.

This book details the issues surrounding our current work environments, and points the reader to a better way. It draws heavily on the the science surrounding ideation, and the emergent values of the open-source and social networking movements. It offers a vision for creating a world of work in the networked economy that is not only more friendly and natural, but that also results in greater effectiveness.

In a subsequent post I will share the Table of Contents, and we'll take it from there...

The President drinks from the 'information overload' Kool-Aid

2010-05-09T13:29:00.004-05:00

I was disappointed to see President Obama's remarks from the commencement exercise at Hampton University today: Obama: iPad, Xbox Turn Information Into A 'Distraction'

You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," he told the students. "And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

He's right about one thing-- the increase in knowledge flows is absolutely putting pressure on our country and our democracy. He's wrong about the solution and about information becoming a distraction. Dealing with knowledge flows is an essential skill going forward. Those that learn to thrive in these new information rich environments will prosper. Those that choose to hide will be left behind.

I'm currently reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. I highly recommend that the President (and his speech writers) read this book.

Push mindsets and practices are tightly grooved to a world where knowledge stocks mattered and knowledge flows were at best a peripheral event. We must accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key-enabler.

We old folks cut-our-teeth in a push world. That world is rapidly collapsing. Telling the next generation to turn off their information appliances and to disengage from their knowledge flows is doing them a disservice. Learning to live in the flow is the new imperative. This is the edge where value is being created. We can only hope those young people at Hampton University were busy reading their feeds on their smart phones, and that they filtered-out the President's bad advice.

Image attribution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/blvesboy/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Why Buzz is important

2010-05-08T09:48:00.001-05:00

Louis Gray does a great job of explaining why the Buzz platform is so important going forward: Why I am Using Buzz and Why It Is Important that Buzz Succeeds

I do not want a world where the only social networks available are Facebook and Twitter. I don't trust Microsoft to do a good enough job to provide a real alternative, and I don't think Apple wants to. LinkedIn won't transform overnight, and Plaxo is not a candidate. Cisco and other companies aren't even close. So Google provides us the only real alternative to these two networks, and looks to be on the right path, talking openly about privacy, data security, and openness.

I really like Buzz. I was a diehard FriendFeed user because of the quality of the conversations. With FriendFeed's demise we needed an alternative. Buzz came along at just the right time. In its short three months of existence I have built a stronger network in Buzz than I ever had in FriendFeed. It works. You can join me in Buzz by visiting my Google profile. An awful lot of what I used to blog I do now through Buzz.

HighTouch Book Club:The Power of Pull

2010-04-25T17:18:00.005-05:00

The next read for the book club is: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. This is a new book by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison. The reviews of the book promise a healthy dose of insight into knowledge flows. I have read and followed these authors for sometime so I'm definitely looking forward to this read. As before, notes will go in Google Wave. It's public. Search for the tag HighTouch Book Club. The notes will also be published on the open web here: HighTouch Book Club on Waverz.

The world has changed profoundly, and the old tools that led to success in the world of Push won’t work anymore. Pull helps us understand the shift we’re experiencing and provides us with a new understanding of the implications of how our digital world really works—and what we can do to thrive in an environment dominated by the forces of pull.

Drawing on pioneering research, Pull reveals how you can access people and resources when you need them, attract people and resources you didn’t even know existed, and achieve potential with less time and more impact than you imagined possible. Few of us are systematic in how we use the tools available to us. And no institutions are effectively dealing with the startling changes wrought by these technologies and the attitudes they encourage. Pull will change all that.

I very much enjoyed our last read, Rework. It was a quick and easy read, but chock full of practical advise about keeping it real. If you've been thinking of starting something/anything I'd highly encourage you to read this book. I'm giving copies of this book to several of my loved ones. It's a no bullshit guide to getting stuff done. Advice which I have taken to heart. (I'm back into my book work.)

Since finishing Rework I have also read Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks and Six Degrees: The Secrets of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. Both of these books dealt with the amazing similarities seen in all networked systems. Being that these were older books I didn't include them as book club reads, but I would definitely recommend them to anyone wanting to understand social networking from a more scientific perspective.

That said, I do hope you will join me in the new read. I'm anticipating that it will be quite profound.

If you build it they won't come...

2010-04-18T10:58:00.003-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

The day of just putting some content up on the web and expecting people to consume it in any significant numbers is over. I was reminded of this recently when dealing with some concern over an informal online course that had no takers. A little over a year ago I wrote the following email to the course creators in response to their query over what I thought of the course:

Dear {name redacted},

Good questions. I'll try not to ramble. :)

I find most online courses sort of boring. I remember asking when we first met back in May how many of you had taken an online course. They are really hard to do well. That said, as far as online courses go this one is certainly better than most. The best? Not sure I've seen one that I would call the best-- one that really caught my attention as being very innovative and engaging.

