The Learning Generalist

A tale of 3 TED talks and their collective irony

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 22:24:38 PDT

Some seven years back, Sir Ken Robinson delivered a landmark speech at TED, citing how schools kill creativity. It's one of those talks that sparked my own interest in public education. In his inimitable, humorous style, Robinson launched a scathing attack on schools. Some of his quotes remain stuff of legend.

I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.

If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatised.

When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. But now ... you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

More recently, Sugata Mitra made his inspirational TED prize talk, following up his landmark speech about his hole in the wall experiment. Mitra made a case for a school in the cloud - self organised learning environments (SOLEs) where children can explore and learn from one another. And while he helped us look ahead to a time of joy and amazement in learning, his subtle attack on the system of schooling was fairly evident.

We don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world?

The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform.

I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen.

There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.

So after watching these amazing gentlemen speak about how school and the public education system is the perfect killer for the joy, amazement and self directed learning journey we call childhood, the third talk is ironic to say the least. A young Maasai boy, Richard Turere from Kitengala in Kenya had found a solution to lion-human conflict at Nairobi National Park. A child from a cattle herding family, Turere often lost his cattle to lions from the park. As is Maasai custom, an act like this has no forgiveness - the marauding lions have to die.

Through his own journey of self discovery, Richard learned that lions were afraid of moving flashlights. A few experiments and failures with his electricity supply and a few games with LED lights gave fuel to his invention - Lion Lights. Richard's now fitted a series of LED bulbs facing outwards from his cattle enclosure. He's wired them to a box of switches and a solar powered battery panel. Every night, these lights flicker intermittently just as a flashlight would if a human were patrolling with it! Ever since, his family hasn't lost a single animal to lions and Turere has now become a mini celebrity amongst the Maasai at Nairobi National Park.

What this boy did, was a consequence of the natural joy and amazement of childhood. No one taught him electronics. He learned it himself. He just had a big challenge, his own little quest, "I had to look after my dad's cows and make sure that they were safe." This seems to resonate with what Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra seemed to say about creativity and learning in their respective talks.

So where is the irony? Richard's reward for his natural genius is that good people with great intentions have now placed him in one of Kenya's top schools. So Richard wears a fancy uniform everyday and will join the rat race of academic achievement alongside several other children who are learning to be cogs in an industrial economy. I hope for Richard's sake that he retains his genius despite school. Chances are though, that as Robinson laments, he will get educated out of his creativity. And when the lions figure out the lights, the Maasai won't have Richard there to figure out what to do next. I hope I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. I can't help but lament the irony of this case. If I get the time, I do want to meet Richard on my trip to Kenya in June. I keep my fingers crossed that we hear more about his astounding achievements in years to come.

Intraversion at Work

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 20:33:22 PST

For the 30 odd years of my life I've been an introvert, a facet of my character that I have tried very consciously to run away from. Recently I was in Africa for work and that work involved meeting a number of unknown people and attempting to build relationships with them. I felt very tired in the evenings. Not physically, but emotionally. The entire hypersocial experience of adjusting to new coworkers in a new office, meeting new people and building relationships was tough for me as an introvert. And of course, I couldn't hide behind intraversion so I built up a bit of a facade of extraversion to keep at my work. And it's amazing that over the years, despite my strengths being reflection, introspection and contemplation, that I was intimidated by the fact that I was in a role that was individual than as part of a team. I should have been happy in a way, but somehow years of feigning extraversion seem to have done me in.

So yesterday when our Managing Director shared this video with me, I was excited. It was Susan Cain speaking about the power of introverts. I'm quite certain I'll pick up her book and read, but in the mean time, I can't deny that there are several points she made that were epiphanies for me and learnings that our most important institutions - schools and workplaces can learn from. At the very least for introverts, I hope it'll help you feel a lot more at ease with yourself.

A few thoughts that I think employers, teachers and individuals can ponder over, from this rather excellent talk:

Is your school or workplace architected for extroverts? Do introverts get safe opportunities to be by themselves, intute, impute, introspect, reflect and contemplate their work? Is there an unspoken taboo against introverted behaviour?
Do introverts face a natural disadvantage in the way your institution runs? Do they get routinely overlooked when it comes to leadership and career advancement? Across the leadership of your organisation, do you have enough introverts who are allowed to be that way?
Are the role models in your institution mostly extroverts? If there are introverts who have the freedom to be introverted, do people know their stories? What's the story of the introverts who do grow in your organisation?
Do you bring in people in the image of the organisation itself - focussed on gregariousness and extraversion? Do you value quiet contemplation and individual work too?
How individualised is your system? Individualisation isn't the same as being individualistic. Nor is it about devaluing the collective.
Does your institution have enough low-key environments that are inviting for introverts? Or do they have to 'fit in'?
As a leader do you allow ideas to run a life of their own, or do you stamp your personality on them? As a leader do you display empathy and step back from offering your opinions - preferring to reflect on occasion? This is an important question for corporate and educational leadership. Do conversations always have a logical end? Or are you willing to go back and reflect on things you may have learned or not totally understood?
Have you ever rejected a person who is quiet or introverted as not being a team player, or as someone who won't 'fit in'? How does your institution look at intraversion vis-a-vis your said or unsaid entry criteria?
Is there an unspoken assumption that all brainstorming, creative thinking and ideation needs to happen in groups? What examples do you have of people having a free rein to explore and express their ideas without being subject to groupthink?
Are magnetism and charisma the most valued leadership traits in your institution? As a leader do you expect your people to be able to sell their ideas vocally, or do you routinely investigate what they're upto and create an environment for them to succeed?
Do people need to win arguments or convince others to move forward with their ideas? If you're the person they're having to convince as a extroverted leader, how willing are you to set aside your own thinking and biases and let your people do their thing?
Would you consider anyone asking the questions I've just asked, to be anti what your organisation stands for?

I'm sure there are other thoughts this talk provokes and I'll be sure to watch it a few more times for it all to sink in. This talk was amongst the most inspiring and liberating ones that I've heard this year. Susan Cain's been through her own journey of being an introverted public speaker - one that I've been on myself. She's developing an online course on 'Public speaking for introverts' and I've signed up for the updates on that - do so if you're interested. And if anything, I hope you're that much more empathetic to that introvert near you.

Photoshop Tutorials to help you post process like a boss!

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 04:45:15 PST

A few weeks back I published a set of tutorials to help you get started on Lightroom. I hope that those of you who do use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw found those tutorials useful. I've now created a set of Photoshop tutorials for you to learn how to use the most popular post-processing tool for photographers. Along with the Lightroom tutorials, these videos form two hours of instruction with real photographs from the field and should be a comprehensive starter pack for you to post process like a champ! Hopefully I can save you some money that you may have ended up spending on a post-processing course. You can use that cash to buy yourself some equipment or maybe fund a short trip!

The Tutorials

Like the previous tutorials, these videos are also part of a YouTube playlist and I've licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You'll find these videos most useful if you play them in high definition. That way you'll see the detail a lot better. Have fun!

If you find these tutorials useful, then do share them with your friends and popularise the tutorials. While I don't intend for these videos to be a comprehensive dive into Photoshop, I hope they serve as a good introduction for people to feel familiar with the application and to get started. If no one ever had to attend a basic post-processing course, it'd make these tutorials immensely successful.

Adobe Lightroom made simple - post processing tutorials for beginners

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:13:46 PDT

When you're making pictures instead of taking pictures, the one thing that helps your execute great images is confidence in post processing. There's no substitute for getting the shot right in camera, but unfortunately the device isn't always the best at representing reality. Cameras lack the eye's dynamic range and also the ability to translate colours accurately. And every now and then we all make mistakes that we'd like the opportunity to correct after the fact. So, first things first, shoot in RAW - the amount of flexibility this gives you is quite awesome. Enough said about that.

Now you have the choice of using Lightroom/Aperture or Photoshop. The difference is a good $400 - at $123 retail, Lightroom 4 is a real steal given the amazing non-destructive editing it allows you to do. Can it do all that Photoshop does? Of course not. That said, there's a lot Lightroom can do which Photoshop can't. Managing your photos, tagging, organisation, printing workflows, tagging, branding are just some of those advantages of Lightroom. I guess it's a toss up between Lightroom and Aperture for the Mac. Given it's availability on multiple platforms and my current familiarity with it, I prefer the former. In today's blogpost, I'll introduce you to the basics of post processing in Lightroom 4 and save you a boatload of cash. This is not an exhaustive set of tutorials, but just enough to get you started. If there are more tutorials you want me to add, please let me know. One word of caution. I assume that you know how to use your camera and to read your histogram. I also hope you know the basics of picture controls such as saturation vs vibrance. If you have some of that covered, these tutorials will help you take your images to the next level.

The Tutorials

I've gone ahead and added all the videos to a playlist on YouTube - you can either play them on the site or off this post. I don't have much more to say - I hope the videos are useful!

I look forward to hearing from you about the utility of these tutorials. My next aim is to create a series of tutorials on Photoshop and focus it on editing photographs. If there are specific topics you'd like me to cover there, just let me know. Thanks for being patient with my erratic posting.

Why your community needs a license to share

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:14:37 PDT

Last weekend, I participated on a thread that caused me much angst. As someone who's participated in online communities for about 12 years now, I feel strongly about a sense of sharing. And yet I found my sensibilities challenged in this debate about sharing bird photographs under the creative commons license. Let me give you context. Indian Birds is a Facebook group with about 10,000 members. As the name indicates, most of the members are birders, quite a few being bird photographers. A few days back, the owner of the group made a suggestion - to make all postings to the group subject to the Creative Commons license. His intent was that all material and pictures posted on the group will be free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
and to Remix — to adapt the work

The range of objections I heard to this seemingly well intentioned proposal made me think quite hard about the spirit of sharing on online communities. In effect, as a community manager it made me think about one more thing I'd like to consider - ownership and licensing. Before I get into the details of what this may mean for your new community, let me explain my stance first.

Full Disclosure

I have to be honest. I'm biased towards the Creative Commons licenses. If this changes your views about the value of this article, you may want to stop reading. I also must say that I'm not a supporter of Creative Commons because of some deep desire to be awesome. While I think it's about being nice, I think it's also very practical. It's very difficult for creative people to write proper licenses for their content. Now the moment you publish a piece of work, you automatically own the copyright to it. And yes in cases of photography and similar art work, you can also put up a notice that says:

"Copyrighted by ... and may not be used, downloaded in any form, or Print Media website without written permission of the Photographer."

This however is an untruth. Under the terms of fair use or fair dealing anyone can use your work in part for the purpose of education, criticism, commentary, reference and review. So, in that a statement like the one you see above isn't very useful and it leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. You don't quite indicate the rights you're willing to give to your viewers and the rights you'd like to reserve for yourself. Now you can hire a lawyer to write all of this up for you, but that'll cost a heap of money. Instead, you can choose the Creative Commons licenses and select the rights you wish to reserve for your benefit. There are some great lawyers behind the Creative Commons system and your reserved rights are pretty air tight. But the bigger benefit is that you make your reservations quite explicit by making the rights you give away very clear. Of course there'll always be jerks who violate copyright, and the way to deal with them is no different from the "all rights reserved" world. So, that's my personal stance about Creative Commons - hopefully that sets the record straight.

Licensing community content

One of the things you want in a community that you set up for sharing, is people shouldn't sue each other for the simple act of using content from the community. Now communities are all about sharing. If you don't intend to share and to give other members the ability to benefit from your work, you shouldn't post to the community. If you participate on Indian Birds, you'll see that the majority content is photographs. It's perhaps 95% of the activity. The big question is - if you're unwilling to share, then why would you post a picture? For free publicity and marketing? I guess there are other opportunities for that. This is where some amount of legal protection is necessary.

Now again you have two options. You can write your own license. This is what we've done for our internal community at ThoughtWorks. All content created by ThoughtWorkers on the community is the property of ThoughtWorks and for the benefit of ThoughtWorkers. So the question of suing each other doesn't arise. In our situation as a consulting firm, this approach makes sense. It may not make sense however for an externally facing community, especially one that's like Indian Birds. This is where an approach like Creative Commons comes in handy and saves you the trouble of writing a license for yourself.

FAQs and misgivings about the Creative Commons licenses

A few days back I watched a great episode of Chase Jarvis live. It was amazing how a well known commerical photographer like Chase promised to put his non-contractual work under the commons to make his commitment to sharing and his rights clear. The episode is very educational for photographers in particular to understand what it means to share their work online and the licensing that makes sense. That said, I realise that Creative Commons still isn't common vocabulary for a lot of people. In view of some of the objections that people raised to these licenses, I thought it might be worthwhile to dispel some of those myths and answer some questions.

I cannot sell any of my work if I apply Creative Commons licensing. If a community uses these licenses, I cannot participate for this reason.

This is incorrect. You can use any of the Creative Commons non commercial license to reserve rights to your work. If your community is also using one of these non commercial licenses, you can quite easily sell the work you share there and also other versions of the same work.

Once I use Creative Commons, I cannot revoke the license at a later stage

This is true, but do remember that this applies only to the version of the work you share under the license. So let's say, you share a low resolution image online and apply a Creative Commons license to it, it's only that picture that is permanently in the commons. The high resolution version and it's other derivatives stay unaffected.

Commercially viable and high quality artwork is never in the commons

Far from the truth. You've got to see the portfolios of Jonathan Worth, Kalyan Varma, Trey Ratcliff, John Harvey and others to know that. In addition, just do a search for Creative Commons photography on Flickr. The number of great photographs you'll see out there is just tremendous!

If a community adopts Creative Commons licensing then violations become the responsibility of the community too

This depends on who owns the content. If the community is set up so the community itself owns the content, then yes it becomes the responsibility of the organisation running the community to take action against violations of copyright. However, if the community only requires members to post under a Creative Commons license while retaining their copyright, then the community has no liability to get into legal battles. As in any other situation, enforcing copyright is still the responsibility of the artist.

Why should anyone decide the licensing for my work?

You're right. No one should decide the licensing for your work. However if you post to a community you should be willing to share your work. In return for publicity, appreciation and social currency, you give some benefits to the members of the community. If the community adopts a Creative Commons license, this is to balance the rights of community members and copyright holders. In case you're unwilling to share your work, you can still decide to reserve all rights by not posting to the community!

If people want to use my work, why can't they just ask me?

This is usually unnecessary friction. Empirical evidence shows that most people don't ask, they just use your work, either under the terms of fair use or not. Instead, a clear statement that allows people to use your work with attribution under the terms you specify is far lower friction and gets you publicity that you may have not even imagined!

If I use a Creative Commons license, people can modify my work without permission.

You can very easily reserve this right by applying a no derivatives license. This stops people from remixing your work in case you're uncomfortable with it. If your community uses a Creative Commons license, you can speak to your community manager about this.

Why pre-empt the beautiful prospect of a friendship between user and an author/artist that could stem from a request to use a particular piece of work? Why make Creative Commons a middleman?