That said, here's what will most likely make the course a winner. It has almost nothing to do with the content and everything to do with what social interactions we engineer around the course materials. When we met in Washington there was some discussion about an online portion of {project name redacted} and they talked about some single digit (%) completion numbers. That's not atypical. It was also mentioned that one of the primary benefits that participants got from {project name redacted} was the opportunity to meet and converse with people in similar situations to theirs. The {project name redacted} course materials became a social object around which people gathered. The course became the excuse for the gathering.

Moodle has all sorts of provisions to allow course participants to interact: forums, wikis, chatting... I haven't heard a lot of discussion around what activities will take place as people take the course. What opportunities will people have to interact with other learners, with the instructors, with other {redacted}, or guests?

I read this Chris Brogan blog post this morning and it seemed relevant: The Goal is the Interaction. Here's a quote if you don't want to read the whole thing.

..."which face are you showing through your online presence? Are you the live and participatory, the sharing and thoughtful, or are you a one way street?"

Now that the social object (the course) is nearing completion it seems that the next level of conversation needs to be around how that object will be used to better foster engagement.

My $.02.

Kevin

Of course, the engagement never happened with this course. The days of "if you build it they will come" ended with Field of Dreams (1989). If you're too busy to spend time engaging with the learners who might find your content of interest, then you shouldn't waste your time doing the content in the first place.

HighTouch Book Club: Rework

2010-04-02T18:24:00.001-05:00

The next read for the book club is Rework by 37signal's Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hannson. With this read we return to non-fiction. I really have been reading Makers since December. It took me forever to get through that book. I just finished it on Thursday. I did like the book but just couldn't sink my teeth into any serious page clicking. I started reading Rework yesterday, and am already a third of the way through.

The synopsis:

From the founders of the trailblazing software company 37signals, here is a different kind of business book – one that explores a new reality. Today, anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few bucks or even free. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is now simple...

As before, my notes for the book and any discussion will take place in the HighTouch Book Club wave. If you need an invite to Wave let me know. The publically available discussion can be found on Waverz.com: HighTouch Book Club.

My initial reaction after reading the first third of the book is that isn't the freeranging thought piece I was expecting. I'll be pointing out the differences in my notes. That said, the book has a bunch of very quotable ideas that I will be highlighting in my notes and on Google Buzz.

The SXSW keynote that went south (or not)

2010-03-18T21:23:00.001-05:00

I was one of the few people who actually liked the SXSW keynote interview of Twitter CEO Evan Williams by Umair Haque. I watched it in an overflow room so I missed the mass exodus that occurred in the main keynote room. My thinking that the talk was pretty decent apparently was so rare that my #upvote earned a retweet:

TPapi: Voice of dissent RT @k1v1n: Keynote was interesting. Umair asked good questions. Excellent takeaways. Good mantra. #upvote #keynote #sxsw

Needless to say, there were a ton of conversations about the talk after the fact. People were so negative that I started to seriously wonder if we'd heard the same talk. Sure, the interview wasn't filled with earth-shattering new stuff, but it did provide a glimpse into the thinking of a person that helped to create and run one of social media's biggest hits. This is not something you get to hear everyday, and if you listened, really listened... there was plenty of substance. Umair and Evan talked about some very important concepts. The list is pretty much those things that organizations need to be doing to survive in this new networked landscape. Maybe everyone knew these things already. I doubt it. I have been living in this social media space as long as just about anyone, and I know I still have lots to learn. I'm guessing that those who walked might still have a fair bit to learn as well.

So where did the talk go wrong? Got me. Maybe people wanted to hear more about Twitter and less about what makes its founder tick. Not me. I'll choose insight into what drives a person any day. I want to know about the creator behind the product. I have very little interest in the product itself.

The talk did drag at times, but it never really lost me. There were plenty of nuggets of wisdom to be had. Umair summarizes the talk here: Twitter, SXSW, and Building a 21st Century Business. That's a very substantive list of takeaways. Learning requires listening. Too bad that many in the SXSW audience missed that lesson.

Education for Creatives, Solvers, and Makers Oh My!

2010-03-07T08:45:00.006-05:00

I visited Ohio State University a couple of weeks back where I was involved in a number of interesting conversations. One of the discussions was a departmental seminar focused on the topic of educating the next generation of knowledge workers. (Used rather loosely.) The question was, how to we best prepare graduate students to enter the networked economy?

I gave this a great deal of thought and decided that the real issue isn't so much what is taught (though I do have some thoughts here) as it is attracting and retaining the right type of individuals to our programs in the first place. The culture of our graduate programs is not conducive to attracting the makers, solvers, and creatives that are the life-blood of the new economy.

Some background:

Makers - the DIY engineering crowd (DIY, maker, hacker movement recognized by the WSJ - video). A term popularized (if not coined) by Cory Doctorow in his book, Makers.