Sure, you could always argue against the commons this way. Let me tell you of a different perspective though. By virtue of the fact that all my work and this blog fall under the Creative Commons, I've received innumerable words of thanks from people who have just used my work in a presentation or as part of their day to day life. I was quite glad some months back, when a reader of my blog found some articles so useful that he fashioned them into a little ebook. He shared it with me under the Creative Commons license too! It was quite beautiful. Kalyan has a similar story which actually took his photography career to prime-time. So while you may lose one way of striking a relationship, you create several more ways to create this bond.

I'm not trying to make a watertight case for Creative Commons here. I'm sure there'll be more questions. The point I'm trying to make however, is more about the purpose of most online communities than about licensing itself. Licenses only serve to protect the rights of both community members and community authors. We need to ensure that authors still retain the opportunity to benefit from their intellectual property, while community members still benefit by using knowledge shared in that context. With this tension, Creative Commons feels like the simplest solution available to us community managers at this point. If things change anytime soon, I'll have something else to say!

Tiger and other wildlife conservation in an anthropocentric world

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 09:15:52 PDT

A few months back, I'd written about a similar topic. The case I mentioned in that post is dragging its feet in the apex court. In the meanwhile, the court has placed a ban on tiger tourism in the core zones of all 41 of India's tiger reserves. Since the ban first came about in the month of July, the conservation community in India has stood divided between those pro-tourism and those against. While listening to the views and counter views, I've participated in a few debates and then pulled out. I needed time to gather my own thoughts on the subject. As a wildlife photographer or a naturalist or a conservationist, I'm an absolute novice compared to some of the big guns out there. So I guess, I'm entitled to take my time to think through an issue as grave as this. The question before the supreme court is one of whether they should allow tourism in its current form or not. The answer to that is pretty clear - not. With all due respect to the honourable court, the eventual answer isn't 'no tourism' either. I'll try to explain my thoughts later in the post. The question before the conservation community is a slightly bigger one. It's a question of identity and realism. I'd like to touch upon some of these issues in today's blogpost.

Divisiveness never helped a purpose

"...all roads can lead to conservation if the intentions and actions are right, and that people from all walks of life can contribute equally." - Shekhar Dattari

This month, Shekhar Dattari wrote a pretty interesting article about conservation. He argued quite rightly that no role in conservation is bigger or smaller than another. I'm not sure if it's me but I notice a huge amount of animosity in some sections of the conservation community towards others who maybe wholly or peripherally a part. For example, conservationists and naturalists seem to look down on photographers. Photographers look down on the general public. The general public looks down upon the forest department and forest dwellers. I like to believe that conservation is an orchestra - everyone plays their part. Sustainable conservation needs people from all walks of life - conservationists, activists, politicians, policy makers, the department, photographers and the common man. Why you may ask? In a country like India, the tiger is the smallest problem for politicians and policy makers to look at - let's be frank about this. Human beings are too short sighted to reconcile how the extinction of the tiger will lead to the crash of our ecosystem and eventually hit our water security. It's a fine scientific argument to pose to people and perhaps an item for long term education, but with 900 million Indians living at less than $2 a day, saving the tiger will never be a politician's priority. And the last I checked, tigers don't get to cast their own votes and even if they did, there's just 1700 of them! So for conservation to succeed, the tiger needs people to rally behind it. So the self-righteous attitude of 'certain people are bad for the tiger', needs to disappear in a hurry, or we'll see our tigers disappear before we can spell c-o-n-s-e-r-v-a-t-i-o-n.

"The tiger is a large hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated; as exterminated he will be, unless public opinion rallies to his support - India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna." - Jim Corbett

Lets get off the moral high horse

I participate on a forum of naturalists - quite obvious given my love for natural history. Recently we discussed the discovery of a flock of vultures in a remote village bordering Karnataka's Raichur and Bellary districts. It was happy news except when one of us jumped on a line from the report and said "...kudos for keeping the location a secret (I think you have already given too much information for picture hunters to swoop in)". To this, Santosh Martin(the naturalist who originally discovered the vultures) responded, "Picture hunters for personal glorification will never be entertained as before. Moreover, picture hunters these days are more focussed on tiger areas... Bellary is too far for them." To say the least I was hurt by the commentary. I'm an amateur wildlife photographer - and for the record, I detest trophy hunting. Somewhere the term 'picture hunter' made me feel that the two naturalists who used the term equated photographers with trophy hunters. Somewhere it felt that they looked down on photography as a way to appreciate and observe wildlife.

In his defence, Santosh responded to me and said, "Picture hunters are certainly different from responsible wildlife photographers.Wildlife photographers are those who employ their skill to interpret nature for the benefit of those millions who never get the chance to visit see the animals and birds in their natural habitat. They also try and document new species which have never been documented before." While I have immense respect for Santosh Martin as a naturalist, I believe this is the kind of thinking that's detrimental to conservation. A photographer need not document new species. A photographer need not reach millions. If a photographer can, through the observation of wildlife become an advocate for its conservation, that in itself is a big win! If a photographer can show his/ her friends fabulous photographs of a much photographed tigress and get those friends excited about nature, that's fabulous too. As nature lovers we seem to live in our own little bubble - believing that there's already tremendous support for the wilderness, given we already see so much media related to it! The truth is far from it. Bump into someone on the street and ask them if they know about vultures going extinct or what the Great Indian Bustard is. Look for the gaze of bewilderment and you'll know what I mean. We need to convert that guy - and unfortunately we can't do this from atop a moral high horse. I don't have a photography website or even a Facebook page for my photos. I make photographs for my own pleasure and to share with my friends and family. Over the last couple of years, I've got several of my friends thoughtful about nature - I can say this about everyone in my immediate team at work. I haven't reached millions and I have no desire to do so and yet I believe I've achieved a conservation victory of my own.

Running an inclusive conservation and tourism orchestra

The fact that the Supreme Court now has this case pending before it, gives the conservation community an opportunity to appreciate the roles we all play to protect our wildlife. We can't be looking for ecocentric solutions to the problems of an anthropocentric world. For conservation to succeed, we need people to support it fully. So the solution that emerges needs to be win-win and this means a few trade-offs. I'm no expert, but if I had any authority, here's what I'd recommend:

Let's ditch the pseudo-science: There's no correlation between tourism and tiger numbers. Simlipal has no tourism and yet has a healthy tiger population and while Sariska and Panna had great tourism, they lost all their tigers in 2005 due to lack of protection and improper monitoring and administration. On the other hand tigers have grown in numbers in Ranthambhore, Tadoba, Corbett, Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh and other parks despite the heavy pressures of tourism. If anything, the only thing we can say with confidence is that tourism has no adverse or favourable impact on tiger numbers.
Locals play a key role: Local people pay the heaviest cost for conservation. They usually lose ancestral land (albeit with decent compensation) and often get second class treatment to tigers and tourists. And when tigers kill their livestock, they have to go through a painful compensation process. If wild cattle ravages their crops, they hardly ever get compensated. In such circumstances, wildlife is like vermin to them - better dead than alive. To make conservation successful, locals need to have a stake. What incentives can they get for a healthy tiger population? What part of tourism profits can they share? Is there room for a community centric ecotourism model like Il Ngwesi in Kenya?
Let's not impose human emotions on tigers: If we really care about tigers we need to stop humanising them. We should be concerned more about maintaining the sanctity of the forest than about how a tiger feels when there are people on an elephant beside it. We have no reason to believe that the tiger near the tourist elephant is a 'poor animal'. Let's remember that these are animals that could become invisible whenever they desire and the fact that we do see them indicates their possible tolerance towards us.
Let's appreciate every stakeholder's context: Yes, we all need to operate with compassion and respect for the wilderness, but to be begrudging of others smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude. First time casual tourists need education. Yes, their noisy behaviour is often irritating and admittedly disturbs the sanctity of the forest - yet, the potential that one among them could possibly bat for the tiger in months to come, is a fair trade-off to live with. Wildlife photographers will want the best shot and go lengths for it. Yes, this may be irritating for naturalists and conservationists - but please understand the value of visual storytelling. That photo could be their way to get their family and friends inspired. There's nothing wrong in judging people, as long as you're willing to be judged yourself. The attitude amongst some naturalists and photographers seems to be that everyone; everyone but them, is a disturbance to wildlife. Nothing's further from the truth.
Let's be ready to live with restrictions: This may seem odd coming from someone who is admittedly pro-tourism. I embrace the educational value of tourism but at the same time tourism can't be anti conservation. We need to have proper emission norms for safari vehicles that enter our parks. We need to decide by some form of established science the optimal number of safari vehicles that can ply at any given time without adversely affecting the ecosystem. We need guidelines for resorts that operate in and around national parks. We can't have another Kosi fiasco. We need tourism to be zero impact to the ecosystem - in that it gives back more than it takes from it. The ministry of environment and forests needs to create a scheme of equitable tourism that allows local communities to benefit and participate in tourism. This is the only way they're likely to help increase the forest cover is if the wilderness is worth more alive than dead.
Let's not have double standards: Given our colonial history, we seem to have a sense of disdain for all things brown. So it irks us to see several brown people line up in jeeps to see a tiger cross the road. And yet, the same naturalists and photographers happily go to the Mara and see 60 vehicles line up for a cheetah and 40 vehicles surround a mating pair of lions and have nothing but great stuff to say about the place. The tiger is the proudest piece of our natural heritage and there's a certain beauty in the fact that 80% of the visitors to our national parks are Indians - as against what you may see in Africa. The fact that everyone from the prime minister to an ordinary country bumpkin can see the tiger for a nominal fee is something we should be proud of and strive to preserve. If we believe we appreciate and love nature, then let's play a role in helping others develop the same passion - instead of trying to judge those who may be less informed.

My intent here is not to take a dig at anyone. All I care about is that every person in this country has an opportunity to experience its rich natural heritage. I believe there's a nature lover in every one of us - our culture is one that inherently respects wildlife. You just need to take a good look at our mythology to believe me. I don't want to pre-judge anyone's intent, our wildlife could use every bit of support it gets in a country with huge population pressures and international poaching threats. I cannot bring myself to support a system where in a foreseeable future others will not have the opportunity to enjoy the privileges I've enjoyed in my life. Most importantly, I'd hope for the conservation community to stay together in its purpose.

Here's why consistency is terribly overrated in corporate education

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:11:48 PDT

One of the things that we talk quite a bit in corporate education is consistency. I've spoken about it quite a bit earlier as well. It seems this is something that every training manager out there is thinking about. After all, if you want to train hundreds of people, then you need a consistent process and a consistent output. There's a small problem though, people aren't consistent. And the last I checked, if you place an inconsistent set of inputs into an extremely consistent process, you still get very inconsistent results. One size fits all, fits no one. In today's blogpost, I want to outline the problems with consistency and the alternatives that corporate education and education at large needs.

Is the obsession with scale and consitency a monoculture of the mind?

A few days back, my colleagues Rohit and Sriram spoke about monocultures of the mind. In particular they attacked the monocultured notion that "If it can't scale it's no good." For my benefit and for my argument I want to repeat what I understood of Rohit's argument. First - what is scale?

Scale is any undertaking where more than a few people come together and organise themselves for a purpose determined by a small set of people at the top.

The benefits of scale are things we've talked about several times, but there's one big problem with scale. While a majority complies and bears the brunt of scaling, only a minority reaps its benefit. And of course, as you increase scale and there are more people involved, you create so many levels of abstraction in your process, that you also increase the level of dysfunction.

The problems with scale

Rohit and Sriram talked about the further problems with scale. Let me list them out:

When you separate planning and execution to scale, you effectively lose local solutions that individuals earlier had, albeit over a period of time. Take the example of the green revolution in India. It introduced fertilisers and pesticides to increase agricultural yield, but 40 years hence, we've lost the local solutions that farmers then had, so they could deal with the problem.
The separation of planning and execution create way too many levels of abstraction. This leads to hidden incompetence and learned helplessness because people working at the service end of the process have lost connection with the reason why they do things in a certain way. You lose autonomy and ownership at the individual level, because at the end, everyone is just 'doing a job'.
Scale leads to standardisation. For example, everyone in corporate India speaks English. In fact that's what I've spoken as a first language for all my life. This means though, that we're losing our diversity - I can't speak Bengali or Hindi or Marathi fluently though these are family languages!
The most disturbing effect however is the apathy that the division of responsibilities causes. When I went to Bharatpur, I shared a lunch with my guide Mr Bhim Singh Rana. Rana farms for a living, but he doesn't eat the grains he farms. Instead he has a smaller plot of land where he grows his own food, devoid of pesticides and fertilisers. He's aware that this reduces his yield, but he'd rather have the non-toxic food. Isn't this a problem? The buyers of his grain are separated by so many layers of anonymity that he doesn't really care about poisoning them. His concern for me and the quality of food I had with him was a stark contrast to this apathy.

Try to relate these same problems to top down, large scale, consistent educational programs and you'll know why I have little faith in our education system.

People are different, so why does learning have to be consistent?

"It's I believe we have a system of education which is modelled on the interest of industrialism...Schools are still pretty much organised on factory lines...We still educate (children) by batches...If you are interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality...It's about standardisation...I believe we've got go in the exact opposite direction...That's what I mean about changing the paradigm." - Ken Robinson

If Sir Ken Robinson says something like this you've got to sit up and take notice. Learning is a very personal exercise. People learn differently. They prefer a different combination of modalities given the context, they have different talents, motivations. You cannot make curriculum the confinement of human experience.

So what does education need instead?

"We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test. I am here to share with you, it is not learning." - Diana Laufenberg

In my view what educators (corporate or not) need is a way to empower themselves. The old model of education where we needed scale, was based on an assumption. An assumption that knowledge is scarce. And since that assumption was true, you could make sense of the 'sage-on-a-stage', 'butts-in-seats', 'everyone-does-the-same-thing' model. As it turns out, knowledge is not scarce today, so educators need to let go of that part of their roles give way to democratised means of gathering knowledge. Share the context, and set them free. We have examples of great knowledge sources all around us. Starting from Wikipedia, all the way to Khan Academy, going right upto iTunesU. Corporates have a unique opportunity to use modern web media to create similar, yet contextualised knowledge sources for their organisations. I believe that we need to drive these knowledge sources using social, collaborative technology with new media at the center. Democracy is at the centre of content creation on the consumer web. Why can't it be in the enterprise?

So what is the educator's role then, if it isn't to disseminate theory? I believe the educator's role in today's world focusses on skills instead of knowledge. Face to face interaction is a wonderful thing - this is an opportunity to solve complex challenges in a collaborative setting. Educators have a wonderful chance today, to participate as coaches, as facilitators of this collaborative experience. In that, you have a repeatable process, but one that is daringly inconsistent and individualised. Those learning have the choice to pick their own learning path to the challenge. Once in the challenge, they have the opportunity to decide how much they wish to stretch themselves. As they stretch their own selves, they challenge educators to support them through this journey. We now have the opportunity to create educational contexts where mistakes are the norm, we view failure as a stepping stone to learning and eventual success and there's no one-right-answer.

The obsession with consistency and scale isn't new. It's something I've seen since the last decade and perhaps even earlier. In a way, the recession was a good thing for the industry. Several companies took some time to focus on learning without having to bother about massive scale given their reduced hiring targets. I'd be concerned though, if the attitude changes when the market does. I'd hope that Ken Robinson, Salman Khan, Diana Laufenberg, Sugata Roy and others have taught us enough about autonomy and individualisation for us to bury the notion of consistency once and for all.

The world's big cats need saving - learn, help, spread the word

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 06:15:50 PDT

I recently spoke at ThoughtWorks XConf - an internal conference that we run in several parts of the world now. I stayed clear of topics related to work and spoke about my six week big cat trail instead and the conservation challenges that these wonderful animals face. Here's a video of the talk.

On a personal note, if Tequila was alive today, she'd be 3 years and 6 months old. You may think I'd be over that tragedy, but I've never been. I miss her every day of my life and for some reason, I miss her a lot today. People who have dogs will empathise with the pain and the regret I have behind that loss. I might go to her resting place tomorrow and say hi. Enough of the personal bit, thanks for reading.

Next big innovation for Enterprise Social Software - Simplicity

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 04:54:31 PDT

One of the things I remember reading about, early on in my enterprise 2.0/ social business journey was Andrew Mcafee's definition of what makes social software tick. He spoke of three characteristics - emergent, freeform and frictionless. Those definitions still ring true in my head. As I look at how enterprise social software matures it seems to be moving away from those characteristics quite a bit. To the extent, that enterprise social software loses the edge it promised to provide.

Do one thing and keep it simple

One of the features of consumer social software which in turn encourages enterprise use cases is the fact that most of these tools do one thing and they do it well. Take for example Twitter - 140 character status updates. Or Pinterest - create a digital pinboard. Or for that matter delicious - create a list of online, shareable bookmarks. Let's look at Path - share updates with your close friends. Each of these platforms keep things quite simple. One metaphor, really simple usage - so much so, that despite the fact that Twitter keeps its help hidden under an obscure menu, you don't miss the lack of instruction.

Enterprise social bloatware?

Compare this to a lot of the enterprise social software you see. Let's take cyn.in for example - I have nothing against the platform; it's great. I just need a scapegoat. Cyn.in is a wiki, a blogging platform, a file repository, a discussion forum, a social bookmarking platform - all at the same time. And more! So, do I create a document or a discussion or a blogpost? If Sheena Iyengar taught me anything - more choice is not always a good thing. People like to stick with the status quo and not choose anything. Is that really what we want as a consequence of enterprise social software?

Let's be real

For a lot of us social media enthusiasts, life's a nice happy bubble. We hang out with other social media geeks, we network with them online, they sing its praises as we do and it seems the world has changed. Yes the world has changed, but only so much. For a large number of people and granted they may not be a majority, social media still isn't their bread and butter for communication. Complex social platforms that combine several features and numerous bells and whistles only scare them away. Think about it - if you're not social media savvy and you have to make a choice between a wiki, a status update, a blogpost and a discussion - what would you do? And what if you had to break through the most complex security system to access this platform when you can easily get to email on your Blackberry? (note I say Blackberry, not iPhone) Let's appreciate that there's a non-trivial audience size that fits this description and the only way social software wins is by being undisputedly easier and better.

Back to the basics

We need to rethink our strategy with social business platforms. We need simplicity - one metaphor, simple usage patterns. The more sophisticated we make the platforms, the more difficult the change, the more resistance the poorer the uptake. This is when people question change - if something isn't 10x better than the status quo, we naturally choose the status quo. Cisco seems to have thought this through with Cisco Webex Social by taking away superficial choices from content creation. Yammer's always been very good at this - they're a Twitter clone for the enterprise. I say that with great respect. Socialcast seems to be doing this right too. I can't say this however for the majority of the social business landscape. Let's remember the frictionless bit of McAfee's definition. I believe the future is bright, but not blingy. I fear that the focus for some social software giants is turning out to be bling, though. Please, for the sake of all we stand for - get back to the basics!

Kaziranga National Park - Second Step into Paradise

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 02:34:32 PDT

10:30 AM, 21st February, 2012. Time to get off a rickety rickshaw, and get going for a bumpy and dusty ride to Kaziranga National Park. This was leg 2 of our 9 days in paradise (remember Nameri?). When I say bumpy and dusty, you've got to take me seriously. Now, how bad can a 65 km drive be? Well, the answer is, "It depends...". Depends on what - you may ask. Well, it depends on how good your driver is and whether or not you can pull up your windows, turn on the AC and be immune to the dust around. We didn't expect it to be too hot in February, so we'd gone for a non-AC vehicle. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Let it suffice to say that when eventually we washed our faces at Wild Grass Resort in Kaziranga - the basin was full of brown water!

That incidentally was the story of our entire stay at Kaziranga. February is right at the end of the dry season in Kaziranga and the forest is a proverbial dust bowl. The fine dust is pretty similar to what we'd seen on the banks of the Jia Bhorali back at Nameri, so this wasn't a new experience. That being said, it wasn't exactly how we'd pictured it. Speaking of pictures though, Kaziranga has to be amongst the best places in the country to photograph big mammals. A savannah more African than Indian, Kaziranga's landscape is dominated by tall elephant grass. And through their blades emerge some of the largest mammals you'll see in India. The Asiatic wild buffalo, swamp deer, the Asiatic elephant, the Royal Bengal Tiger, the Asiatic leopard and the mascot of the park - the one horned rhinoceros, all take turns to throw visitors into a photo frenzy as they suddenly materialise.

But beyond megafauna, the grassland habitat, marshland, and moist tropical forests play home to over 500 species of birdlife. Add to that smaller mammals such as otters, mongoose, jackals, foxes, cats and pangolins - Kaziranga is an absolute jewel of India's wilderness.

Try not to get killed

Let's count our odds. Kaziranga is home to 80 odd tigers, some 140 leopards, about 2000 elephants, a similar number of rhinos and more than 1600 wild buffalos. Dangerous enough? To protect these animals, the guards have very strict rules - no one walks around the park on foot. If you do, there are no questions asked - you first get shot. If you stay in your vehicle, you're likely to stay alive. As a measure of the risk you've got to know that about seven guards lost their lives to wild animals last year, despite being armed.

I of course like to learn my lessons the hard way. As a lot of you will know, I love birds - and photographing them. Nameri hadn't given me much joy on the photography front, so I decided to exercise my shutter finger a bit extra in Kaziranga. So in search of birds we finally found a beautiful brown fish owl. Right on the side of the road. As it happens when you have four people with long lenses in a vehicle, we were indecisive about what the best angle for photographs would be. A little to the front and little to the back - the bird lost patience and flew to a less flattering perch. I was undeterred. That day we had a forest guard with us - I took his permission and decided to try and photograph the bird on foot.

Picture this. I get off the vehicle and walk about a 100 metres back to where the bird was. The forest feels unusually calm. As I get to the bird I pull up my camera and take a few record shots first. Then I decide to try a few different compositions. Even as I make up my mind on how to make the most of tricky lighting and a bad perch, my friends wave frantically to get my attention. "Is there something even more exciting to see?", I think to myself. And then, I see the guard leap down from the vehicle and pull out his gun. "Come back, come back.", he says as he runs towards me. "This can't be a photography subject...", I say to myself as I run back towards the vehicle, sensing some urgency. As I begin my leisurely jog, I see what everyone is worried about. Hardly 50m from where I am, a two-tonne male rhino is waiting to cross the road. Phew! That's a close one! I have to say, I didn't feel scared at the moment, but in hindsight I realise how close I was to dying - quite painfully. Rhinos of course have very poor eyesight and that's what worked quite well for me - it smelt me and so was tentative about whether to cross. At the end of the day, I've got to count the big guy as a really gentle being - one that preferred to wait and avoid conflict. That day taught me an important lesson - regardless of how calm things may seem, never take things for granted in a forest.

Rhinos like cows?

"We'll see so many rhinos, that you'll equate them with cows.", that's what Raji had said to me when we started out in Kaziranga. Ok to be fair, her friend said that to her and she repeated the statement back to me. I'm sure several others may have had exactly that experience, but I can't say I was tripping over rhinos. We saw our fair share and we definitely got some really good photographs. That being said, how many rhinos you get to see depends purely on your luck and the ranges you choose to visit. Kaziranga National Park has four ranges - Kohora (central range), Bagori (western range), Agoratoli(eastern), Burapahar and the Panbari reserve forest. The eastern range is a birder's paradise - not surprisingly we spotted more than a 150 bird species during our stay, most of them in that range. The western range is a great place to spend your evenings with large mammals. The central range is a best of both worlds. Tall trees make for great raptor perches and the proximity of grazing landscapes makes for great encounters with the bigger animals. No one wants to go to the Burapahar range and the Panbari forest which needs special permission was closed when we went to Kaziranga. Our decision to split our time across the remaining three ranges paid off - I think we got a good sampling of what Kaziranga has to offer; though I must say I'll have to go back and spend some more time there to get to know the forest better. And who knows what mysteries this forest hides that I haven't yet experienced?

How many tigers?

I usually have pretty good luck with big cats. I will say this though - don't go to Kaziranga if you want to spot a tiger or a leopard. The grass is so tall that sometimes you have to struggle to spot an elephant. Secretive, solitary hunters like tigers are difficult to photograph unless of course you're Steve Winter and can set up camera traps all over the place. Go to Kaziranga for the birds and the large herbivores. If a tiger's what's on your mind, pick another park. We came tantalisingly close to spotting a tiger - but it gave us the slip. All fair and well though, since we didn't miss the big cats at all!

Travel Tips

If you're planning your trip to Kaziranga here are a few tips that'll come in handy.

The best time to visit Kaziranga is between December and February. This is a relatively dry season, there's good light; the forest department also burns the grass during this time which makes for relatively unhindered wildlife viewing. Plus, it's absolutely brilliant weather for the most part.
Kaziranga is quite close to Jorhat airport. As compared to Guwahati which is about 230km away, Jorhat is just 80km from the park. If I had to go only to Kaziranga, I'd perhaps choose a flight into Jorhat.
We stayed at the Wild Grass Resort. Mr Manju Barua (+91-3776-262085), the owner is a very knowledgeable man and extremely hospitable towards wildlife lovers. The manager, Dilip Gogoi is a bit of dead-fish by appearance, but don't get fooled by that facade. He quietly makes sure that he caters to all your needs.

We got a pretty good deal from Wild Grass. All four of us stayed in one huge room at just ₹1300 per night with breakfast included. Our meals were an additional ₹750 per person per night.
There are several other accommodation options too. The Assam tourism lodges are perhaps the most inexpensive, though I'm not sure of the service. There's lodges like the Dhansari eco camp and luxury resorts like Iora that complete the picture. From the number of homestays and small hotels I saw on the road, I can't imagine that it'll be too difficult to backpack into Kaziranga either.
Wild Grass will arrange your safaris too. We got a rate of ₹3200 for two game drives a day from them which is about ₹400 less than that of the gypsy association at Kohora. That said, the side facing vehicles at Wild Grass didn't feel very photography friendly for a group of four. I can imagine they'll be fine for two people, but for four of us with telephoto lenses, we got front facing vehicles from Kohora.
Wild Grass has some amazing guides. Kunwar, Palash and Naqeeb are perhaps their most talked of guides on the blogosphere, but I'm pretty sure that their other two guides are also pretty good. I'd recommend Wild Grass most highly just for how knowledgeable their guides are.

If you'd like to go on an elephant safari, you should plan your morning drive at Kohora. The elephants set out for an hour at 0530 in the morning and the ride costs ₹325 per person. While you don't always have the best photography angles, the elephants give you a good chance of getting very close to the rhinos and swamp deer. Your best bet of seeing a tiger is also from atop an elephant. We of course, almost fell off the elephant in the excitement of seeing a Siberian Rubythroat.
Wild Grass arranged our pick up from Nameri for ₹2500 - I suggest asking for an AC vehicle if you're coming in from there so you can beat the dusty roads. The drop back to Guwahati was ₹4000 - this seemed like a reasonable rate.
The Hoolock Gibbon Sanctuary is just a stone's throw from Kaziranga - home to the Hoolock Gibbon; India's only ape. I strongly recommend a visit - more about that in another post.
Most importantly - if you want to photograph, be mindful of the dust. My friend Chirdeep's 100-400mm lens stopped functioning mid-way through the trip. Of course, he'd been through similar hell in Kanha and Bandhavgarh in 2011, so it may not have been entirely because of Kaziranga.

Loving them to death or providing a third eye? My views on 'Tiger Tourism'

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Sun, 20 May 2012 09:30:06 PDT

I'm not a tiger expert like Valmik Thapar. I'm not an activist on the field like Vidya Athreya or Dharmendra Khandal either. I am not pretentious enough to consider myself an armchair tiger crusader either - unlike Diya Banerjee. I'm just another Indian who loves the natural history of this country to bits, especially the tiger. I've said this earlier, I'll say this again - there's nothing quite like seeing a tiger in the wild. To photograph it with a stable hand is something else. I have seen the lazy elegance of the lion. I've seen the feline grace of the leopard. There's something about the tiger though that sets it apart from its peninsular cousins. Is it the swagger of the beast - a gait that's quite contrary to its acquired fear of humans? Is it the tiger's beauty? Is it about how elusive it can be in the wild? I can't tell, though I know that to see tigers the wild has been amongst the best experiences of my life till date. I've rarely done anything cooler.

"A tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated - as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support - India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna." - Jim Corbett

As I write this post, the Supreme Court of India is hearing a petition by Prayatna - a Bhopal based NGO led by prominent activist Ajay Dubey. The petition, amongst other things seeks to ban tiger tourism in the country as it exists today. The alternative they suggest is for tourism (read safaris) to happen in the fringes of the park, making the core zones of our tiger reserves 'inviolate'. The rationale behind this is that if traditional forest dwellers have left their ancestral land to give the tigers solitude and peace, how can tourists still have access to these woods? There are theories which state that the tiger cannot breed in the constant presence of humans and therefore tourists should stay out. After all the Sariska tigers have not bred successfully since their reintroduction in 2005 - a reason for this (probably) being the presence of villages in the forest. Tourism doesn't also bring too many benefits to local communities. Krithi Karanth's 2011 study titled 'Conservation Letters' revealed some startling statistics - local residents get less than 0.5% of the revenues from wildlife tourism. Even more startling is the revelation is that the park itself gets less than 5% of the revenues and close to 95% goes into private hands.

There's anecdotal evidence to say that the presence of tourists does disturb the tiger's life. I shot this tigress at Jim Corbett National Park - named after the legendary hunter turned conservationist. She's a beautiful female just separated from her mother, learning to live the solitary life of a tiger. Look at the picture carefully. Do you see how her tummy's gone well inside? Well, we were responsible for that. Let me explain. A day before I shot this picture, we'd gotten news of her presence in the Dhikala grasslands. We turned our vehicle around from where we were and headed there for a view. The news was right - she was there, stalking wild boar for a morning meal. We waited patiently for her to move across the grassland and grab her quarry, but alas that was not to be. Within minutes, tourist elephants ferrying tourists who wanted a 'closer view' invaded the grassland. The hunt was all over - the tigress stood no chance of making a kill in that commotion. When I saw her the next day (at the time of this photograph), she looked frail and hungry and a part of me regretted what had happened the previous day, though I wasn't directly responsible.