Creatives - Their primary job function is to be creative and innovative. “Along with problem solving, their work may entail problem finding”. They are the classic knowledge workers and include those working in healthcare, business and finance, the legal sector, and education. They “draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems” using higher degrees of education to do so. (The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida.)

Solvers - prize their independence as much as their intelligence and ingenuity. They have a unique combination of creativity, knowledge, work experience and life skills that allow them to see things a little differently than other people.

How do you change the culture of the academy to appeal to these highly independent and innovative people? I most definitely think there are things that higher education has to offer creatives, et al. I could make a long list, but to do so would be to focus on the wrong problem. Can higher education make the necessary transition to appeal to freerange learners?

Higher Education's Path Out of Its Budget Nightmares

2010-03-03T11:05:00.005-05:00

The last few days I've been in a bit of a funk reading about the draconian cuts happening to higher education just about everywhere. The funk has been growing for some time. It's no secret that state budgets are in dire straits and they are starting to act to stem the bleeding. In spite of what a lot of people want to believe, this is not feeling anything like an ordinary budget deficit. What will be left in the aftermath is anyone's guess.

I was thinking about these budget cuts and wondering why someone isn't proposing radically different approaches? Instead of worrying about the business-end of higher education, I couldn't help but wonder who is looking out for the people end of things-- the whole reason the system of education exists in the first place. This was my mood when I came across this Umair Haque post: The Real Roots of the Crisis:

That means, of course, that tomorrow's organizations must do more than just sell stuff. They must not be economically full but culturally empty. They must culturally reboot the communities and societies which they're part of, helping them thrive and prosper in human terms.

So where's the leadership? Instead of worrying about buildings, and patents, and copyright and all sorts of business-end bullshit why are we not focusing on learning? On serving communities of learners? On having a higher purpose? Helping people to change their lives and the world for the better through discovery?

Somewhere along the way we lost our moral compass. Too many in higher education, especially public institutions, have forgotten why we exist. The values of the system are borked, and unfortunately too many have taken sides against the people we are here to serve. Higher education has become exactly what Umair claims, it is culturally empty. How do we fix that?

Maybe I'm an idealist (okay, I know I am), but I'm naive enough to believe that if we focus all of our energy on doing the right things the rest of this stuff will somehow manage to take care of itself. As Umair said,

Without care, there is no road back to prosperity — only an infinity of roads to decline.

It's time we get passionate about caring-- it's the only feasible path out of this current dilemma. The clock is running.

Buzz Engine Optimization: Get your BEO on

2010-02-15T09:03:00.003-05:00

As some of your know, I've been pretty active in Google Buzz since it launched. I'm absolutely seeing it as a replacement for FriendFeed. Buzz appears to be close enough that I have shut down my FriendFeed account and don't intend to look back. I've pretty much stopped using Twitter as well. I didn't stop using Twitter intentionally, I just find it much less interesting today than I did last week.

That said, it appears to me that Google has done something brilliant by tying Buzz to your Gmail account. They have made a statement about online persona-- that people participate in social media as individuals. Shared email accounts are a security nightmare (among other things). They aren't going to be allowed to happen in organizations without a great deal of consternation and forethought. A Gmail account gives you access to a lot more than just email. No Gmail account-- no participation in Buzz.

Google has done a very googly thing with Buzz. There is an algorithm that decides what you see and what others see from you. No one really knows how it works. We do know that it learns, and that it requires active participation. I'm thinking any organization that might try to use Buzz for broadcast, rather than conversation, is destined for obscurity. If a buzz falls in the forest... We all will have to consider our BEO (Buzz Engine Optimization). Buzz will require organizations to come out from behind the curtain and talk as individuals. If not, all those official social media channels will be lost in the flow and buried deeper than a blog post with no links.

The thought of this kind of makes me smile. Thank you Google for putting the social back in social media.

Developing a social media strategy

2010-02-13T08:08:00.006-05:00

I've been given the assignment of crafting a social media strategy for my <snark>day job</snark>. It's been difficult to say the least, as I keep coming up against our university policies, laws, and just plain old-ways of working, that keep us from doing the-right-thing. I'd been pondering this a fair bit when I came across this nice post from Jo Jordan. It spoke to my assignment: Social media is a river.... She had this great line:

Old strategic models matter less than our social purpose.

And therein lies my dilemma. I'm struggling like mad to try to define a strategy, be it old or new, until we've come to some sort of shared understanding as to the why. I want to talk about things like trust and mutual respect and openness and sharing and... I'm wanting to write something that seriously addresses our social purpose. Seems to me that to do otherwise is to put the cart-in-front-of-the-horse.

If we can get the purpose right I'm thinking the imperative will be crystal clear. Done right, we won't need no stinkin strategy. Thank you Jo!