So then, shouldn't we ban tourism? It seems to bring no benefits to the local community and it disturbs the tiger. If anything it seems to encroach on the tiger's last strongholds. As it turns out, my view is quite the opposite. The tiger is India's national animal. As Steve Winter would put it, the tiger is 'our bald eagle'. The beauty of tiger tourism in this country is in the fact that anyone with ₹500 ($9.17) can share a vehicle with other people and stand a chance to see the charismatic beast. People can't feel the desire to protect what they can't see or experience. If seeing a tiger in the wild becomes the privilege of just a handful of experts, it will probably mean an end to the love and passion several Indians feel for the beast and its protection. Last I checked, spreading the word was amongst the top few things one could do to save the tiger. When no one can see the tiger anymore, what word do you spread? That there's a mythical beast in the woods which incidentally we don't have access to anymore?

"Nobody will be interested in protecting something that they are not allowed to see or experience. Banning tourism in National Parks and sanctuaries will be disastrous for the tiger in particular, and an open invitation to poachers and the timber mafia." Belinda Wright

A few days back watchful tourists reported the presence of two suspicious youths in the core area of Tadoba Tiger Reserve. My friend Chirdeep wrote this rather sorrowful story of Maasti - the tiger with an amputated leg. The truth is that Maasti perhaps wouldn't even be alive today had it not been for a watchful wildlife enthusiast on safari. Tourism gives tiger conservation the third eye it woefully needs. In the current situation where patrolling is so ineffective that tigers get killed despite a red alert in the state, tourists end up being free watchdogs for the forest department. This is a service that we can't snub.

We can't wish away the issue of disturbance to tigers from tourists. That being said, we have to look at Tadoba and Ranthambhore - two of our most visited tiger reserves. Over the last year the tiger population at Tadoba has gone from 53 to 69. Ranthambhore has a baby boom despite the drones of tourists that visit the park. There's circumstantial evidence in Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh and almost every other park that tigers are multiplying in the core zones despite tourism. Yes tourism needs regulation. Illegal constructions on the banks of the Kosi river need to stop. We need unhindered tiger corridors and if there are resorts that block this area, we need to bring them down. We need a strict clampdown on boorish behaviour in parks. Guides, mahouts and drivers need education to keep the interests of the animals first. We need to pay them well, so their livelihood isn't just dependent on the tips they collect in the seven months that the parks are open. As tourists we need to draw our own line of ethics. Do we want to do all it takes for that tiger sighting or are we willing to let go every now and then?

There's no point in slamming the elephant assisted tiger sightings of Central India - they are perhaps the most organised and well behaved viewing opportunities for tourists. Under the supervision of park rangers, the elephants ferry tourists four at a time for a five minute, regulated view of the tiger. The tiger is free to move into the woods and if it moves in too deep, the elephants don't pursue. The mahouts keep the tourists in check. The tourist safaris are a different kettle of fish though. The guides and drivers are too scared of losing their tip to admonish ill-mannered guests. While that is the reality of today's situation, every tourist in the wild has a responsibility to self regulate.

Last but certainly not the least the forest department needs to relieve the pressure of tourism by creating alternate opportunities for visitors. The buffer zone safari at Tadoba, the promotion of Magadhi and Khitauli in Bandhavgarh, responsible fringe tourism by resorts like Camp Forktail Creek are all steps in the right direction. The tourism industry also needs a fair bit of transparency. The opaque, fax based booking system at Dhikala and Corbett's forest rest houses needs to go. The nexus of the Kosi lodges and the forest booking clerks (read this report) needs to break and make way for responsible tourism. The agent dominated safari booking system at Ranthambhore needs to go - it needs transparency in booking zones and vehicles. The whimsical allotment of prime routes to the tourism mafia needs to stop. The more we can weed out corruption from the wildlife tourism infrastructure in this country, the more accessible we make it to the common man. And after all, we can't save the tiger if the common man doesn't care about it.

"Wildlife tourists carry cameras, not axes. They do not poach, do not submerge forests with dams... They are being unjustifiably blamed for killing tigers." Vishal Singh - TOFT

I sincerely hope that the Supreme Court acts wisely in its decision on the Prayatna case. Tourism when well regulated can be a great tool for conservation. I can't express in words how it has opened my mind and enriched my life. I hope this doesn't remain a privilege I speak of in the past tense. The next generation of Indians deserves to still enjoy our wilderness just as I have in the past few years.

The Art of Choosing with @Sheena_Iyengar

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:15:42 PDT

This afternoon in the closing session we have the very accomplished Sheena Iyengar - author of The Art of Choosing. I haven't read her book but I hear she's pretty awesome. I'll believe it - I'm all ears.

Sheena has been studying choice for several years and her book explores several questions. Why do we choose? What affects our choices? How can we improve our choosing experience and outcomes? Sheena asks the audience if they're having a good time - loud resounding clap!

Sheena takes us into a story about the Draeger's Grocery Store. They had 75 different kinds of olive oils from all sorts of places. Awesome eh? Sheena went there several times but bought nothing! She asked the manager if the choice was actually working for them as a business. They didn't know. So they set up 24 Jams in one place and then another place with 6 Jams. Which place would people buy more jam? While 60% stopped at the 24 Jam store, 40% stopped at the 6 Jam store. However, 30% bought from the latter while 3% from the former. This - if you do the math is a 6 time increase in sales. The paradox of choice documents this phenomenon. Turns out that more choice usually ends up confusing people enough to postpone the decision.

Today you have more choice than ever before. You are confronted by 3 trillion bits of information in the air! 15 million possibilities for a soulmate on match.com - brilliant eh? Not so much. This is choice overload. There are three main consequences of too much choices:

People usually stick with the status quo - people choose not to choose. No one wants to commit to one choice. Let's look at 401k plans in the US - more fund choices seemed lead to less people participating and hence less savings.
It reduces decision quality. Medicare - it's the same story; people are unhappy with the choices they make and a lot of people want to buy directly from Medicare and would love fewer choices. I have the same problem with the new age of social media platforms. The market is so saturated with choices that it's making life worse and fragmented.
We're less satisfied with our choices. Think of how much TV programming that's available. You watch a program and then you're unhappy with what you missed.

So what's going on here? George Miller (psychologist) came up with the notion of a magic number 7 (+/-) 2. The paraphrasing of the law is that the average person can usually hold 7 (+/-) 2 objects in working memory. So more choice than that is usually a detriment to decision making and choosing. Think about it - when you start a game of chess, you have more choice available (as combinations) than stars in the galaxy. If you have expertise then you can chunk this information and break it down into specific lines of attack. So do you have enough information available to you to make a decision? For example the car you want to buy? SUV, cruise control, automatic transmission, etc - will narrow down your choices and make life easier. Unfortunately you're not an expert and the market is designed for experts.

So here are four choosing techniques that help:

Cut: Remove the choices. When P&G reduced the number of their shampoo choices, they increased their profits and this is the case with several product lines. Think of Apple - the only choice you have is the iPhone! Don't boggle the mind with extraneous choices. Sheena tells us about leadership perceptions. When a manager gives no choice, the engineer group surveyed rates them badly. When the manager gives them two choices they rate them highly. When the same engineers get 6 choices they again rate the manager badly. You want to give people choices but you don't want to overwhelm them. If you only had one option what would it be? If you can't justify the options then don't put it in there.
Concretise: How can you make the consequences of your decision explicit? Why is my credit card always maxed out? Potentially because it doesn't feel as real as spending real money from the bank. To make decisions what you need is not only information but also a feeling of the consequences. It's like in Indecent Proposal when Robert Redford offers a million dollars in return for a night with Demi Moore and it's a hypothesis the reaction is different from when the money becomes actually real. Good example, eh? I came up with that all by myself.
Categorisation: Experts are able to categorise information. That being said, a choice provider can be the expert and categorise for the consumer or decision maker. After all, it's perhaps in your interest to help people make a choice. Think of a magazine rack. If 400 magazines were laid out in front of you in 25 different categories you'd be more likely to make a choice. As it turns out our brains are also more equipped to handle categories than choices. So you're more likely to make choices from 25 categories than say five.

For example look at the wine categorisation technique that specific cellars use to categorise the hundreds of wines that are available to us.
Condition: If we can approach things in a methodical fashion, we're more likely to arrive at a choice than by just the accident of finding 'the right furniture' in Joe's used furniture store. Sheena gives us the example of a German car manufacturer that allow users to custom make their car by breaking down various choices available ranging from certain decisions that have low choice (4) to high (56). Now people that advance from high choice to low make less purchases than those that advance from low to high. Also satisfaction is higher for those that move from low to high choice. People's excitement for choice usually increases with each step and the fact that you build up the condition makes them more excited about the product itself. Start shallow and get deeper. Why does Apple do so well (something I wrote earlier)? Small choice vs heavy choice and people understand their choices much better.

Wow, this was a great session on design though not so apparent on the surface. I think there's a lot of meat in there for community managers, leaders, marketeers, sales-people, designers and anyone offering an experience to take a lot out of this session. This lady is brilliant. Sheena maybe blind, but she is helping us see. If you need to use the learnings from this session in practice then check out GLEAM - Global Leadership Matrix (coming soon). This will include several tools with video clips alongside - this'll help you learn about yourself and design solutions that actually make sense. Also, everyone who comes to the website, you'll be able to participate in Sheena's research. Be choosy about choosing. Follow Sheena on twitter and check out her website!

All the amazing stuff that @JKUnrein shared in her talk today

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:01:35 PDT

This woman is a star and while not everything was new for me, she's an inspiration to see how much ground you can cover in 60 minutes.

Here's just a compilation of the tweets I put out just during here session. And just so we don't lose this in a year's time, here's a list of the tweets from the talk:

Do you want to see some amazing showcases of #html5 - check this out http://www.apple.com/html5/ @jkunrein attests this resource #LSCon
One more type server for you to use with you #html5 content (not free) via @jkunrein at #lscon https://typekit.com/
Adobe captivate #html5 encoder. They are really getting behind the new web. Via @jkunrein at #lscon http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_html5/
Tumult Hype - @nickfloro mentioned it, I love it and now @jkunrein is telling us about it too! #html5 animation #lscon http://tumultco.com/hype/
Another SWF converter that allows you to port over your animation to #HTML5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.sothink.com/
We've used this encoding tool + player before - Brightcove via @jkunrein at her #html5 session at #lscon http://www.brightcove.com/en/
And one more free player you can use with your web video content #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.jplayer.org/
Another video player you can use for web video #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://videojs.com/
A free #html5 video player you can use - Sublime #lscon via @jkunrein http://sublimevideo.net/
Another video encoder for #html5 compatibility via @jkunrein #lscon http://zencoder.com/
Studio style (pricey) video encoding for the web #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.telestream.net/
Miro-A super simple way to convert almost any video to #html5 compatible formats #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
Raphaël is a JavaScript library that'll simplify your work with vector graphics on the web #html5 via @jkunrein #lscon http://raphaeljs.com/
Optimise your PNG files #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://imageoptim.com/
Surfacing this site since @jkunrein mentioned this in her talk today #html5 learning #lscon http://www.html5rocks.com/en/
Use browser sniffing to figure out what browsers access your content so you can do different things for different platforms #lscon @jkunrein
Parallax scrolling is an interesting content delivery mechanism I'm seeing on websites and magazines. @jkunrein is showing it #LSCon
Btw, for really enriching articles by @jkunrein keep checking out stuff she writes for #lsmag http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/authors/304/judy-unrein #LSCon
Check out the #html5 starling murmuration and dynamic video here http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ #lscon via @jkunrein
For some reason I wasnt following @jkunrein. You should see her blog http://onehundredfortywords.com/ #LSCon
“@CUtrain: Loved the quote by @jkunrein Create interactive courses, "stop the navigation rage." @bschlenker what I learned yesterday #LSCON”

The Art of Vision with @ErikWahl

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 07:33:14 PDT

This morning at LSConf, the our speaker is Erik Wahl of Art of Vision fame. The conference site describes him thus, "By breaking apart traditional thinking, Erik challenges and inspires his audiences to redefine commonly held assumptions and misconceptions about “creativity," "goals," "success,” and "vision.” Discover how you can sharpen your creative skills and identify a personal style for inspiring yourself and others to rethink vision and purpose." Very exciting, let's see what he has to say.

I can't tell you how awesome this guy's start is. Check out this video to get an idea or maybe this video as a teaser. What a masterpiece this guy creates in just about 5-6 minutes! His hands are dirty, he is in the thick of work within a room of at least a 1000 people. I am in awe. Erik is saying that if we go to a school, and we ask "Who can draw?" everyone raises their hands and now when he asks that question in this room only a few hands go up. Every child is an artist - how do you remain an artist as you grow up?

Erik talks about the most important meetings and he wants you to take those meeting notes using Crayola crayons - one of the most recognisable smells amongst adults. Apparently it reduces blood pressure. Drawing is a learned skill like anything else - math, science, design, what have you. He's seeking out the courageous, colourful ideas that are hidden amongst all of us. He's talking about breaking out of our comfort zone - business as usual or technology as usual.

We move on to the show "Fear Factor". Erik picks a member of the audience by just throwing a ball and picking the guy who catches the ball. This guy is now going to lead or will delegate to someone else to lead with Erik. And of course, this guy puts his boss on the line! Erik is giving everyone an opportunity to pull out their iPhone because this will be great YouTube material. Surprise, surprise! The guy on stage wins the brilliant painting that Erik drew up live. Taking a risk got this guy a dividend he didn't expect. Fear kills performance - embracing risk creates unexpected results. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real.

Do we have the ability to focus, to then commmit but most importantly to adapt? What is the ROI on creativity? What is the ROI to have a differentiation? What's a creative idea worth? In today's market the strongest currency isn't the Euro or the Dollar. The strongest currency is trust. The question to ask is that if we were to start from scratch today what would we paint on our blank canvas? How can we leverage the currency of trust and community to spread our ideas? Our greatest innovations in this world take place on the border of chaos and order. Our mind is a machine that never sleeps. We need to unlock the potential of that mind by combining left brain thinking and right brain thinking. We're getting conditioned to think in a one dimensional way that is about a single right answer. We were taught to be increasingly risk averse, increasingly operationally excellent. Too much focus on the left brain.

Time = Money? If we allow money to equal time, we cheapen the value of life. We turn great interactions into transactions. Instead of thinking of ways to ignite our passion or work smarter, we're looking at how many dollars and how many checkmarks we got. Where will the vision for the future come from if we go logically, linearly with the equation of Time=Money? Today we're bombarded with ideas and stimulus in ways than never before. We try to generalise and predict what might arrive by using only a part of our brains to deal with this stimuli. Is there a way we can unlock the potential of our minds when we can look at this stimuli and build emotional connections that'll drive future thoughts?

Erik wasn't always an artist. He was told he didn't do things right. And then 9/11 happened and his business collapsed. And by luck or accident he went to a local art store at that point when he touched the canvas, his perception of himself as an artist changed. And that changed his life. He stopped selling his artwork seven years work to raise money for charity. Creativity is now the corporate capital. He will now hide his Monroe painting and he'll drop clues on twitter for people to find it. This is his way of engaging differently! Can we think of ways to engage differently? Do we really need to think like everyone does? We need different ways to experience the world. Most people will see a challenge - can we look at the same challenge as an opportunity?

As a finale, Erik does things differently. To the brilliant music in the background and to a standing ovation, Erik draws up Steve Jobs - upside down. Just take a look at the video above (hopefully it'll process by the time you see it). Great talk. It's tough to think of whether you have 10 things to take away from this talk. Was it inspirational to feel that everyone of us is creative at some level? Was it about questions than answers? Was it goose-bump-generating? Was it something that tells me that I can be different? Does it tell us all that we can break free? Hell yeah!

To call Erik Wahl “another speaker” is the equivalent of calling the Mona Lisa “another painting.” - from his website, but true. It's not often that I have to video sections of a talk to share the emotion it evoked for me - this is one of those talks. I had goose-bumps watching this guy draw to the music and his passion, for art and his brush strokes was palpable. There's an artist in all of us - we got educated, we grew up. We have the opportunity to paint a canvas for the future - free of constraints, free of inhibitions. We need to believe in the currency of trust, believe that the future will be what we'll make it to be regardless of who we are. And that future won't be wonderful and beautiful if we continue to think exactly the same way as we did yesterday. That future needs us to think in ways that we haven't thought before. Thank you Erik - I had to stay back and miss the next talk if only to shake your hand for this inspirational morning. The conference was worth it to just feel your energy.

Designing Mobile Performance Support Apps - @elearningcoach

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:47:40 PDT

I'm sitting in a Mobile Learning session with one of my favourite people and authors - Connie Malamed, so forgive me for being extremely nice with my write up if that's what happens by the end of this talk. Connie's had a journey learning about apps on Mobile. She wanted to create a performance support app for instructional designers. It's called Instructional Design Guru. You should check it out. In today's talk she's going to tell us how you can walk through the design experience before you hand it over to a programmer. As instructional designers we have the skills to do this, it's just a question of thinking through each of the decisions that we're going to be party to.

When designing for mobile it's important to think of the context. Connie talks about the journey in a few steps:

1. Define the problem
2. Research and Ideate
3. Define the Solution
4. Develop the App

Everyone has ideas about apps! 5.9 billion mobile subscribers in the world. 1.2 billion of them are mobile web users. 63% more smartphone users in 2011 whereas laptop growth has been just 15%. So why mobile? First things first - it's convenient. People almost always have their phones with them. It's very relevant and contextual to the experience that someone's having at the time. People are always out there with their phones and helps with content generation. There are varied devices and mobiles do reduce friction by bringing down barriers. There are mobile collaboration tools and mobile is a far reaching phenomenon. In Africa for example mobile penetration is far ahead in comparision to computers. And lastly, mobile gives you the ability to design for either push or pull. Which is a great thing for learning design.

There are several approaches for learning on mobile:

* micro-learning: self paced mini lessons in varied media. eg podcasts
* synchronous: virtual classrooms using mobile webinar tools
* assessments: tests, surveys, polls
* social media learning: enabling networks for learning
* learning games: challenges and simulations
* performance support apps: references, job aids, collaboration, social, augmented reality

We'll focus on performance support. The key here is a few interesting things:

* it's just in time - the ability to quickly get information in the context of work
* it's part of the workflow and is seamless with the act of doing something
* it occurs when needed
* it uses a pull model
* the learners can apply the skills immediately - great for cognitive load since you don't need to remember heaps before you perform a task.

There's a fair range of things you can do with mobile learning and mobile performance support:

* queries to PLN - no need for an app here
* QR codes - used widely in marketing, but you can get people to get to information in context here
* Automatic text message reminders can be great as in context prompts
* Checklists, references, job aids are also interesting tool - that's the territory Connie's explored
* Augmented reality is a good in context training approach

Connie talks about a doctor receiving surgery advice on SMS. Quite amazing when you think that it saved someone's life. It's performance support too! Mobile performance support needs to fit within the overall learning and mobile strategy for your organisation.

In any case when you think of performance support, you've got to address the 5 moments of need:

1. When learning for the first time
2. When wanting to learn more
3. When trying to remember or apply
4. When things change
5. When something goes wrong

Mobile helps in particular with the last three situations! Think of tools like HVAC calculator. Or iBartender to make fun drinks when you don't know how. eMocha is another interesting data collection app for healthcare.

Design Considerations

Now how do people use phones? People mostly use them on the go. They're usually distracted - so remember they don't have your full attention. People use it in context - eg: Maps, Layar, Foursquare. 40% people use phones in the bathroom. People use phones when they're bored! People use them at their desks - it's a good way to impress them. People use them for micro-tasks - running an errand, paying a bill, watching a video. People use phones when they're relaxed and in a varying set of emptional states.

So the conclusion is:

* Short bursts of activity
* One handed
* Simple features first and complex next
* Text messages are hugely popular!

So what tools do you want to use? You want to figure out the use case scenarios. eg: You're at a museum you want to look up information about the artist and the painting. Or you're doing repairs - you have a complicated situation you need help with.

Second, you want to research similar apps. What other apps are out there that do similar things like your app? It can be fairly time consuming and by the way you need to spend money!

Third, what gestures will you need? This is not your grandma's mouse! The mouse is an intermediatary while playing with touch devices is quite intuitive. Even a kid can do it as Connie demonstrates. So think of taps, pinches, flicks, drags, presses and the stuff that actually happens in the mobile world. Luke W has a lot of stuff here about how to design for mobile. Take a look at his gesture reference cards.

Fourth, what hardware will you use? You'll have several different types of media that you may want to use but will your hardware support it? Does your hardware support geolocation if you're trying to use that in your design? The phone camera can be quite a useful tool. There's the accelerometer as well as is near field communications using RFID technology. So two phones close to each other can share information with each other. iPhones don't support this but you can work around using bluetooth. Be careful to focus to on the primary task.
So how do you communicate your design?
Three important things to consider:

* Write you specs
* Diagram the structure of your app
* and be absolutely sure to wireframe

When you're writing specs for your app, you have several ways of doing it. You could write detailed requirements specs or you could even do user stories. There are definitely other things that you want to specify, such as personas, programming language that you prefer, web or native, task diagrams, your overall vision of the apps functionality, etc. Be sure to diagram the structure too. There are three general structures:

* Flat, no heirarchy
* Tabs
* Tree structure which has a fairly complex heirarchy

There are several wireframing tools available on the internet for this kind of stuff and well, you can just do Powerpoint, Word and maybe just pen and paper.

The other thing to thing to think of is visual design. What icons will you use? What will your touch target sizes look like? What metaphor will you use? For example the Compass app has a real world compass metaphor. If you do pick one metaphor, be sure to follow it all the way through.

Technology Decisions
Native apps of course are faster give you access to the phone's hardware, etc but the cost of programming is high and you get very platform specific and you've got to conform to the marketplace rules. The web on the other hand is portable, cost of development is lower and works on various platforms. Also it's easier to prototype this. The disadvantages however is that you're internet dependent and then you don't get the speed and hardware functionality of your native apps. You can of course create hybrid apps using stuff like Titanium. Do also be mindful that you need to use native languages to program for mobile platforms - so your programmers need to know the specific languages. There's quite a few mobile authoring tools out there as well, but be sure to check on native compatibility and the publishing structure there.

The Art of Leadership and Learning - @JohnMaeda

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 06:52:42 PDT

I have to tell you - I haven't been doing much reading in the last 6 months or so. Tell me, with a 12 hour work day and birding to do in free time and a life to lead on top of that, where's the time for this? Anyways, I'm going to learn from an author today. John Maeda the author of Redesigning Leadership is keynoting the conference this morning. I'm curious to know what the talks going to be all about - very exciting stuff since I'm always kicked about learning and I'd love to be an effective leader. Heidi says John can speak to us as a colleague but also someone who can bring views from a different sphere. Currently he's the president of the Rhode Island School of Design.

And so the keynote begins! John was mersmerised by Heidi's intro because it was about us and not about him and that's important as a leader. John is very interested in the idea of how to lead - he sees it as a practice. It began from his curiosity - eg his discovery of the lingo of financial terms. He did an MBA online to decode that lingo. He was a professor by day and a student by night. Leadership comes through living it and it's quite uncomfortable.

Leadership has four stages/ aspects:

Start from foundations
Craft the team
Sense Actively
Fail productives

We're living a lot longer than we did 30 years ago. So a four year college education or the two years masters add-on doesn't cut it for our evolution in this world. So you need to keep learning.

Build the foundations

You can't be afraid to get your hands dirty. MIT was a very clean place for John - RISD is a very dirty place that way. People want to understand and play around - a very elegant thing in John's view. John just got super-promoted and was at the top job of the school very quickly so he didn't really know how to do his job. So he bought a lot of books and he's been learning all the time. He's gotten to learn about art and design at the very core. Take a look at who the Alumni is.

In the first year at RISD, people are supposed to unlearn what they know. For eg: they know how to draw, but the first foundational course is to break it down into drawing simple shapes such as black and white polygons. It helps all the artists understand their craft better by coming down to the foundations.

Maeda is talking about knowledge starting from direction moving to concepts but then experience going to change concepts and affecting direction. So while the first direction is about mastery, the second is about originality. This creates what the human race is all about - innovating and improving all the time.

Craft the team

Figuring out the team thing is quite a strange task. Maeda refers to the American basketball team which had Michael Jordan and the first two times the American team dominated, but then they couldn't get gold. What was wrong?

You look at some oriental buildings in Japan, made of wood and these last several hundred years! In modern construction things don't last even a decade. The secret is in the materials they use by selecting the right wood from the mountains. In your team, the materials are the people.

There's no I in TEAM. There's a lot of I in INDIVIDUAL. There's a WE in WELCOME. John is talking about someone at the omelette station at the breakfast buffet and that server made him feel welcome with his omelette! That kind of power is human power - doesn't come from a dialog box or hashtag. It was because someone believed hospitality and wanted to live that value.

He brings up Marshall Ganz's book about the Power of WE. The book talks of a spiral emanating outwards - every leader leads about stories that lead outwards. It's not about autopilot; it's about engaging. Marshall's book calls leadership a practice. It's a practice that starts with Self - identifying yourself. Then there's the story of US - the connections in the group. And lastly there's the story of NOW, where the SELF meets the US and there's a task to complete. Every leaders story fits this very simple pattern. The only time you need leaders is in times of uncertainty. Story is a critical component in this - they can't hear you if they can't feel it.

Sense Actively

Artists are always doing a wrong thing at the right time! He talks about people wanting to fly kites - what good is that? Well a good thing there is to see and feel the wind. Also it's a good way to experience what it's like from the wind's perspective to see the person flying the kite or the kite itself?

If you look at growth in the last 20 years. Median family income is increasing at a linear pace, but cost of medical care and education has increased exponentially. So the ability to be educated is diminishing given that our capability to fund is becoming more and more difficult. So we need to sense this and find other ways to learn.

If you look at the monopoly in information with the number of printed books. The monopoly of universities such as Harvard, Princeton and Yale until 2000, their monopoly increased considerably. But post that, it fell quite a bit? Is there a disruption there because of the long tail?

It's not longer a heirarchy in organisations these days - it's more an organisational network. The bigger thing is now a trans-organisational network. You're friends with your competitors.

Fail Productively

"Courage lies somewhere between fearlessness and recklessness"-Aristotle
John is showing us some of the scenes created using circuit boards. You've got to see this to believe it. It's art created with circuit boards - showing deep situations like a single fathers, CEO-ness and possession; a guy showing off his new smartphone. He talks about an experience in London - a workshop that involved drawing on sand. He met people from various walks of life. People had several problems and varied situations.

There are two frames to leadership - Traditional and Creative. One being a symbol of authority, other being a symbol of inspiration. Traditional is about Yes or No. Creative is about 'Maybe' - the world is complex and you can be wrong.

"If you manage a team of 10 people, it's quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviours. If you manage an organisation of many more it becomes quite impossible." - Ben Horowitz

When you're an A player, your median is quite high on the other hand your median as a leader will be quite low given all the mistakes that you'll make and you've got to be willing to make.

John's book is about an honest recount of what it's like being a leader. He describes it as leading without all of the answers and being open to the critique. It's been a fairly inspirational talk and I enjoyed some of the ideas he threw out though the points I noted down were a poor replacement to his talk.

The point John makes right at the end is that the economy is at a downturn in America. The innovations we're looking at come from Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM). But a lot of the innovation also needs to come from Art. Yes we have more technology - it's everywhere. We're in a strange race with ourselves. We've always been in this evolution. We used to have a technology called the coffee table. This was before the TV. After the TV, coffee tables became defunct - now people stopped sitting around the coffee table, they sat around the TV now. And in the computer and mobile age, everyone's got a television in their face. It's the reality of the world. Technology realises progress at light speed. Electrons travel at light speed, people don't. We're stuck in a bit of a loop. When computers came first, they were awful and then there was the amazing invention of the CDROM - ability to store and share full colour images; great sounding audio and then movies on your computer. Then we had the web, and the web could do everything in the browser that we did everything we could using the CDROM. And then the mobile came and went through the same evolution as computers and the web. The evolution pattern is the same, culture hasn't moved forward though.

When Maeda compares his time at MIT and contrasts his time at RISD with it. He looks at the combination of Design (making solutions) and Art (making questions). Artists are bold to be cultural entrepreneurs. The intersection is where cool stuff happens. Design is about balancing form and content. John shows the word FEAR written in different typefaces and it's quite amazing how the form changes the way we perceive the content.

And then there's art. Art is harder - by definition it is. People who don't 'get' art are actually getting it because they recognising it is hard. It's about questioning authority. Artists ask 'Why' or 'Why not'. Why would you make art out of glass than drink from the glass? Why would you paint every day? Why not? By forcing us to think and question, we evolve our culture.

VUCA is how the world feels today - volatile, uncertain, complex ambiguous. The anti-VUCA is visioning, understanding, clarity and agility. It's the new VUCA. A new creative way of thinking that changes the way we approach life.

Scientists and artists both ask big questions, but they have different inflections. Both types of questions put together create powerful combinations. Artists are often inspired by scientists to see anew. There are artists who are scientists and vice-versa nowadays. There are designers who are scientists too. Designers are helping us see patterns in complex data. Art is merging with science. Policy makers need artists to help with sense making!

Innovation is the combination of Art and Design. STEM needs to become STEAM with the Art popped in between. Check out http://stemtosteam.org

9 Days in Paradise - Leg 1, Nameri

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:32:59 PST

It wasn’t going as I’d planned it. Sahana had dropped out of the trip at pretty much the last moment. This meant that we’d have just four people in our group to Nameri and Kaziranga as against the planned five. On the face of it, this didn’t seem much of an issue, except it hiked up the costs that we’d divided across five people. I like being meticulous in the way I plan, so this was a bit of a hiccup. As it turns out, some hiccups are for good reason.

Onward to Assam

So on 21st Feb - a day I’d been waiting for months, we set out on our journey. Raji picked me and Chirdeep up, we reached the airport well in time, met Sudhir over breakfast, got into our flight and then made an uneventful trip several hundred miles away to Guwahati. Our first stop was going to be Nameri Tiger Reserve - a quiet forest tucked away not very far from the Assam-Arunachal Pradesh border. Nameri is known to be a birdwatcher’s paradise and we’d planned to stay at the forest department’s Kanyaka Lodge. While the roads from Guwahati to Balipara were OK, the route from that point on was nothing but an absolute nightmare. We’d made quite a few stops on the way - a few times for lesser adjutant storks, and once for some tea at the NH52 Dhaba. So, after a five hour bone rattling drive, we made our way into the lodge and were able to stretch ourselves.

Rolling into Nameri

Nameri is not short of accommodation options despite the limited footfall it receives. Nameri Eco Camp is the most popular property in the neighbourhood and is run by the Mahseer Conservation Society in the region. I haven’t heard very good things about the Jia Bhorali resort (Email: jiabhoraliwild@yahoo.in / joyda49@yahoo.in Mobile: 9435101614 / 9859262831), but I can’t believe it’ll be absolutely awful. We however couldn’t get accommodation in the Eco Camp, so we decided to go with the Kanyaka Forest Lodge which at Rs 800/- a night per room seemed like an absolute steal. Located right next to the 134 Eastern Planters unit which is part of the Indian Army’s Eco Task Force, the property is a good, no-frills wildlife enthusiast’s accommodation. Mr Sarat Sarma who runs the lodge on behalf of the forest department is a funny man who has limited knowledge about birds, but more than makes up for it with his enthusiasm. That first night, we slept really well - it’s funny to think how just sitting through a long flight and a long drive can tire you out.

Exploring the Wilderness

The next morning we were up early. The plan was to go rafting down the Jia Bhorali river. If you stay at the Kanyaka lodge, be sure to speak to Mr Sarma and have the boatmen either stay over at the lodge or come really early in the morning. The rafting point is about 10 kms away at a point called the 13th mile and an early start at 0630 AM gives you a good chance to spot birds. On that first day we were late, but the Jia Bhorali didn’t let us down. Ibisbill, Mallard, Ruddy Shelducks, Black Stork, Black Necked Stork, Pratincole… we found birds faster than we could call out their names. A part of me felt we were on a birding roller coaster. Be mindful though that rafting down the rapids is not an easy way to take photographs and while you’ll spot many birds on the way downstream, you’re quite likely to come back with no pictures.

Post the rafting trip and a pit stop for breakfast at the Potasali camp we set out on a forest trek with Meenaram Gogoi. At Nameri Tiger Reserve, birdwatchers need a permit to explore the trekking routes along its peripheries. You’re usually accompanied by an armed guard just in case you run into an aggressive elephant or bison. Now, it pays to have a guard who is a birdwatcher and knows the forest well. Meenaram Gogoi is one such man. From Kaziranga, he’s what you’ll call a born wildlifer. As the birds whizzed past on the canopy, he would operate without binoculars and help us identify exotic species that we hadn’t ever seen before. A little pied flycatcher flew by, as did a blue throated barbet. A streaked spiderhunter perched itself in an unusually high spot. As we went ahead redstarts and bulbuls dotted our path. A crested serpent eagle played hide and seek while a buzzard and a booted eagle soared high above us. You don’t expect to see this level of activity at 11am, but Nameri was truly a different kettle of fish.

As we trudged ahead and reached the Oubari camp, Meenaram started to get more alert. He had his mind on a more prized sighting - the white winged duck. You wouldn’t think of a duck being difficult to find, but these guys are shy and super elusive. They choose small ponds in the middle of the forest as their habitat and come noon, they go up on the trees and rest unless disturbed. We tiptoed to a haunt that Meenaram knew of. “Don’t talk, when I point out a location, look there without saying anything.” And that’s exactly what we did. As we approached the pond though, we startled an otter. The otter lunged into the water and off flew some of the most beautiful ducks I’ve ever seen. We’d seen the white winged duck, but had no chance of getting a photograph. Damn!

Over the next two days we spotted over a 100 bird species and trekked through some of the most beautiful woodlands you would have seen. Mr Sarma played eager host, Meenaram the astute guide and Jaykumar the caretaker was a wonderful cook who rustled up some simple, yet tasty food. If you’re a birdwatcher, then there’s nothing quite like birding in these evergreen forests. As we went down the Jia Bhorali for our last trip almost all of us felt that Nameri needs a lot more time than we had planned for it. Had we stayed longer and not had a hard stop to the trip, we could have come back with some pretty decent photographs. We didn’t, so I’m sure I’ll return there at some point to photograph the avifauna of the region. Until then, I’ll live with memories.

Travel Tips

Here are a few points that’ll help you plan your trip to Nameri:

To get to Nameri, you can hire a taxi at Guwahati airport for about 3600 INR.
To book Kanyaka Lodge, call Mr Sarat Sarma (the forester in charge) at +919435381990. He doesn’t operate by email but will mark out your name in his diary.
The ensuite rooms are 800 INR apiece, though for hot water you’ll need to share one of the common bathrooms. You can also opt for a deluxe room with a TV and that costs 1000 INR each night.
Food is usually simple and consists of local vegetarian and non-vegetarian options. Jayakumar, the cook is quite obliging with requests and is usually willing to do what it takes to please you.
Rafting and trekking require separate permits and cost 280 INR and 320 INR respectively. Mr Sarma can help facilitate this.
The boatmen’s charge for the rafting trip is usually the bigger amount - 3240 INR for the trip. Each boat can accommodate upto 4 people. So in hindsight it wasn’t too bad that Sahana couldn’t make it. It helped all of us be together.
You’ll also need to hire a vehicle to carry your raft to the 13th mile and to pick you up from the end of the trip. This usually costs 1000 INR.
Apart from birding, there’s also the pygmy hog breeding center to help in the conservation of this endangered wild pig. Well worth a visit and I also saw some pretty interesting butterflies in the area.

I hope you visit Nameri soon - it was leg 1 of what’s been my most productive birding trip by far. Our next stop was Kaziranga - more about that in my next post. By the way, for this post and for this trip in general I tried using my iPhone as an alternate camera. I was quite pleased with the results in several cases. I'd love to know what you thought. So please, please, please - do share your feedback. I'm guessing you'll be able to make out the ones I shot with the phone, won't you?

Children are not childish - Education needs to give them credit

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:22:29 PST

Yesterday Anvitha, a young schoolgirl and an avid birdwatcher reached out for help to rescue a black kite from what could have been a slow and painful death. I'll let you take a look at the two messages - one with her call for help and one with how she actually managed to gather people and eventually rescue the bird.

First message
Hi, just now while coming from school I saw a black Kite that was caught by a thread in a tree. What can be done to help it? The tree is quite high to climb and to cut the thread. Is there something I can do as my house is quite close to my school?

Second message
I went to that area where I saw the bird. The bird was still struggling. I asked help from my aunt who was near by and one of my teacher. We thought of climbing the tree and cutting the thread but the tree was too thin and long to climb. We took a stick to remove the string but the stick was short. Seeing us trying to help the bird many neighbors came and one of them brought a long stick and thread. We joined the 2 sticks. One of the bike riders seeing us stopped by and helped us. He was tall and so he stood on a long chair and tried removing the thread. We were holding a blanket to catch the bird if it falls down. The thread was cut and the bird fell on the ground. It hopped a few times and then flew away. At first it flew in the ground level and then was able to fly high. It was a memorable movement for me. I was happy to see the over whelming response from the neighbors. Many actually saw it but thought it was dead. After carefully seeing those innocent eyes blinking they came helping :). One of the things what I saw was - at first when i saw the kite while coming home, many black kites were trying to push the bird. Did they do that to help the bird?

Children are capable of wonderful things. Uncorrupted by our desire to compete, win, think way too far into the future - children are capable of demonstrating maturity, given half a chance. Anvitha herself is a passionate nature lover. Her knowledge of birds can put an adult like me to shame. Did this happen as a consequence of her school curriculum? I doubt it. Did it happen due to the right context and her own passion - I suspect so. Education needs to give children credit for the fact that they can choose their own paths. So should schools be more about creating context than imparting knowledge? Is knowledge really scarce in this world? If so, then how does Anvitha know so much about birds? Can you really bind down a kid's human ability to create, think, dream, be sensitive to curriculum alone? What role do parents play? These are important questions.

Kids don't surprise us - we just haven't given them a chance

"Learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal. The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it." - Adora Svitak

We often term kids as doing something 'beyond their years'. I believe that to be a truly discriminatory way of thinking. Yes, kids do need guidance. Yes they do need exposure and context setting. From that point on though, it's really about letting passion and the human desire to learn and create to set in. I love the fact that young Tom Suarez (above) got the opportunity to set up an App club in his school. That even if programming iOS apps wasn't part of curriculum his parents and school gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion. At 12 years old, he's a developer that's looking to expand his skills to program on both the iOS and Android platform. We have adults here who'd die for that opportunity. I'd really love for schools to give children this ability to try, fail, learn, succeed than to confine them to the realms of curriculum. For what it's worth, we adults have perhaps more to learn from them than we give them credit for.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Working with a Histogram

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 02:55:52 PDT

If you've owned a prosumer camera or a DSLR/ SLT, you may have seen the histogram display on your camera. It may have even left you confused. One of the more ignored tools in your arsenal, the histogram is a great diagnostic for your image. Taken step further, it's also a pretty awesome guide to post process your image.

In today's post I'll explain this really useful graph to you. Don't worry - you don't need to be a scientist to understand this. It's quite simple.

So what's a histogram really?

In simple terms the histogram displays the distribution of blacks, whites and middle greys in your picture. The key mnemonic to read a histogram is this 'dark to light, from left to right'. The left half of the histogram shows the distribution of shadows and the right half displays the distribution of highlights. The x axis of this graph starts from a pure black and goes on until a pure white. Everything in between is a shade of grey.

Not all histograms look like a bell curve as you see in the above picture, but what you should try and ensure is that you don't have too much of pure whites or pure blacks in your image. Why is that? That's because the textures and play of light in real life ensures that situations in which you see a pure black or pure white are unusual. The situation when you have a lot of whites (also called 'highlights clipping') indicates that you may have over exposed your image. As a corollary, if you have too many blacks (shadow clipping) that may mean you've underexposed your image. Makes sense?

There are situations when you'll have both shadow and highlight clipping. These are very tricky. Usually this happens in awful lighting situations where you perhaps need to underexpose to overcome the highlight clipping and use artificial lighting to bring out the detail in shadows. Unfortunately these situations are difficult to post process as well. This is one of the reasons it is a good idea to get the right exposure out of camera. Here's a video explaining the concept visually.

Post processing - Creating a high key or low key photo

One of the great things about a histogram is that it tells you exactly what you need to do to give your image a professional pop. The easiest thing you can do is move the middle grey slide in Photoshop (any other tool will give you a similar interface) to either darken the shadows or lighten the highlights further. If you move your slider too far to the right, you'll get a low key image (eg: here) and of you move it far left, you get a high key image (eg: here).

Post processing - Improving tonal range using Levels

One of the most useful images you'll see on Photoshop is the Levels tool. Before you understand how to use it you need to understand histograms - which you already do to a great extent. The key to a good image is that it should ideally have a range of greys in the shadows and highlights with no pure whites or blacks but almost every other shade. So, the wider your histogram, the more contrast in your picture. Now you will also have a lot of contrast if you had a lot of highlights and shadow clipping, but this will mean that you'll get a very black and white image! So you need to avoid that one.

In a lot of photographs you may be able to go with some amount of shadow clipping because extremely dark places usually will show up as pure blacks. In rare circumstances - and remember they are rare - you might be able to live with some highlights clipping too. But for the most part, the levels tool should be able to help you modify your histogram and shift the white point and black point inwards. By doing this, you're effectively spreading your original histogram over the entire tonal range from white to black, thereby increasing the contrast. Take a look at this video to see how you can create a nice, pleasing, contrasty image with the levels tool. It really helps add a professional pop to your image. And by the way, you should be able to use similar tools on any other post processing package.

So, try this tool as the basic post processing on your images and also as an in camera diagnostic for your exposure. You'll notice that being able to read the histogram is a really useful skill. Hope you enjoyed today's blogpost. More to come in the next one.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Why shooting in RAW makes sense

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:45:03 PST

I've always thought of this blog as just a place to air my thoughts. Turns out it's a bit more than just that. I'm sure some of you've noticed my absolute laziness in posting to the blog in the last couple of months. While there are reasons for it, I also feel really grateful about the number of people that emailed or DM'd me on Twitter admonishing me for my laziness. I guess, this blog does mean a little more than a place for me to ramble. So let's see if I can turn over a new leaf and do a bit of a reboot on this site. For starters, let me get back on my weekly posting schedule - and if nothing I'll do my best to post a short update. Today is unlikely to be short though.

This past month I was on a 1000km door-to-door drive from Bangalore to Pune. On the way, I was able to photograph two beautiful raptors - a black shouldered kite and a white-eyed buzzard. Note this - I wasn't on a photography trip and most people won't be looking for photography opportunities on Indian highways. All said and done though, the opportunities did present themselves and I have some decent photos to show for. Photography is quite like that - readiness is a big strength. They say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity and this couldn't be truer for photography. If you want great photographs you need to have a camera with you. If your camera is always at home, you'll miss a lot of photo worthy moments. And mind you, it doesn't always need to be your entire camera kit. Even a phone camera is often a great tool to have for photo-journalism. Just remember to carry it with you; so when the momen presents itself, you're always ready. As an elearning developer or an instructional designer, you'll perhaps notice a lot of photo-worthy moments in the office that are worth preserving. I can't tell you how many candid photographs that I've randomly taken in the office came out to be useful in presentations, courses and in-person training sessions.

In today's otherwise short blogpost I want to discuss shooting in RAW vs shooting in JPEG. This is quite a subject of debate amongst photographers and I'd like to present my perspective on the issue. Of course, you can choose to disagree and that's the joy of talking about photography. So let's begin.

If you own a decent camera, you need to shoot in RAW

(Click for a larger image)Take a look at the before and after on this picture. Remember that not every photo opportunity will give you brilliant light in the right direction, with a very cooperative subject. This barn owl is my neighbour. I see the family every evening when I'm out for a run with my dog. The big problem though, is they're owls - they're nocturnal. In particular, I've never seen this family during the day or even in the twilight hours. I only see them at times when the light is poor. Now what should I do if I see this owl come and sit in the light of the street lamp, on a fairly good perch? Not take the shot? So well, I took the shot but as you can see, it wasn't much to write home about. Thankfully I was shooting in RAW. Before I tell you what I did, let me tell you what a RAW file is.

RAW formats are your digital negatives

Did any people you knew from the film generation have a deep interest in photography? You might remember the days of the 30mm, 36 shot film. If you remember, you'd get a film negative at the start of the development process. After that it was a lot of magic in the darkroom. People would then play with different chemicals and techniques to enhance the default negative image to produce masterpieces like the ones the great Henri Cartier Bresson created. Now granted, that Bresson himself wasn't great at cropping and processing film - he generally outsourced the activity to give himself more time to shoot. That being said, all his shots did actually go through a post process.

The problem with the digital era is the fact that you can produce pictures for sharing right out of your camera - the JPEG format. That's a problem because you aren't really giving your pictures the tender loving care that they need - the little extra zing before you actually share. So what's wrong with a JPEG - after all, you can use Photoshop to enhance your JPEGs and even tools like iPhoto and Picasa give you some tools out of the box. The problem is that the JPEG file is just a snapshot of a moment in time - nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't capture any information about the light available for you to be able to make changes to the exposure of the scene or the colours without actually deteriorating the quality of your image. So each change that you make from the time that you start editing your JPEG file results in some loss in quality.

On the other hand, the RAW file is an information heavy format. It's a proprietary format that changes from manufacturer to manufacturer. In addition to the snapshot that the JPEG also captures, the RAW file captures a lot of information about the light in the scene. While the camera does a little bit of work on your JPEG file by increasing the saturation and vibrance and adding a little bit of sharpness to your shot, the RAW file usually looks pretty drab out of the box. However, you get the opportunity to make a number of tweaks to the vibrance, saturation, sharpness and exposure of the scene without dramatically reducing the quality of the shot. Nice huh?

Do remember though that all this flexibility comes at a cost. RAW files are pretty huge and fill up your memory cards and hard-drives quite fast!

A few minutes of love

That's all your images need really. Take a look at the above video. It takes me less than four minutes to rescue what you could call a hopeless picture to start with. Most pictures aren't going to be such a hopeless job and all you're going to need is few little tweaks that don't take away the detail in your image. RAW files help you do just that.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and give you a bit of a build up to my talks at the Learning Solutions Conference 2012. I'm still undecided on the exact stuff I want to put up on the blog, so let me play it by ear for now. But let's see how this goes - keep reading and thanks for the encouragement.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Understanding Exposure

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:54:11 PST

Between the last post and today, I had a great time at Thattekad - one of India's finest bird sanctuaries down south. I can't say it was the best photography tour - grey weather, rain and dark clouds never make for a good mix. I did have a fascinating birding trip, having spotted 110+ bird species during those three days. Along the way, I got some good photographs but not too many to be frank. I'm hinging my photography fortunes on the next few trips this winter - hopefully my luck will come good somewhere.

Coming to the topic of today's blogpost, you may remember that in my last blogpost I'd explained how to choose a new camera for yourself. In today's blogpost I'll follow that up with what I consider the most crucial part of photography - exposure. Simply put, exposure indicates the total amount of light that your camera receives during the time that you record a photograph. When your picture is optimally exposed, you get a great picture. In photography parlance, an underexposed image is usually dark and conversely an overexposed image is usually too bright and white. Well, not all the time - but we'll come to that later. Let's first look at the three different parameters that actually affect the exposure on your image.

Aperture

Aperture on your camera lens indicates how wide your lens is open when receiving light. The wider open your lens, the more light it can take in - the narrower the opening, the lesser the light. Simple? Your camera indicates your aperture setting using what we call an f-stop. The confusing thing to remember though is that the larger the number, the narrower the aperture. This is because we express aperture as a fraction of the focal length. f/1.8 therefore is wider than f/5.6.

Now why would you like to control aperture? Firstly of course, a wider aperture gives you more light for your frame which is always a good thing. That aside, adjusting your aperture gives you the opportunity to play with the depth of field on your picture. Depth of field refers to the depth of the picture after which the camera blurs out the details. Remember seeing those pretty portraits where the background is a beautiful blur? This is a result of playing with the aperture. So here's the trick - a wide aperture will usually result in a shallow depth of field. A narrow aperture on the other hand will capture a large part of the image in a sharp fashion. So for portraits you can go with wide aperture. With landscapes and interiors you could go with a narrow aperture. Take a look at the above pictures for reference.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed refers to the amount of time a camera's shutter is open when you capture an image. Think of a tap and a glass to fill. If you opened the tap fully your glass will fill in a jiffy. On the other hand if you just let the tap drip a drop at a time, it'll take you much longer to fill the glass. This is the relationship between aperture and shutter speed when it comes to aperture. If your tap of light is fully open you can go with a fast shutter speed. If your tap of light is down to just a drip you'll need a longer shutter speed to fill your glass of light. Simple?

Here's why you may want to control your shutter speed. When you shoot at a high shutter speed you freeze action in that split second. When you shoot at a lower shutter speed you get the opportunity to capture details in the poorly lit scene or capture motion using creative blurs - like the silky smooth waterfall in the above picture. The above pictures will help you see how shutter speed can help you capture different kinds of photographs.

ISO or Sensor Sensitivity

What if your tap was down to a drip and you still wanted to fill your glass quickly? You'd have to cut some corners right? You could potentially fill the glass with sand such that it takes only short amount of time to fill the glass! Yes, yes you make the water dirty - but you do fill the glass, don't you. This is how ISO works as balancing factor for exposure. ISO defines how sensitive your imaging sensor is to available light. So ISO 100 indicates low sensitivity while ISO 6400 indicates very high sensitivity.

Where could adjusting the ISO come in handy? Think about a situation where you're shooting a cityscape at night - handheld. If you shoot at low ISO, you'll need a very slow shutter speed. Here's the catch - slow shutter speeds introduce blur because very few people can keep their hands steady for more than 1/60th of a second! In such a situation, if you shoot at ISO 100 you just won't get a sharp picture. On the other hand you can go with a sensitivity of ISO 800 and you'll most likely get a sharp picture.

Now here's the other catch - remember the sand in the glass? The higher the ISO, the lower the quality of your image. In the film days you'd notice this in the form of what they called film grain and in the digital world you see it in the form of image noise. So the bottom line is this - a high ISO is the arrow in your photography quiver which you want to use only if absolutely necessary.

How do you control Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO?

While most serious cameras have a manual mode where you control everything, it's usually not the best idea unless you're shooting in a very controlled, studio type setting. You're best off controlling either Aperture or Shutter speed and letting the camera control the other. If you're using a DSLR, then you'll perhaps know the modes to control these as Aperture priority (A on Nikon, Av on Canon) and Shutter priority (S on Nikon, Tv on Canon). All you need to do is pick the parameter you want to control, select the ISO you're willing to live with and let the camera help you along from that point.

What mode do I shoot on? Well as most photojournalists would say, "Aperture priority, f/9 and stay there!". Well not quite - I select modes based on the need of the photograph, but for the most part I shoot in Aperture priority since that allows me to control how much of the picture stays sharp and how much blur I need.

A Photo Case Study - Ceylon Frogmouths

For the last year or so, I've been waiting to see the Ceylon Frogmouths. These birds are some of most elusive species to spot in the wild. In fact, I was looking up Wikipedia and found that from the Batrachostomus genus only bird that they have photographs for, are the Ceylon Frogmouths. These birds have excellent camouflage. They're hardly 23 cm in size and they choose their homes in dark, thickly forested, leafy areas. Since they look like dry leaves and branches they completely blend in. You could be a meter from them and still not be able to see them. The reason why we can actually find them in some spots of India is particularly because some birders know their roosting spots and end up guiding folks like me.

Now to this photograph - the tropical forest was very dark. We were struggling to see the frogmouths with naked eyes - through the camera it was even tougher. I proceeded to shoot at the widest aperture my camera offered. However at f/5.6, the shutter speed of 5 seconds was just unmanageable with a big lens, handheld. I kept upping the ISO until I reached a shutter speed of 1/30th of a second and then pressed the shutter. At an ISO of 6400, the picture isn't as sharp or as high quality as I'd like it to be, but I want to think it was the sharpest I could have got in that environment. I could have perhaps gone to ISO 12800, but that would have brought down the picture quality even further. In any case I hope this adventure of a photograph helps you see how ISO, shutter speed and aperture play together to help create the right image.

I hope today's blogpost gives you a basic sense of exposure for your photographs. I am mindful that I'm not focussing on elearning-only situations with my examples and that's deliberately so. I'm guessing that if you can use your camera effectively in a life situation, the ability to do so for elearning will come automatically. In the next blogpost, I'll touch upon some simple tips related to colour and format choices in photography. Stay tuned until then - cheers! Is there other stuff you'd like me cover on this blog? Let me know by dropping your comments on this post.

Photography for Elearning Developers - Choosing a New Camera

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:57:19 PST

If you’ve followed this blog long enough, you’ll remember that I’m no big fan of stock images. No, I don’t hate them - in fact I use them quite often. That being said, I think there’s significant disadvantages to stock photos - my primary gripe with them being the fact that they’re so inauthentic. People just aren’t as pretty as they look in stock images, except of course you lot that’s reading this post. And then again, they don’t strike cheesy poses. Most importantly, stock image models are so far removed from the real world that the credibility a real colleague’s photo brings just doesn’t come through with a stock photo. In my presentations and learning programs I’m using more and more of my own photography and I can imagine this could be a really useful thing for other elearning designers too.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to do a few posts on basic photography that’ll help you take high quality photographs for your learning materials. Of course, I don’t proclaim to be an expert and well it’s going to take far more than my posts to be a really good photographer. I’m sure though that learning about the art and science of photography will help you develop the craft in case you have an interest for it. In today’s blogpost, I’ll show you how to select a new camera - after all, that’s a prerequisite to awesome photographs!

The best camera is the one you already have

Photography geeks can keep going on and on about the best equipment. Is the A77 the best DSLR ever? Or is it the monstrous 46 megapixel Sigma SD1? Well no one cares. I for one don’t have the budget to buy the best gear on the planet. And then again the deal with photography is this - your existing equipment is good until you run up a limit. So if you have a point and shoot and you need more creative control on your images then you perhaps should get a prosumer camera. On the other hand if you’re looking for lightning fast response then you may have to choose a DSLR. Often you may be already shooting with a DSLR and you need to capture a small object with all its details. You may then need to upgrade to a macro lens. All this said, if you have to always remember - if you don’t see a problem with the results you’re getting, your existing equipment is just good enough. I am however going to tell about the different types of cameras in the market so if you did have to purchase a new one you can make an informed decision.

Equipment Geekery

I like to look at cameras in three different categories. Let’s take a look at each of these:

Point and shoot cameras: Compact and pocketable in size, these are the cameras that a lot of us have. I have one too. They take decent pictures and are meant for exactly what the category is called - point and shoot. Your cellphone cameras also fall under this category. Most people will say that these cameras aren’t meant for serious photography, but hey - look at these photographs from the iPhone 4! For a lot of photography, a little pocket device is adequate. The downside of these cameras of course is that they aren’t really versatile for various purposes and because of their small imaging sensors, the image quality often isn’t as good as you’d like it to be.
Prosumer cameras: Prosumer cameras are a little more advanced than compacts. They essentially have similar or slightly larger sensors and theoretically are capable of producing better images. More importantly, some of these cameras allow you to shoot in the camera’s native format a.k.a RAW which gives you a lot more control to tweak your images after the fact. This apart they’re equipped with more versatile glass that can zoom into far away objects or often shoot really wide landscapes.
Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras (SLRs): SLR cameras start to go into the realm of serious photography. The ability to shoot at rapid pace, to choose from a wide range of lenses and accessories and to be able to come up with high quality, tack sharp images is something a lot of photography enthusiasts prefer. Amongst DSLRs there are full frame cameras that are fitted with image sensors of the same size as good old 35 mm film. This means that if you were to put any lens on top of these cameras, your picture would be similar and true to the 35 mm film format. These large sensors help you reproduce vivid colour and detail and well that makes these cameras quite costly - anywhere between $2000 and $8000. There are also what we call crop or APS-C format cameras which have smaller sensors than the full frames and produce a cropped image in comparision to those big guns. They’re still pretty good and I own two of those. You can get your hands on one of these for as little as $450. There are also newer variants such as the mirrorless micro-four-thirds cameras and the single lens translucent (SLT) cameras. I’ll leave it to you to find out about those.

If you’re looking to buy a camera for your elearning photography, I suggest you go for a DSLR. I’m a Canonista and I strongly recommend the EOS 600D as your first camera. I’m pretty sure Nikon produces good cameras too - I just don’t know about them. The advantages of the DSLR are aplently. The fact that there’s only one moving mirror which projects to an optical viewfinder, you have a WYSIWYG experience with photography. Plus you can keep adding equipment to the base system as you want to expand your photography repertoire.

Beware of the myths

If you’re buying a prosumer camera or a point and shoot, do remember that there’s a scam in the market. I call it the megapixel and optical zoom scam. You can guess what I’m referring to. Manufacturers, regardless of whether they’re well meaning or not, need to have some way to keep selling you new models of their devices which don’t necessarily add much value beyond what you already have. Don’t believe me? Check out the story of stuff. Now with cameras, technology doesn’t really change by much each month. Yet there are new models in the market every month. The one way that camera manufacturers can lure you into buying something new is by providing you a quantitative metric to evaluate your purchase. The easiest one is the megapixel count.

Now remember I told you that point and shoot cameras and prosumers have very small sensors in comparison to DSLRs? Think about it. Pixels are finally dots on your final image. To reproduce these dots as they appeared in real life, you need to lay out several mini-sensors on your sensor area. Therefore as you’ll notice from the diagram above, while a DSLR sensor area has these mini sensors laid out quite comfortably, the point and shoot has them fighting for space. The more megapixels you pack into a point and shoot, the more mini sensors you need. The more mini sensors you pack in, the more squished they will be. The more squished they are, the more they’ll interfere with each other and produce poor images. So if you’re picking up a new point and shoot camera or for that matter any other camera, be mindful that more megapixels doesn’t always translate to better pictures. For all you care, you’re likely to get better pictures from a camera with a lower megapixel count!

The other scam that camera companies run is that of optical zoom. Remember those numbers you saw at the store - 4x, 10x, 15x? Does a 15x camera lens have a better zoom reach than a 4x camera lens? Not really. X here signifies the ratio between the highest focal length of the camera lens, to its lowest focal length. So a camera that goes from 20mm to 300mm is a 15x lens. Now let me tell you that several wildlife photographers use the following professional lenses for super long reach:

100mm-400mm; just 4x
200mm-400mm; just 2x
400mm, 600mm, 800mm primes which are just 1x!

As you can see the x value is nothing but a hoax to make you buy a new camera and doesn’t really mean anything without knowing the focal length of the lens on the camera. Also remember that it takes great engineering to build lenses that operate at various focal lengths. This is the reason that most professional lenses are either primes or 2x or 4x. A camera lens that operates at a focal length multipliers of 15x, 18x and 30x is surely cutting corners with image quality.

There’s perhaps heaps more technicalities to know about with photography. In my next post, I’ll try to clarify some of the technical jargon you’ll hear thrown around in the space. After that we’ll start getting our hands dirty with some neat stuff. Deal? See you next week then.

Camera image credits: Individual manufacturers. Title photo credit: FOTOCROMO

Share your images freely - you have no excuses

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:05:26 PDT

This week is Diwali in India. An extremely colourful festival of the country - one that celebrates the victory of good over evil; I believe it represents some of the greatest inequalities of our nation. Don't get me wrong - Diwali is like Christmas for many Indians. It's a time for family and a time to be happy. At the same time it shows what a great divide exists in our society. While one part of the society showcases its opulence by lighting fireworks worth thousands of rupees, another part of society still sleeps hungry and earns less than two dollars a day. While some children spend all evening in new clothes and launch fireworks into the sky, several Indian children have been slogging away in the same factories that produce these fireworks. While society brandishes its wealth by causing noise and air pollution this year, we lose several plants, birds and insects to this rampage by human kind. As you can tell, I have a very different perspective to Diwali from most Indians.

Anyways, let me get to the point of this blogpost. Last week I reached out to a very respectable wildlife photographer and made him a request. I noticed that his pictures had really huge watermarks which he'd placed to protect his work from copyright infringement. I asked him if he could consider opening up his work a little more and he revealed to me what he was apprehensive of. His concerns were quite valid and as an amateur photographer I'd like to share them with you. In addition I'd like to share some other concerns I've heard from photographers who've been reluctant to open up their work. But before that, let me explain some basics about intellectual property.

Copyrights and Licensing

A copyright as the word indicates is the exclusive right to make copies of a piece of work, to distribute it, to modify it and to create derivative works. When you take a photograph, you automatically gain the copyright for it and it's upto you to share those rights with others. No one can use your photograph until the time you either grant them the right to do so. You can grant people all or some rights by using a license. There are three traditional ways around this :

Now quite often you'll give people the entire picture which means that you've shared all your rights.
You could give them the picture with an informal agreement, in which case if there is an infringement you'll have trouble explaining your agreement, especially if you have no legal skill.
You could use a custom license, and while this has it's advantages, it increases complexity, because you need to understand the legalese behind it.

The simplest way out however is to use a Creative Commons license. You can retain whichever rights you want to retain and give out the remaining rights. I won't get into the details of the creative commons scheme - you can choose a license that suits you by using the Creative Commons license chooser. At the heart of the system though, is the one thing that most artists care for - credit and attribution. Every creative commons license requires the licensee to give you credit for your work. With that basic information in mind, let's look at some of the arguments people have against openness.

Argument 1: People have copied my work and given me no credit

I've heard this complaint often and here's what I'll say. Jerks will always be jerks. Regardless of how much you watermark and protect your pictures, it's very easy for theives to steal your work if they want to. Take a look at this one minute video to see how easily I removed the watermark from the above picture. Also be mindful of the principle of fair use. Anyone who is using your picture for the purpose of research, criticism, teaching, commentary, news reporting or other such purposes are fully entitled to use your picture without seeking your permission as long as they attribute back to you. By placing a watermark on your pictures, you make it difficult for the rest of human kind from using your work for such purposes. Given that people will steal if they need to no matter what you do, does it make sense to make fair use difficult?

Argument 2: I'm not required to use a Creative Commons license

Absolutely - you could just keep all rights reserved and let people ask for permission each time that they need your pictures. Do remember though that this only creates friction. The more the barriers to use, the less your pictures will be used. Now you could argue this is good, but again remember that only if your pictures can go far and wide will people actually know you. Most geeks know Linus Torvalds - there's a good reason for that. It's because Linux and Git are open source and they take his name far. But even with photography, you don't need to go far - Trey Ratcliffe, Jonathan Worth and Kalyan Varma are great examples of people who are popular because of their openness.

The advantage of choosing a creative commons license is that this makes your approach towards sharing explicit. You can be very explicit about what people can do with your photos and what they need your permission for. For example, people can use, share, modify and redistribute my photos as long as they attribute back to me and they don't use my work for commercial purposes. I wouldn't mind earning some money, so if there's an opportunity for something like that I'd love to have a share.

Argument 3: But what if I want to use my work for a commercial purpose?

This is the beauty of the creative commons scheme. You can reserve the rights that you consider important to yourself. If you'd like to preserve your work as is, you can reserve the right to make derivative works. You can reserve the right to commercialise your work. You can share a low resolution version of a photo liberally and reserve the high resolution version for commercial printing. It's a very flexible system.

As you can see, thieves shouldn't deter you from sharing your work with the world. The Internet can be a much better place if photographers in particular share their creative representations with the world without fear. If you are a photographer or create digital media of some kind, please read the power of open for inspiration. If you haven't been sharing openly, you'll surely find some stories that strike a chord from that book. And by the way, don't be scared to visit the link - it's a free book.

Do you have other fears about sharing your work? Please post them in the comments section of this post and I'll do my best to answer them for you. Thanks for reading!

Three antipatterns to protect your learning community from

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:29:53 PDT

I'm back from China and it feels great to be back home finally. China's a great place that I recommend everyone tries to visit at least once in their lifetime. That said, if you are hooked to the internet then you've got to be prepared to sacrifice some of that during your visit. So with about 30 days of no access to my blog, several of Google's apps and Twitter or Facebook, socialising on the web was a bit of nightmare.

Anyways, I got back last week and went on an amazing birding trip to Ganeshgudi. In birdwatching parlance, a bird you see for the first time in your life is a called a 'lifer'. My friends Raji, Kannan, Sandeep and I lost count of the number of times we saw a bird and shouted the word 'lifer' to each other. An amazing biodiversity hotspot in the Western Ghats, Ganeshgudi afforded sightings of about a 110 different species of birds. If you're interested, you should look up my photographs. I wasn't looking at photography as a goal on this trip. I wanted to use my camera as a bit of a documentation tool for this trip. I'll be back there soon and then I'll perhaps move around with a monopod and try to get better shots.

Three pillars of successful communities

Speaking of the birding trip, all three of my friends that came with me were folks I know from a naturalists' community that I participate in. It's been an enriching experience being a part of that group. I believe that successful learning communities are founded on three important pillars:

Sharing and Altruism: The most successful communities are where people participate because they believe that sharing what they know helps others and they believe that they'll be better off if others share what they know as well.
Feedback: In his Last Lecture, Randy Pausch said, "Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care." Communities that have a healthy culture of sharing feedback are likely to learn and grow better.
Respect: As a fundamental value in most meaningful human relationships, respect has to be out there as one of the fundamental building blocks of successful communities. Communities that respect experience and the lack of it alike and can create safety for people to participate are likely to see a lot of meaningful traffic.

As I was thinking about these three pillars, I've been thinking of three very common antipatterns I've observed on online communities that I'd like to share with you. If I'm running a community, I'll probably avoid these like the plague and I really hope that you do too.

Hero worship

Every community has it's heroes and top contributors, but to elevate these individuals to god-like status is an absolute no-no. I remember that a few days back on a birding community on Facebook an experienced wildlife photographer posted a beautiful photograph of a bird. He'd also posted a write up on the bird. Everyone had great stuff to say about the image and the write up. That being said, there was problem. The photographer had copy pasted the write up from Thomas Jerdon and had done nothing to attribute to the great naturalist. I was surprised that no one had called him out on this. I have very little tolerance for plagiarism and un-deserved praise gathering, so I had to call him out. This however led me to notice how several of the established photographers and naturalists on the group received nothing but fulsome praise. There was hardly any useful feedback for these folks. Now this is a problem. How does someone with expertise grow and learn if they receive no feedback?

At ThoughtWorks, we have our heroes in people like Ola Bini, Martin Fowler and Jim Highsmith. That doesn't stop us however from sharing our views openly with them, even if we're at odds with how they think. That's what makes the ThoughtWorks community so awesome. Think about where your community suffers from hero worship. If so, you need to fix that soon.

Boorish behaviour

Some months back, I wrote an article about behaviour on social media. A respectful community handles disagreement and feedback respectfully. Often people will say or do things that may or may not be correct in our opinion. It's crucial though that we convey our opinions in a manner that doesn't undermine someone's intelligence and doesn't humiliate them on a public forum. Let me explain.

A few days back one of the members on a naturalists' forum mentioned how he'd attracted a crested bunting by throwing food grains and then lying in wait to snag a photograph. One of the more experienced members of the forum was furious with this. Baiting is generally a frowned upon practice amongst naturalists and for good reason too. The experienced member laid into the photographer and gave him a public dressing down on the forum.

I felt a bit odd about that angry response. I wrote back to this person explaining that while the actions were wrong, the photographer perhaps didn't mean any harm. I explained that by berating someone in public he'd not only insulted that individual, but made the community environment unsafe for genuine, well intentioned mistakes. After all, mistakes are a great way to learn!

Thankfully the experienced member understood my point and immediately wrote back on the group apologising for his outburst and explaining why he felt strongly about the concept of baiting for photography. I'm pretty sure this made the original poster feel a lot better. This was a story that had a happy ending, but a lot of such stories end with just bad behaviour that goes unnoticed. If you're running a community, this is something to be aware of. Remember - good, respectful behaviour creates a safe environment for people to contribute and learn from their mistakes. It also creates a healthy environment to share feedback.

Hoarding over sharing

If you're a member on any wildlife forums, you'll see a lot of people sharing photographs with copyright notices that look like this:

"Copyrighted by _____________ and may not be used in any form,website or print media without written permission of the Photographer.For any enquiry for the photographs please contact _______________."

You know my views about this. Communites are about sharing and restrictive copyrights are about hoarding in the hope of maximising value for an individual. They have no place in learning communities. I'm amazed why people even bother posting restrictively copyrighted work on online forums. Is it just to tease people with a 'see, don't touch' approach from museum culture? Are these contributors so full of their own work that they believe they're better than all of the awesome, successful people who make money despite sharing freely?

This is a simple problem to solve, and yet something that's not easy. It takes talking to people individually, and high standards for sharing in the community. It's quite easy to ignore, but in my opinion this is a stink to watch out for in just about any community.

Over the next few weeks I want to try a few different articles on this blog. In particular I want to focus on photography for elearning media. I've been experimenting with photography over the last few years or so and I wouldn't mind helping elearning professionals select gear, understand the technology behind phototgraphy and play around with the composition and post processing. While I've almost made up my mind to do a series on this, I'd like to know if you think this could be a valuable thing to cover on this blog. I look forward to hearing from you - either on this post or on any other channels you're connected to me on. Until next week, happy learning!

Setting up a learning community? Consider this.

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:05:14 PDT

You've perhaps noticed that I haven't posted in a while and frankly I have no excuse. I'm just slacking off - it's a bad thing to do as a blogger, but I must confess that my participation in the real world is affecting my contribution to the virtual world. For those interested in news about me - I'm back China now and I'm unsure how that'll again affect my Internet usage. In the mean time though there's really no reason for me to not share what I've learnt about learning over the last month or so. In today's blogpost I want to share some epiphanies I've had as a consequence of my experiences over the last month or so. These are only theories and I'd love to know what you think about the validity of these thoughts.

There's no pace better than your own pace

I'm the kind of guy that tour guides hate. I meet them with a "No" almost each time. There's a part of me that likes exploring places at my own pace. I must say though, that I've developed this tendency through my prior experience with tour guides. Tour guides have the tendency to give their standard spiel regardless of who they're with. Often this is a mouthful about the history of the place full of facts, dates and information that I struggle to remember. In the end I remember only the highlights, which are usually signposted by tourism authorities near the monuments themselves. When in China, I just got myself several pages of information on each of the sites I was planning to visit and carried them along with me on my iPad. When I thought I needed more information, I pulled out my iPad and found what I needed. From the perspective of learning and recollection, I found this to be a more effective, tailored approach than following a tour guide's pace and narration. I wonder if there's something in their about learning in general. Do we really need teachers and trainers for most learning? If most knowledge is in the public domain and people have the motivation to learn, do we really need the trainers as middlemen? I don't think the role of a trainer or teacher is dead but I do think these roles need some redefinition.

Empathy is a big connector in group work

There was a point in China, where I was really depressed. Despite all the great sights and colourful culture, I think the language barrier had just gotten to me. Plus my iPad had gotten stolen, so my easiest way of communicating with the rest of the world was lost too. I think I'd hit a brick wall with how much I was willing to do all by myself. By my last weekend in China I think I was well and truly at that brick wall. When I look back at the few really memorable days in China, it was perhaps the nights that my Chinese colleagues took me out for dinners; hanging out with Dave Worthington, Anita and Adam who were foreign ThoughtWorkers like me in China and hiking the Great Wall with Emily Ghan, a fellow tourist who I befriended. I think in several of the situations the feeling of empathy was the glue that made the activity hold together. My Chinese colleagues displayed a sense of empathy towards my situation as a first time China traveler and took me put for some of the most fantastic meals of my life. Emily and I had a sense of empathy towards each other as we chatted away about China, India and our hike on the Great Wall. Even when I cramped up and fell, Emily was nice enough to give me a helping hand. And I had the best times with Adam, Anita and Dave because well, we had so much in common as foreigners working in China. Going through bucket loads of chicken wings with them was such a great experience! Now that I'm back in the country with a team of my own, I can't tell you how enjoyable the experience is. We have two Mandarin speakers in the team and four of us are of non-Chinese origin. That's a great mix to connect to the culture and learn about it while having a group that can be empathetic to each other's situations. As we look at technology to connect people, I wonder how we bring together the empathy glue that truly helps people engage with each other. There is a point where just being self driven isn't enough, is it?

Strong ties are crucial for the success of a social network

I'm running a few little communities on Facebook. Two of these communities are quite interesting. One of them is a photographers group and another a group of naturalists. If you go to the Naturalist's group, it's buzzing with activity. On the other hand, the photographers group is a bit quiet. I don't believe that the photographers are any less inclined to sharing than the naturalists, but here's the deal. The core of the naturalists' group is a set of us that share a great friendship and have extremely strong ties. While there's part of the article I disagree with, Malcolm Gladwell wrote sometime back as to how at the centre of revolutions and high risk activism you need people with strong ties. I suspect there's something similar with online communities too. It's tough, though not unprecedented to build communities on the basis of weak ties and acquaintances alone. On the other hand, communities with a core of people with strong ties is a lot more likely to attract and support weak acquaintances. Something for us to investigate further and think about as we spawn newer communities.

There's still nothing that beats the real world

One of the reasons the naturalists group has a lot to talk about, is because we a lot of us meet very regularly for nature trails and birdwatching expeditions. Every trip has a trip report that follows and requests for identifying birds, butterflies, insects, plants and fungi that we couldn't recognise. This heartbeat ritual ensures a regular channel for communication in addition to the adhoc collaboration on the group. Had it not been for the real world activity, we would have had nothing to discuss in that forum. This is where the photography group suffers - we have little in common in terms of shared experience and while photo critique is an interesting activity every now and then, the lack of common context makes a big difference. There's something to be said about the value of real world meetings and activities, don't you think?

So, I've tried to give you my view on these theories of mine. Now it's your turn. What do you think about these theories? If you agree how do you think they influence the way you design communities and learning experiences? If you disagree, what's your view?